Google Search Error- Who Me? Spyware?
posted 20 Nov ’07, 11.16am MST PST on flickr
A new response on a Google search. It seems the 3 words I submitted are associated with spyware? If they had included some http client detection, they might have surmised my operating system makes this extremely unlikely.
Want to play? I was trying to find the URL for that paradoy blog for the guy who runs Apple. You know… "fake ______ _____-"
And I thought they really might be finally apologizing that their empire is built upon creating incentives for blog spammers. Darn.
I dont know about you, but in the last weeks I get a regular stream of trackback spam to spam link farms- places that just quote fragments of your blog posts in some hopes of increasing PageRank.
They may not “do evil” but they do provide the carrots to blog spammers.
I was pretty interested to read your post – as I had also seen these danged spyware messages. In fact, came up at a hands-on workshop recently – and of course I assumed it was our own system “up to something”. Now this is actually worst! I can wrap my mind around a school system doing (dumb) stuff, but I can’t wrap my mind around the implications of what Google is/might be up to. All the more reason to get into teacher’s heads that Google isn’t a global solution to an information literate future! As for spammers – they suck! and now I know why these backtracks are happening. Thanks for the revelation Alan!
The search worked for me. And I haven’t seen one of those messages yet. Maybe it’s the Google cookies that track my every move…
Hmm…. no problems for me either – http://fakesteve.blogspot.com/
Looks like its not a magic phrase. it has happened about 2 out of 10 searches today initiated from my firefox search bar.
My hunch is it is my sometimes flaky satellite internet connection up here in the mountains. Every web request (I think) goes through a Hughes black box and would not be surprised if it adds some weird footprint to the web request,
Or maybe my Mac really has spyware? Nahhhhh
I think your title of the post says it all. Even though we all love google, “Google is sorry!” with their high and mighty page ranks based on algorithms that o sees are truly uderstands, but somehow we are all sure have something to do with advertsing to a degree. lets drop a google bomb….that’ll show them. Ooooh, I may be misinterpreted as spam. Im just sick of my students turning to Google for every search when we $$$ for authoritative databases. I lone school teacher librarian playing David standing up to Goliath.
Alan, I had such messages 2weeks ago at school – they were causing REAL concern to my students and as they came up on EVERY Google search carried out in a 3 day period, resulted in a Google search becoming a 3 or more step process, not to mention you questioning whether or not your own search was valid or not. I had been wondering what was going on as such messages popped up when searching for Ewan McIntosh, David Warlick and even Cogdogblog. This was EXTREMELY disconcerting, made worse by the pretty poor resolution Google logo on the top left hand corner of the screen that one was taken to.