And they all link to a Warning – visiting this web site may harm your computer! page.

All that is except the ones to Google sites, like Google books. And the blog search seems to be working.

And many blogs is posting about it (small sample):

• Google Just FAILED: Every Site May Harm Your Computer
• Warning: Google thinks every site may harm your computer
• Google says “This Site May Harm Your Computer” for all websites

Update (0:33):
Situation has returned to normal.
Threat rating lowered.
Please return to whatever you were doing.

Update 2:
TechCrunch has a post on the situation. Apparently there was a problem with an extra forward slash ‘/’. The Official Google blog explains that they use StopBadware.org to filter ‘bad’ sites, and that someone had added ‘/’ (the whole internet) to the list in error. The outage lasted around 40.

This leads me to a few questions:

1. Have people become to dependant on one search engine? What happens if someone really hijacks Google? (Everyone uses Twitter I suppose)
2. Why doesn’t Google/StopBadware.org check blogs for malware? Is this a notice to malware distributers that they should shift to a blog distribution method? Or do they already know this?

Update 3:
After uploading the screenshots to flickr I found that many others had done the same. So I created the group This site may harm your computer.

All the things you have to do when moving sites.

You have to tell Google and Yahoo about your new site, and add sitemaps again. Then wait the month or more while their indexes update.

Not to mention that Technorati has no means for moving your blog from one domain to another. You have to add the moved blog to your Technorati Profile as a new blog, loosing your previous links and ranking.

So make sure the old url forwards to the new one for the foreseeable future, or you will loose a lot of traffic as nobody will be able to find you.

I should probably also update my Google Analytics profile for this blog.

Plus the new URL needs a new look and feel. Though I think that can wait. The old theme still looks ok, and will do till a new one can be found or produced.

Ah, the joys of moving sites. Not something you want to do everyday.

The URL listed looked wrong to me. Australia doesn’t allow domains straight on the ‘.au’, only as second level domains. There is no www.AustralianPassportAdvice.au. But I wonder how many people realise this?

So, is is ethical to advertise a URL that is not the same as the one that the viewer is directed to? And is it also the responsibility of the group serving the advertisement (Google in this case) to check this?

The actual site is a ‘.com’ domain. It promises to help Australian citizens with all things related to passport registration. Just call the 1902 number and be charged $5.50 a minute. I think I’ll give it a miss.

If you make it to the bottom of the page, small print in a colour very close to the background colour, says:

“This service is not connected with, or endorsed by, The Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. APA has no professional qualifications or experience related to the subject matter and we recommend that you contact DFAT for any information relating to passports.“

The official Australian Passport site can be found at: www.passports.gov.au

(Which doesn’t work if you leave off the ‘www’ or if you use the singular ‘passport’)

Well, you can’t have everybody’s Page Rank go down. I’m pretty sure that Google RP works on a logarithmic scale. There are a lot of people with a PR of 1 and only a few with a PR of 10, with a gradient in between.

Using that model, if some people go down others must have gone up. Keeping the same ratio across the curve.

I think the big losers in the algorithm change were bloggers. It looks to me like the changes are designed to combat splogs (Spam blogs) and blogs created as link farms.

To prove my point, a couple of the sites I manage went from PR 3 to 4. I don’t think it is bad news for everyone, the sky is not going to fall in, just a reordering of rankings.

It appears that the weight of links from blogs has decreased. So, all the bloggers just need to go get more links to their blogs from ‘real’ sites.

Also see:

• Directories PR fell down? (2007.10.07)
• What could have happened that your PR dropped? (2007.0.24)
• Matt Cutts Confirms that Paid Links Killed Your PageRank (2007.10.30)
• Matt Cutts Confirms Paid Links & Google PageRank Update (2007.10.29)

So I suppose that blogs are not considered scholarly in nature.

“The marvels of modern technology,” said the woman, shrugging at a nearby sign: Immigration-Powered by Google.

With all the data it collects, Gmail/search results/pages visited/adds displayed, Google is considered the best private sector business to screen people entering the USA. But do you want customs officers querying you about what you sent 6 months ago? Or why certain adds were displayed with your search results?

An interesting piece of fiction that asking ‘what if Google was evil?’.

• Scroogled (Cory Doctorow, Radar, September 2007)

Since much of the site is auto generated it often requires editing to be more useful. This includes the categories a page belongs to, which are often just a list of key works. (Good thing as a wiki anyone can edit it)

So to make Australian sites easier to find I created a new category: Australian Roleplaying. I added sites I found in AboutUs, linked sites, and other sites that I know of.

The category now sits at around 60 club, convention, designer, published and shop sites. Not bad for a few days spare time.

He has been trying to promote the idea through a website. And when an email from Google arrived saying saying it was the “fastest growing internet story since 9/11” he went straight to the media.

A story in the Sydney Morning Herald details how the wool was putted over his eyes.

My favourite quote from the story is:

“Obviously, I’m not dumb, if I’d knew there was anything wrong with it at that point I’d have gone ‘shit I’m not going to put that on national television on Sunday night’.”

No, he is obviously just gullible and didn’t think to check the email authenticity.

• Oyster man’s Google-gram a hoax (SMH, 6 June 2007)

Articles:

• Google hedges against YouTube lawsuits (SMH, 16 Nov 2006)
• Policeman’s YouTube email goes to utube (SMH, 6 Nov 2006)
• Google gobbles up YouTube (SMH, 10 Oct 2006)
• Boom: Google buys YouTube for $2.2b (SMH, 11 Oct 2006)
• Google lawyers fend off the YouTube lawsuits (SMH, 6 Nov 2006)
• YouTube is ‘toast’ (SMH, 29 Sep 2006)
• Will ads in YouTube spoil the fun? (SMH, 18 Oct 2006)
• YouTube to make life even busier for Google lawyers (SMH, 24 Oct 2006)
• YouTube founders now superstars (SMH, 11 Oct 2006)
• Google mulls YouTube takeover (SMH, 7 Oct 2006)

The EU trademark office has rejected its application. Citing the high count of sites using the junk mail meaning in Google. The second site when I checked was “spam.com“, the spiced ham fan club. So its not like it doesn’t appear at all.

I suppose the moral of this story is trademark your product name ASAP.

• Spam-maker loses bid to trademark ‘spam’ (SMH, 12 Oct 2006)