14 DAY TRIAL // A few days ago, a weird blog appeared on the Google Custom Search Blog that showed several misspellings and grammar errors. "Google Custom Search, is the wonderful product from Google which many webmasters have been looking and dream for. It allows webmasters to create their own custom search engines to search only the sites he/she wants. Also Google Custom Search is integrated with Ad-sense, which means make money while keeping users on your site for longer time with custom search engine. I'll cover up more on this powerful tool very soon in my next blog. Good Luck for all the Custom Search customers(??). Cheers, Srikanth," the message read according to Google Blogoscoped.
Obviously, everybody was talking about the possibility of being hacked but the Google employees didn't comment the post. After a short period of time, the blog was back to normal but still no official statement. The folks from Google Blogoscoped contacted the Googlers to find out what happened but probably nobody expected this answer:
"Whoops! We accidentally classified ourselves as spam, and our ever-perceptive Blogger settings caught us. The Custom Search Blog has since been restored, and we're taking steps to ensure this doesn't happen with other Google blogs in the future. Other Blogger users can make sure this doesn't happen to them by reporting any problems to the Blogger support team via the Blogger Help Center at http://www.blogger.com/problem.g. We can then investigate."
As Philipp Lenssen reports, it's quite strange that Google removed its own blog after they flagged it as spam because all the blog posts published in the past were removed from the website. It's not too clear if marking a certain blog as spam can delete all the blog posts published on the page but, according to the official response sent by the Google employees, this was the main cause for the Custom Search Blog trouble.