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most two-factor authentication schemes i've seen so far require users to have either a physical dongle that provides keycodes, a mobile phone capable of receiving SMS messages, or a smartphone app.

most users i've seen can't be bothered to take this "inconvenient" step to secure their accounts. i hope Google makes the two-factor login a requirement soon, but they're going to get some pretty tough pushback from the lazy.

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/google-chrome-communication/

http://www.google.com/chrome/intl/en/privacy.html

Really? The Google paranoia is pretty heavy around here and is completely unnecessary. If you're not going to bother to become informed, you should avoid telling the world how uninformed you are.

Some like the minimalist approach to less menus; keyboard navigation trumps trackpads on netbooks, for example.

All the browser phone-home calls are known and not a secret, so where do you find this mysterious information that it's a concern?

You ran free software on a non-free OS? Your argument is invalid. Hand over your geek badge! ;P

About "opted in":

As part of its regular Patch Tuesday, Microsoft released an update for its various toolbars, and this update came with more than just documented fixes. The update also installs an add-on for Internet Explorer and an extension for Mozilla Firefox, both without the user's permission.

I don’t think an average consumer realizes that if they say "yes, show me suggested sites” that they’re granting Microsoft permission to send their queries and clicks on Google to Microsoft, which will then be used in Bing’s ranking.

I'm also surprised at how low the wages are at this Turk thing. ... I thought spammers had to at least sweat through that manual task by themselves.

It's like $0.25 per human-generated spam. Automation seems to be coming. I'm seeing mentions on black hat SEO forums that an automated tool for doing this in bulk will be released early next month.

Marketing fake numerical addresses in between legit ones ensures that Google Pagerank rates your "unique" business as #1...

Sometimes. That technique is mostly used to give real businesses extra bogus locations. Check out "New York City locksmith", for example. Other heavily spammed terms are "carpet cleaning" and "divorce lawyer".

This week's new technique is described at "How To Spam Google Maps For Top Google Place Listings". This is like SQL injection for mailing addresses. The trick depends on Google's parsing of mailing addresses from the top, while USPS standards say they should be parsed from the bottom line upward. So a mailing address with two street addresses is parsed differently by the USPS and Google, allowing the spammer to redirect Google's confirmation postcard to some mail drop.

Google seems to be out to lunch in this area. The same exploits have been working for months. Yet Google doesn't list any such issues under "Known Issues. Over on Matt Cutts' blog, where you'd expect to see some discussion of this, he reports that he's writing a novel.

It's even worse at Bing. Bing emulated Google's October 27th merger of Places into web search within a few days. But they weren't ready. Look up "New York City locksmith" in Bing, and the five "Places" entries are all the same business.

Empty search results are against our quality guidelines: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/empty-review-sites/ I asked my team to check into this.

Matt Cutts at Google even has a MS-free challenge: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/30-days-no-microsoft-software/

Yep -- a meta tag with name="robots" and content="noindex" will (supposedly) cause Google to drop the page from its index. Once all the pages are gone from the index, robots.txt-blocking the crawlers will stop Google from keeping the URLs around as well.

Not quite. I believe it will remove the page from its cache, but it won't necessarily de-index all the urls it has.

Matt Cutts, the VP of Engineering at Google, says:

You might wonder why Google will sometimes return an uncrawled url reference, even if Googlebot was forbidden from crawling that url by a robots.txt file. There's a pretty good reason for that: back when I started at Google in 2000, several useful websites (eBay, the New York Times, the California DMV) had robots.txt files that forbade any page fetches whatsoever. Now I ask you, what are we supposed to return as a search result when someone does the query [california dmv]? We'd look pretty sad if we didn't return www.dmv.ca.gov as the first result.

That being said, Matt claims they get those urls and their descriptions from third party directories (which would agree with your theory). But personally, I do not think this is entirely true either, but unfortunately I can't really prove it. At some point, I thought Matt Cutts published some contradictory statements on his blog, saying that the googlebot did index blocked content (at least, in the background), but I just can't find those statements anymore and this was so long ago -- I can't actually be 100% sure that I'm remembering everything correctly in this case.

"Someone should send an email explaining robot.txt to the poor guy."

actually someone should explain robots.txt to you: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/robots-txt-remove-url/

putting something in robots.txt won't stop it from showing up in Google. Still shows up, they just don't crawl it.

If you want to keep urls from showing up on Google put it in the meta tags: meta name="robots" content="noindex, nofollow"

Matt Cutts already commented on this article, he has some interesting notes about the people behind the study - they also want Gmail shut down:

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/studying-a-study/

One of the study's co-authors was Chris Jay Hoofnagle. Hoofnagle has served as the Senior Counsel and Director of the West Coast Office
of Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC). You haven't heard of EPIC? EPIC was the group that in 2004 argued that Gmail should be shut down: "In a letter sent to California Attorney General Bill Lockyer on Monday, the Electronic Privacy Information Center argued that Gmail must be shut down because it 'represents an unprecedented invasion into the sanctity of private communications.' "

I don't just work there, I get paid by Google to promote them, hence the positive overtones in my post. Okay seriously...

Thanks for the disclosure. Astroturfing is bad, and it has been documented on BN that MS/Waggoner Edstorm did a lot of astroturfing. Even Google isn't perfect, but they did make a public apology when it was revealed: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/pointers-for-google-japan-paid-post-story/ So, another thing that makes Google less evil than MS.

Not so fast. Same source indicates the bing has already fallen back down to (less than) live.com levels.

TechCrunch: Bing was #2 for a day then Yahoo regained its place as Bing fell.

"As Matt Cutts (who yes, works for Google) points out in the comments, StatCounter updates every few hours, so there is also data for today already. And itâ(TM)s more bad news for Bing. Itâ(TM)s now down to 5.65% in the U.S. â" yes, thatâ(TM)s less than what Live.com was at last month."

All of this can be achieved by properly configuring and tweaking Chrome. I hate that I have to give links but here are some of them:
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/google-chrome-communication/
http://www.dennis-kempin.de/various/the-silent-chrome-browser/
http://www.winmatrix.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=19868

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/google-chrome-license-agreement/

[...] This change will apply retroactively to all users who have downloaded Google Chrome.

Rebecca Ward, Senior Product Counsel for Google Chrome

Which goes to show how ludicrous this is. Such an agreement is between 2 parties. If they can just alter the agreement unilaterally then so can you. Copy it to your computer, alter all the clauses to read this "software is public domain and released with no restrictions" ... Bobs your uncle.

In order to keep things simple for our users, we try to use the same set of legal terms (our Universal Terms of Service) for many of our products. Sometimes, as in the case of Google Chrome, this means that the legal terms for a specific product may include terms that donâ(TM)t apply well to the use of that product. We are working quickly to remove language from Section 11 of the current Google Chrome terms of service. This change will apply retroactively to all users who have downloaded Google Chrome.

Rebecca Ward, Senior Product Counsel for Google Chrome

While you've just described what Chrome *can* do, this is not necessarily what it *does* do.

This service is an opt-in service for sending use statistics and crash logs to Google. See: http://www.google.com/support/chrome/bin/answer.py?answer=96817&hl=en-US

If you look at the page you linked to, you'll notice that it has a NoDetails mode (which appears to be the default), so that although it will send information that you've requested a URL or successfully loaded a page, it won't include any information about *which* URL.

(Also, see http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/google-chrome-communication/ for discussion of other instances in which Chrome may dial home.)

If you're interested, I did a blog post documenting the communication between Chrome and Google at http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/google-chrome-communication/ The short answer is that there's nothing sinister there, and Google doesn't get information on the urls you visit as you surf around the web.

Matt Cutts denies that Google spies on your browsing and form submissions in this post on his blog.

I don't think Chrome sends the stuff anywhere (see here), but anyway, this is a theoretical legal problem translating into practice so that no company lawyer will permit any handling of company data with Chrome. This would mean that Chrome will be outright banned.

The implications of the EULA sound nonsensical, and I sincerely hope that someone will soon demonstrate how I'm wrong about this.

And then read http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/google-chrome-communication/

Preventing Paranoia: When does Google Chrome talk to Google.com?. Please read it carefully.

Google has a specific policy of not trapping users' data, so you can back up almost any data you have at Google. Here are some helpful links:

How to back up almost any Google service:
http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2007/12/creating-backup-for-your-google-account.html
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/not-trapping-users-data-good/

Backup a Blogger blog:
http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2007/02/how-to-backup-blogger-blog.html

Backup Google bookmarks:
http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2007/06/export-your-google-bookmarks.html

Backup your Gmail with getmail:
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/backup-gmail-in-linux-with-getmail/

Google has a specific policy of not trapping users' data, so you can back up almost any data you have at Google. Here are some helpful links:

How to back up almost any Google service:
http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2007/12/creating-backup-for-your-google-account.html
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/not-trapping-users-data-good/

Backup a Blogger blog:
http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2007/02/how-to-backup-blogger-blog.html

Backup Google bookmarks:
http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2007/06/export-your-google-bookmarks.html

Backup your Gmail with getmail:
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/backup-gmail-in-linux-with-getmail/

Google Toolbar does not lead Googlebot into indexing pages.

Read the full post.

If the article is correct then I'd be stripping off the Google toolbar as quick as I could.

Except it's not: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/toolbar-indexing-debunk-post/

It's a bit out of date, but this Matt Cutts blog entry claims that the toolbar doesn't feed URLs into the web search index.

Bellamkonda's blog post: "Clarifying changes in Network Solutions".

That link at the end to a blog post about people who are paid to spamvertise some (not kidding) brain surgery product... isn't it ironic?

Google is working hard to keep its index fresh and relevant. Thats the reason you are able to posts in Google index in minutes. More info at
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/minty-fresh-indexing/

His take on Google's privacy (and eventual disagreement with Priv. Intl. UK) can be found at his blog

Matt Cutts maintains a blog where he responds.
Here is the link to this particular response:
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/google-hell/

Oooops I didn't know that my "marketing consultant" was doing SEO spamming. Ooops I just paid him by accident to do "stuff".

Good that Google doesn't let that defense wash. Could you imagine what a better place the world would be if we could have a similar rule for email spam ? I cheer Google on for their anti spam efforts.

So Google has gone out & captured some seo/ad spammers ? I reckon Matt Cutts , their chief anti spam dude is preparing the "interview room". Google will extract their secrets & end up a cycle or 2 ahead in the SEO War.

Of course doing this will take some of the value out of their acquisition, an option mentioned in the article is selling off Performics, that would be shirking their responsibility. Much better to make it a honest, neutral but quality service. That might win the SEO War.

There are wide inconsistencies in the SERP this essentially means googles
algorithms has failed. Looks like google is doing manual editing of SERP by
Googlebomb squad headed by Matt Cutts to find and diffuse googlebombs.
Cutts himself says so http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/undetectable-spam/ his
job is to find undetectable spam ;-)

If you don't like your dmoz description to appear in Google, you can place a meta tag. See Matt Cutts' blog (Google employee): http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/google-supports-meta -noodp-tag/

Matt Cutts, Google's link spam expert, supports the decision:

"for the present, I think it's the right call: the incentive to create spammy links on Wikipedia has been massively reduced"

How Google handles hacked sites

As it turns out, Google is very professional on this issue, notifying webmasters, putting timeouts on the "sandboxing", etc ..

If you would have tried doing even a little research, you would have found out that Google penalizes hacked sites and even makes an attempt to contact the webmaster to alert them to the problem. Not only that, they'll relist you if you remove the spam.

1. Fail to follow even basic internet precautions standard since 1998
2. Whine loudly on Slashdot when search engine behaves as advertised
3. Get lots of new traffic
4. Profit

See Matt Cutts (high up engineer at Google) post about yahoo changing their mail interface to AJAX and hence losing lots of pageviews. Essentially, page views is just a dated metric since there is no reliable way to count AJAX requests, which are substitutes for pageviews.

Blogging Googlers have responded, and I am reaching for my bwig bwag of popcorn. More of this action please!

Google noticed the fuss everywhere and has since then changed the page. A very interesting post about this is made by Matt Cutts (Google employee) on his private blog explaining how annoying it is if somebody steals your layout. Very interesting read.
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/ie7-promo-page/

Do no evil...Except occasionally.

Since we're linking to Jeremy's blog post, I thought it might be worth while to also post Matt Cutts blog regarding this 'drama'. Matt acknowledges Googles mistake (and by Google, we mean a person(s) working for Google who first, thought copying a Yahoo! page was a good idea and 2) got through management approval to let it go live.)

Matt also points out, probably more interesting, how Yahoo! is not entirely innocent when it comes to 'copying' what the competitor does. However, the comments on his page have an interesting discussion of which is truly worse? Copying UI/Layout/Design or Graphics/Layout/Design.

This is a tough call for me (as a web programmer/developer). I can kind of go both ways on this one. Patents and such are always a difficult concept to talk about. On one hand, they protect inventor and innovators, while on the other hand they're a forced 'legal' monopoly of "If they make it, you cannot make it too". As an inventor, I'd hate to create something, be original, and have it copied. As an average everyday person, I'd hate for one company to control a product and prevent natural competition.

In this sense, I cannot agree with myself on this situation. A photographer buys a Hamburger at a popular fast-food chain. Takes it home and opens it up and takes a photograph of it. A 2nd photographer see this photo (on the 1st photographers website) takes a hamburger from the same food-chain, and shoots a drastically similar photograph (the pickle is on the other side). A 3rd photographer cooked his own hamburger, and decided to take a photo of it, and has never seen photographer 1 or 2's photos, and his photo turns out to be almost the exact same image of the 1st photographer. Who's right? Who's wrong? Has a 'crime' (either moral, ethical, artistic, respectful, or legal) been committed?

Regarding the Google vs Yahoo!, it raises another question... online media. Graphics/Photos (JPG, GIFs, PNGS, etc) are protected, but what about UI? Layout? Coding practices? If it 'looks' the same on a monitor, is it not like being a Photo? After all, I can take a screen-capture and make it one easily. So, should it be equally worse to copy ones layout or design? Or even use similar or the same color palettes?

If I spend hours of time and money in R&D for the perfect usable interface, should my 'innovation' also be protected, the same as if I took the time to take a photo of something? After all, a layout/design is artistically placed in the same manner a photographer or painter choose the placement of objects in their shot and a designer chooses their color and brightness the same as a photographer or painter chooses theirs.

Cheers,
Fozzy

Matt Cutts has debunked this story, and Google's AdWords team has also posted to their blog to debunk this. I think it's funny that people beat up on Google for buying ads, when Yahoo just takes the screen real estate for free. Try a search for [online advertising] on Yahoo. They hard-code a shortcut to their own products.

The latest in cutting edge technology. I mean apache::asp has only been around since 1998.

And in the finest Slashdot tradition you not only felt you had enough information to write a response, but one that had a snarky dig at Microsoft and the hacked site's webmaster. Sadly, that does make you a mainstream member of the Slashdot community.

Skim through the comments here. Skim through the comments at the Wesley's linked blog. Note the overwhelming percentage of snippy, self-righteous, insulting, condescending, and throroughly unhelpful entries. Now, follow the trail to the blog of the employee in charge of the Google webspam team: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/how-google-handles-h acked-sites/

The latest in cutting edge technology. I mean apache::asp has only been around since 1998.

Yea, I couldn't be bothered with 10 seconds becsause i spent all of 20 seconds reading the FTA.

And in the finest Slashdot tradition you not only felt you had enough information to write a response, but one that had a snarky dig at Microsoft and the hacked site's webmaster. Sadly, that does make you a mainstream member of the Slashdot community.

Skim through the comments here. Skim through the comments at the Wesley's linked blog. Note the overwhelming percentage of snippy, self-righteous, insulting, condescending, and throroughly unhelpful entries. Now, follow the trail to the blog of the employee in charge of the Google webspam team: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/how-google-handles-h acked-sites/

There is a blog discussion there on the same topic covered by Slashdot and Wesley's blog. Note the information level of comments in a nonSlashdotted forum. Note the civil discourse. Note an evolving conversation which makes actual progress toward beneficial understanding. I quote the last entry by Google employee Matt Cutts:

And for the record, I agree with Wesley. Our alerting process is better than other search engines, but it's still not where (I personally believe) it should be. It's from hearing complaints and feedback like in Wesley's post that Google can prioritize what things need to be done next.

Oh please....

Google's head of webspam has posted a full write-up [mattcutts.com].

Read this first and then step up to the plate. They e-mailed and also let him know via well established channels. If the guy uses sloppy code and lets a spammer cause him to be delisted its his problem.

He aint missing jack! You are!

If you dig deeper, it turns out that Google emailed talkorigins.org to alert the site that it had been hacked and was stuffed with rape and animal porn spam. Google's head of webspam has posted a full write-up.

They could just be blunt when booting the smallest publishers, but that would be bad PR; and completely flying in the face of "do no evil" (something Matt Cutts recently reaffirmed).

Saying "We cut small advertisers" = bad PR, "doing evil"

Saying "We are tough on click fraud" = good PR (to advertisers, Wall St, et al); "Don't be evil"

I should point out here that my point was interpretive, ie "Google is doing foo, hence you could say bar". The serious point is that under Google's TOS, clickfraud itself can be widely interpreted.

Ever clicked your own ad? By mistake? Checking it works? Clickfraud. Told family / friends / coworkers you have a website [with fancy Google ads]? Did they click to "help you out"? Clickfraud. Drawn 'undue attention' to your ads (as interpreted by the powers that be at Google) that resulted in a click? Clickfraud. While these don't fall under the definition of I-bought-a-robot-to-generate-1000s-of-clicks, or other egregious violations, Google could call it clickfraud if it so wished.

While these are small potatoes to Google, they are still technically valid reasons to terminate an AdSense account. Maybe Google would use such a technicality as an excuse to terminate an account that was small and a liability to them, maybe they wouldn't. Draw your own conclusions.

Matt Cutts actually describes the procedure on his blog.

In BMW's case the doorway page contained the word "gebrauchtwagen" - meaning "used car" in German - over 40 times. The real home page, to which searchers were seamless redirected, only contained the word twice.

Interestingly the page Matt Cutts complained about in this post is now 404.