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Nice little existing conversation about startpage, ixquick, ddg, and others here:
http://www.webmasterworld.com/...

> But did Google *pay* for Angry Birds to do that?

I have no idea what their contract, if any, with Angry Birds looked like.

But they have certainly been encouraging web developers to do just that, yes.

> And what is your source for that Skype behaviour?

Personal experience, for one thing. You can see a screenshot from the advanced install at http://people.mozilla.org/~khuey/skype-install-2011-10-3.png if you want.

As far as a Google search not finding anything.... https://www.google.com/search?q=skype+chrome+bundling shows http://www.webmasterworld.com/goog/4135280.htm and http://www.winrumors.com/skype-for-windows-updated-to-remove-google-product-bundling/ and http://mynetx.net/6494/skype-removes-google-integration

It also finds, not coincidentally, http://www.osnews.com/comments/25184 (do read the first response too!) and http://www.salsitasoft.com/2011/09/23/wonder-how-chrome-is-growing-market-share-ask-adobe/

A similar search on Bing also finds http://www.quora.com/Just-got-a-Skype-update-and-they-wanted-me-to-install-Chrome-Why

One Word: Trademark.

its really hard these days to come up with useful names these days without infringing on another companies trademark. ESPECIALLY if you want to go international.

You mean like "Mandrake"? Hearst sued them, but honestly, Mandriva? That's as bad as Mandrivel. Not like anyone cares any more.

"In August 1997, the Company and microsoft Corporation (microsoft) entered into patent cross license and technology agreements. In addition, microsoft purchased 150,000 shares of apple Series A nonvoting convertible preferred stock ("preferred stock") for $150 million. These shares were convertible by microsoft after August 5, 2000, into shares of the Company's common stock at a conversion price of $8.25 per share. During 2000, 74,250 shares of preferred stock were converted to 9 million shares of the Company's common stock. During 2001, the remaining 75,750 preferred shares were converted into 9.2 million shares of the Company's common stock."

http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum9/7140.htm

"Another dumb freetard."

Another comment from someone who didn't bother to read the article or understand the issue.

Here's a quote from the Microsoft press release: "Upon completion of the migration, Go Daddy® will have moved all its parked domains from Linux to the Windows platform."

A "parked domain" is one with no real content, but just one small static web page that says something like "coming soon". The implication is that Microsoft Windows servers are fully capable of serving parked domains.

At the time, March 21, 2006, the story was that the Microsoft marketing department got GoDaddy to make the change by offering a lucrative deal. Why would Microsoft do that? This April 7, 2006 story explains: Microsoft Server gains 4.7% market share of hosted domains.

A parked domain, even though it is never visited except by accident, is a "hosted domain". Now it was possible for Microsoft sales people to talk about how Microsoft Windows server software was rapidly gaining market share. That would be entirely misleading, however.

Note that the press release misspelled GoDaddy as "Go Daddy", even though it was spelled correctly a few words earlier. That gives a picture of the level of competence involved at Microsoft's P.R. agency, Waggener Edstrom.

You may find it interesting that Pam Edstrom's daughter Jennifer and a former Microsoft manager wrote the book, Barbarians Led by Bill Gates. (August 15, 1998, eight years earlier) The Amazon.com review says the book "... presents a harsher and messier history, sharply questioning Microsoft's ethics and corporate wisdom..." The book seems authoritative; the authors certainly had inside access to the facts. It's certainly unusual that the daughter of one of the heads of Microsoft's P.R. agency would write a book discussing Microsoft's abusiveness in detail.

I've been to Google and found it down for a few minutes at least twice and there are numerous instances where gmail has been unavailable.

Gmail downtimes, while frequent enough and long enough to be annoying, have been gmail-specific downtimes, not total google failures. Google search downtimes were measured in 2007 by pingdom[1]. I can't find anything more recent, but it doesn't appear anyone thinks it is worse, otherwise they'd certainly write about it. You must do a lot of searches to notice 30-40 minutes of downtime per year.

If Google goes down for a few seconds, you hit refresh and blame your ISP. If, for example, the telephone company's accounting system goes down for a few seconds then they lose hundreds of thousands of dollars.

If your phone service goes down during a call, you hang up and call again. If Google's accounting system that counts all charged ad clicks goes down for a few seconds, they lose thousands of dollars[2,3]. In fact if there's even a delay, adsense publishers will notice[4]. You are comparing apples and oranges in your statement because you mix the user view with the company's global view. In reality the two "utilities" are pretty similar with large downtime cost for billing and in the user behavior for short outages.

Btw, if you know a telephone company that makes $2T/year, please let me know so I can invest in them. AT&T makes "only" $124B, or ~$3900/sec.

[1] http://royal.pingdom.com/2007/09/26/google-availability-differs-greatly-between-countries/
[2] http://finance.yahoo.com/q/is?s=GOOG&annual
[3] $21.7E9/year / (365.24*24*60*60 sec/year) = ~$688/sec; a few seconds could be $2000.
[4] http://www.webmasterworld.com/google_adsense/3929862.htm

I wouldn't recommend Websense to anyone. They have a long history of stealth web robots which intentionally disobey the robots.txt standard.

Mod_rewrite will do that - it would be pretty similar to this.

I have yet to really understand why it is better than using tables. Tables are pretty logical things to understand and seem to work the same in all browsers.

Actually, you're right. It's not CSS itself that's the problem, it's the DIV/FLOAT/CLEAR approach to layout. DIV/FLOAT/CLEAR is a one-dimensional layout approach. Trying to bash it into doing a 2D cell-like layout is difficult and ugly. Doing three columns in DIV/FLOAT/CLEAR is a classic hard problem. The DIV mechanism just doesn't have adequate alignment tools. If DIVs could be arbitrarily constrained relative to other DIVs ("Left edge of B must align with left edge of A, above"), DIVs would have more power than tables. But, as currently designed, they have less expressive power than tables.

The limitations of DIV/FLOAT/CLEAR layout lead web 'designers' to use absolute positioning. This leads to pages that look wrong if resized, or worse, text on top of text. Then there are Javascript hacks to put positioning logic onto the web page, which rapidly gets complicated and tends to be buggy.

WYSIWYG tools work much better for tables than for DIV/FLOAT/CLEAR layout. Try Dreamweaver in both modes.

>> Yes, and I've also had Linux do the same thing. It didn't give an error, but no matter how many times I "kill -9"ed it the process never paid attention to the command and carried on churning away. I guess that's the process rather than the OS, but it's still not always "all-powerful root".

The reason is typically because the process is a Zombie process that no longer 'truly' exists. To remove it from the process list you'll need to kill the parent process. (See http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum40/1032.htm last comment for more details on what Zombie / Defunct process's really mean).

With windows it never makes any sense when a process refuses to die - at least with Linux I know there's a reason (and if you understand the details - they make sense).

Allow me to humbly suggest a moratorium on "Microsoft is dying" posts - at least - until the company stops posting record gains and growth each quarter.

At this point, corporations are no different from either individual persons or countries.

JAVASCRIPT
Netscape originally called their creation LiveScript. They had a tight partnership with Sun at the time, who had just generated a lot of marketing buzz around Java. Netscape piggy-backed on the buzz by changing the name to JavaScript. However JavaScript is not Java, not at all. But the naming confusion carries on to this very day!

jscript
Microsoft created their own version of the scripting language, which they call jscript. They made it "roughly" the same so that basic features would be supported cross-browser.

ecmascript
ECMA is the European Computer Manfacturers Association. Netscape offered JavaScript to the ECMA for standardization in 1996. Netscape and Microsoft then both agreed to support the standards ECMA developed.

XP was called a flop more than once. Here's an example with some fun comments as well
http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum10009/1538.htm

One such example :)

"I think that xp will be a huge success. I feel that WinME is a much improved product over win95 and win98, so I expect that winxp will be better still."

most home networks are not even 100Mbit, for the average joe user, who has multiple computers, it is much easier to set up an unsecured wireless network (802.11b/g), neither of these is much faster than 6-12mbits (in any situation I have seen).

I think it would be cool for home servers to become the norm, but there are problems with that too. 1. US ISPs suck. Other developed countries offer 50mbit or even a gigabit to the home, while US isps are generally stuck at some small fraction of a mbit upload. You also have to remember that not having net neutrality will likely make it so that ISPs will try to forece more money out of you to get reasonable service. and 2. many companies are likely to offer the same service (online storage) and are likely to include software to automount these drives on boot/sync local documents, which would seem seem easier to that average joe who does not know the first thing about networking.

This appears to be being done through hacked adwords accounts.

There's more. Definitely read the blog section at Webmaster World linked above, which is being updated rapidly. Apparently it really is a virus. "It spreads by installing the activex on the computer that clicks the ad and looking to see if the infected host uses adwords, then does the same to their account." The pay per click people are panicking, because they're billed by Google for the ads. "The daily budget was increased to a number that would have produced a 7 figure Monthly payout." The details of exactly how this all works are still sketchy, though. Here's an early technical analysis.

It just hit the mainstream press, in the Washington Post

Approximately concurrently with this, some Adwords advertisers have discovered that their accounts have been hijacked using a similar technique. Ads that they did not write were added.

Oddly, in at least one case the hijacker added their OWN credit card information to the account to pay for the ads! (Perhaps to try to avoid detection when the advertiser's credit card bill arrives.)

There are some first-person accounts by advertisers at WebmasterWorld:

http://www.webmasterworld.com/google_adwords/33200 21.htm#msg3321934

It's worse than that. The URL Google displays for the link is, of course, not the actual link; the actual link goes to Google so they can log the click-through. But the link to Google may in fact cause redirection to a completely different third-party domain, usually some ad broker who is doing arbitrage on the click-through.

Here's an example, obtained by searching Google for "mortgage rates". This is a direct Google result from Google's home page.

<font size=+0>
<a id=an4 href=/url?sa=L&ai=BMHn-CuwvRs7QLpOYgQO0vMmWBoO9jRX zgpWxAvvb3gfg3X0QBBgHKAg4AFDj9Mzv_v____8BYMn2-IbIo 6AZyAEByAL77xXZAw3PC8TgQncC&num=7&ggladgrp=2585635 35&gglcreat=543052995&q=http://pixel-user-1042.eve resttech.net/1042/rq/3/543052995_mortgage%2520rate s_s/url%3Dhttp%253A//www.lendingtree.com/stm3/offe rs/marketpromov34.asp%253Fpromo%253D00224%2526loan _type%253D1%2526esourceid%253D835910%2526source%25 3D835910%2526EF%253D1%2526partner%253DGoogle%25268 00num%253D800-460-8109%2526adtype%253D1&usg=AFrqEz f58V3yFBM0ywyFkKryLzAMqmIWRQ><b>Mortgage</b> Rate Offers</a>
</font><br>
$400,000 for Only $1,334/Month!<br>
Refinance Now, Offers in Minutes.<br>
<span class=a>www.LendingTree.com</span><br>
<br>

Note that field coded into the URL on the A tag: q="http://pixel-user-1042.everesttech.net". That's where Google is going to send you. Not to Lending Tree, but to EverestTech.net. Who's "Everesttech.net? An ad broker, or as they put it, "the leader in Search Engine Marketing".

This creates a new attack vector. The Google ad often shows the name of some well-known business, but actually takes you to some place you never heard of. That gives the third party an opportunity to try browser-based attacks.

This isn't just theoretical; it's in the wild. See this article on Webmaster World: " I just had my AdWords account hacked and it seems campaigns were setup with redirects pointing to places like orbitz.com and business.com that try to install some activex remote desktop program."

It's not clear how to deal with this. The example above is from Google's main site, not "adwords.google.com".

Webserver on Palm? Sorry, already been done.

http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum45/81.htm
http://www.citi.umich.edu/u/rees/pilot/

Here's a post by Dean on WebmasterWorld from back in May:

http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum44/2127.htm

If I was to write a FAKE news article on my blog could I get sued for it? I want to write some spoof articles and I will mention in the article that it is fake, but i will be gently mocking celebs etc. Is this likely to cause problems?

Dean seems morally-challenged. Here's another goodie from WMW:

I will be launching several websites in the near future,( I'm still learning from all the great help here on Webmaster, and some advice was to hold off launching my website intil I learn more) and one one them is a going to have news and information on certain health issues. When I search the web and find current news on my subject can I copy and paste in into my website if it doesn't say something like " No part of this can be duplicated, reprinted, published da da da da.

And, finally, one more:

I am wondering what the legal issues are concerning what is displayed behind a password protected area of a forum. e.g lets say we create a moderators only forum and I decide to slag off the competition. Or, lets say I create a password protected section that NO-ONE can access, but for some crazy reason I decide to add hardcore porn, or i copy content from another site, put it in the password section and no-one will ever know. However, what would the legal standpoint be for such scenarios? if no-one can see it, then is it still an offence?

Looks like Dean's been toying with various scammy concepts for a while.

In any case, he's looking like more of a sleeze by the minute.

Here's a post by Dean on WebmasterWorld from back in May:

http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum44/2127.htm

If I was to write a FAKE news article on my blog could I get sued for it? I want to write some spoof articles and I will mention in the article that it is fake, but i will be gently mocking celebs etc. Is this likely to cause problems?

Dean seems morally-challenged. Here's another goodie from WMW:

I will be launching several websites in the near future,( I'm still learning from all the great help here on Webmaster, and some advice was to hold off launching my website intil I learn more) and one one them is a going to have news and information on certain health issues. When I search the web and find current news on my subject can I copy and paste in into my website if it doesn't say something like " No part of this can be duplicated, reprinted, published da da da da.

And, finally, one more:

I am wondering what the legal issues are concerning what is displayed behind a password protected area of a forum. e.g lets say we create a moderators only forum and I decide to slag off the competition. Or, lets say I create a password protected section that NO-ONE can access, but for some crazy reason I decide to add hardcore porn, or i copy content from another site, put it in the password section and no-one will ever know. However, what would the legal standpoint be for such scenarios? if no-one can see it, then is it still an offence?

Looks like Dean's been toying with various scammy concepts for a while.

In any case, he's looking like more of a sleeze by the minute.

Here's a post by Dean on WebmasterWorld from back in May:

http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum44/2127.htm

If I was to write a FAKE news article on my blog could I get sued for it? I want to write some spoof articles and I will mention in the article that it is fake, but i will be gently mocking celebs etc. Is this likely to cause problems?

Dean seems morally-challenged. Here's another goodie from WMW:

I will be launching several websites in the near future,( I'm still learning from all the great help here on Webmaster, and some advice was to hold off launching my website intil I learn more) and one one them is a going to have news and information on certain health issues. When I search the web and find current news on my subject can I copy and paste in into my website if it doesn't say something like " No part of this can be duplicated, reprinted, published da da da da.

And, finally, one more:

I am wondering what the legal issues are concerning what is displayed behind a password protected area of a forum. e.g lets say we create a moderators only forum and I decide to slag off the competition. Or, lets say I create a password protected section that NO-ONE can access, but for some crazy reason I decide to add hardcore porn, or i copy content from another site, put it in the password section and no-one will ever know. However, what would the legal standpoint be for such scenarios? if no-one can see it, then is it still an offence?

Looks like Dean's been toying with various scammy concepts for a while.

In any case, he's looking like more of a sleeze by the minute.

"...there are signs that the industry is losing its trust in Google and losing respect for them. Just look at how "AdWordsAdvisor" - a Google rep that visits Webmaster World (but hasn't posted in ages) - tries to clear the air about the trust score for landing pages (another huge issue).

"Nice try Google. But no go. You're learning that it's not possible to keep an open community relationship with those you depend on and maintain that parochial level of authority. Power = corruption it's that simple and we are all witnessing the opening salvo of a growing corrupt power named Google.

"Who's so naive that they believe this company won't be evil? How are they any different from any other big business? In the end we've seen this before many times and sadly when it comes to business, ideals are only words on paper. The bottom line drives the decisions."

"...there are signs that the industry is losing its trust in Google and losing respect for them. Just look at how "AdWordsAdvisor" - a Google rep that visits Webmaster World (but hasn't posted in ages) - tries to clear the air about the trust score for landing pages (another huge issue).

"Nice try Google. But no go. You're learning that it's not possible to keep an open community relationship with those you depend on and maintain that parochial level of authority. Power = corruption it's that simple and we are all witnessing the opening salvo of a growing corrupt power named Google.

"Who's so naive that they believe this company won't be evil? How are they any different from any other big business? In the end we've seen this before many times and sadly when it comes to business, ideals are only words on paper. The bottom line drives the decisions."

For those unfamiliar with Flickr, it's owned by Yahoo, who just loves them some patents.

- OptiRex

Read through Brett's 26 Steps to 1k per day. Great set of advice. And, the WebmasterWorld forum itself is quite a resource. Lots of experts in a lot of areas.

No kidding. Makes live real convenient, and even gives useful info like PageRank, and simple buttons for a link: query, site: query, et cetera.

Oh, wait ... but it turns out the PageRank graph isn't always honest, and even when it is, it's on a different (logarithmic, maybe) scale. And the link: query is becoming more useless, as it only gives a random 1000 back-links, and half of the time doesn't work, period. And the site: query ... well, now thanks to Big Daddy on the new datacenters, it looks like this's going bye-bye, too. For more info, see this WMW thread.

And what does Google get from the installed toolbars? Any given user's IP address, login name, what sites they go to, how often, how they use G, how they react to G's advertisements. Given that G is chiefly an advertising company (follow the money), a resonable person would conclude the G toolbar is spyware.

(oh, and don't look now, but that "independent" organization G is joining in the fight against malware? its domain name is owned by Google.)

...or advertorial? It just seems unlikely that an editor would link to a page that begins "Search engine marketing is critical to the success of your website marketing." That's not editorial - that's a sales pitch.

/bye karma

PS. Here's my free SEO/SEM advice. Visit seochat.com & webmasterworld.com. Then do a search for "seo forum" and participate in some discussion. Another added benefit - you will not limit yourself to a book that will likely be outdated within a year.

Personal Search didn't exist in March 2004, and they tracked clicks back then too. How do I know? I searched for google track clicks on Google, of course.

Excellent. It seems that this particular situation is so convoluted and widespread that whoever has the best lawyers will eventually win. Further:

The domain "Gmail.co.uk" is "is the private mail service reserved exclusively for the customers of the Contensis Content Management System" and is linked to Contensis, a web content management application developer. Although I was unable to discover who actually owns the name, there was no suggestion they are involved with IIIR and IIIR states that they did not register the domain. In an article by Chris Richardson, several points are made about the statius of the url, including a suggestion that its purpose is to collect gmail ids and passwords. Richardson does state that "The company who has ownership of the domain has received offers to sell the rights, although none were from Google. They have, up until now, declined to sell the rights, stating, "[l]uckily, we're honourable people." I wonder if that means that they will "do no evil"?

Now as to IIIR. They have had several incarnations, but basically are an ASP provider of financial projections under the name Pronet Analytics.com Limited. IIIR's founder and CEO is Shane Smith. Although well regarded, they have experienced significant financial difficulties lately and are struggling. An independent firm has estimated the trademarks worth at around $45M to $60M dollars. Must be nice for a guy who ran down after he heard Google's announcement of gmail and registered the trademark for $700. Yeah, that sounds like he was protecting his "intellectual property rights". It also speaks to how "reluctantly" he is proceeding with the claim against Google. In a pretty thorough search using these resources, I was unable to find any reference to IIIR and g-mail prior to the Google story. It was not mentioned in any of the company documents I read. Wouldn't a working e-mail system have a bit stronger web presence?

My conclusion is that the law suit is a money grab. There IS evidence of possible prior claims to the "gmail" name. Actually, quite a few, with established histories and credible owners. IIIR's is one of the weakest, although presented by one of the bigger firms, and augmented by the IIIR's area of business - International Finance. In the end, Smith's whole claim is based on a service that was never developed and seemingly no one uses, and a valuation based on what the name is worth to GOOGLE, not to IIIR. I doubt Google is too worried. The real shame is the way this shit muddies the waters and will make it very difficult for legitimate claimants to get a fair shake. Smith is grasping at straws to save a business that has already screwed its creditors. I, for one, am glad he picked the wrong target. Mr. Smith - "you don't tug on Superman's cape, you don't spit into the wind, you don't pull the mask off the ole Lone Ranger" and you sure as hell don't mess around with Google. Just ask Bill Gates. It ain't gonna be pretty.

billy - who would not call what's going to happen...well...evil

If Google loses, they'll just rename GMail to GoogleMail.

They already did, at least in Germany, where it is now called "googleMail" and not "Gmail"

http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum100/241.htm/

http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum86/519.htm

Its an quick, interesting read.

This blog post (and especially the comments) discusses pinging yahoo.com, the switch to pinging google and what else do other people ping.

Incidentally, this is the 2nd result when searching for "ping yahoo" on Yahoo! and only the 9th result when searching on Google (the first 8 are much less relevant).

This is typical example of real-life "ping yahoo.com to check if you're online" suggestion.

P.S. And personally I do ping yahoo.com. The are the Internet and compared to them Google is insignificant. :)

http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum40/1114.htm

That's really funny, that's exactly my problem, and here is someone else that agrees with me so I'm not crazy. Even funnier, the last poster on the first page suggested Slackware, just like you, so I'm happy I spent all day downloading all 4 CDs : )

We'll see how it goes.

To change some of your user agent follow these steps: http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum21/779.htm?high light=change+agent

You can configure part of the Internet Explorer User agent string. If you go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\Curr entVersion\Internet Settings\User agent

in the Windows Registry, there are two keys: Pre Platform and Post Platform (if they aren't there, you can create them). You can create String entries in each of these. The name of the string is added to the user agent. The value of the string should be set to IEAK.

So if you set the pre-platform to "This is pre platform" and post-platform to "This is post platform", this might be what shows up in the server log as the user agent string.

Mozilla/4.0+(compatible;+MSIE+5.5;+This+is+pre+pla form;+Windows+NT+5.0;+This+is+post+plaform

You cannot change the Mozilla/4.0+(compatible;+MSIE+5.5; part of the string, nor the operating system.

"Google has plenty of ridiculous patents"

Here, let me finish the sentence... ", but I can't take the time or make the effort to prove it."

You know as much about Google's tactics as Tom Cruise knows about psychology... ZERO.

The parent asked for examples, give 'em some!

http://www.seoguide.org/se-patents-papers.htm
http://news.com.com/2100-1024-986204.html
http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum34/618.htm

http://www.webmasterworld.com/conference/bios/matt _cutts.htm

The story is so old I can't believe it made it to slashdot.

Some more on info the subject:
1. U.S. Patent Application - it's best to read what's exactly been patented.
2. interesting discussion on webmasterworld

Personally I think that while some of the stuff is interesting, most of it is made up rather to confuse SEOs (google doesn't quite like them, you know that, right?). Before that, they had couple factors to think about and work on. Now, there's a shitload of stuff that just makes their work harder. Also, more factors influencing SERPS means it's much, much harder to make a trial-an-error research on what works well and what doesn't.

People have been talking about this for a while... http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum3/11972.htm

http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum3/11972.htm discusses people getting referrals from eval.google.com back in 2003, so it seems this has been around for a while.

The Adsense program will very likely soon be the biggest money earner. This is really not a 'search engine' dependant revenue stream. No matter how you get to a page with Adsense, Google still makes money if you click on the ad. so even if MSN were to displace Google in search Google would still have a great business model. Google doesn't disclose the fraction of revenue that they make from the Adsense program but they do report that their 'network partners' contributed 48% of total revenue in 3rd quarter of 2004. http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum89/4045.htm That was a 120% over the year before and most of the increase was probably due to Adsense.

Check out the thread to make firefox a whole lot faster =]

As the browser has changed since the first post, read message 33 and 34

From Google, You may not send automated queries of any sort to Google's system without express permission in advance from Google.

It's good to see Google abiding by their own rules.

People on WMW have pointed out that you can stop Google pre-fetching by banning IPs 72.14.192.0/20.

It seems Google is using Python for a good deal of stuff... And I thought google was enteprise

For something that does not exist there is a VERY LARGE amount of discussion about it:

See the long list at: http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum30/28742.htm for starters.

302 hijacks work because Google goes to http://bad.site/ and gets redirected to http://good.site/. It then treats the contents of the bad.site as identical to that of good.site. The effect seems similar to if somebody simply copied an entire page off of your site (I'm not sure if it's actually more serious than this), but it's easier to do because you're just keeping a small table of redirections.

How serious is it? Don't know. It's pretty easy for a webmaster to check for hijacking and have her pages de-hijacked (see aforementioned article). It's probably not as screamingly awful as the threadwatch.org article suggests, but the redirector sites are rather annoying. Several of the comments in the webmaster article suggest that Google has already started moving on the problem.

I don't think this one is affiliated with Google. Look at this earlier post, which links to googleguy.de, which has the notice:

GoogleGuy.de is not the real GoogleGuy and not affiliated with google

Maybe [Google cache]'ll go on like that forever. Maybe it won't.

I know you are joking, but this problem pre-dates the IPO.

The basic issue is that not only can purposeful individuals kick you out of the serps with a simple 302 from a higher pagerank page, but people who use 302 redirects to track outgoing links from their site (and several content management software packages do this by default) can accidently do the same thing and there isn't anything the real webmaster can do about it.

It's been discussed in much greater detail in a thread at webmaster world for a while, as well.