May 2004 Archive

Google Bug

Danny reports on a strange bug at Google which has allowed someone to remove the home page of several sites such as Microsoft and Adobe from the Google database. Danny received the following confirmation from Google: "We can confirm that less than 10 websites were inadvertently removed from Google's index for several hours [Thursday]. All of these sites have been restored and are accessible through a Google search. The removal occurred as the result of an outside attempt to abuse Google's automated web page removal tool -- a free service we provide webmasters who would like to remove web pages they own from Google's index. Upon discovering this bug, we fixed it immediately. We will also perform a thorough analysis to ensure additional web pages were not inappropriately removed."

Google Starts Blogging Itself

Google has started up a weblog at www.google.com/googleblog, providing one more place to check for news.

Teoma and Ask Jeeves Add PDFs

Teoma (and thus Ask Jeeves as well) has added indexed PDF files to their database. Unfortunately, they do not yet have any limit syntax, although adding a inurl:pdf to a query term comes close. On Ask Jeeves, the PDF files have a red (PDF File) after the title while on Teoma [PDF File] is in green after the title.