Google Custom Search Blog Hacked?

All the posts from Google's Custom Search blog were deleted and there's a new post written by someone who doesn't speak English very well (my emphases).

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

Google uses Blogger for all of its 50+ blogs. It wouldn't be the first time when one of Google's official blogs has problems: last year, Google's main blog was accidentally deleted in March and was hacked in October.

Update (90 minutes later): Everything is back to normal. There's no official explanation for this incident.

Update 2: The explanation is pretty strange. "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." So Google deleted the blog because it was classified as spam and then someone set up a new blog at the same address.

Update 3 (August 10): More details from Google's Sean Carlson via Search Engine Watch. "Blogger's spam classifier misidentified the Custom Search Blog as spam. If a spammer gets caught by our automated classifier, the blog owner will receive notification of this identification. At the owner's request, the Blogger team will review the blog to verify that the blog in question isn't spam. In this case, the Custom Search Blog bloggers overlooked their notification, and after a period of time passed, the blog was disabled. The content wasn't deleted, but it was removed from the URL. Even after blogs are disabled as spam, the owner can write in requesting a review for her or his blog to be restored. If the review proves that the owner's content was not in fact spam, the blog will be restored with all content. So, when we saw what happened on Tuesday -- and we're well aware that our content wasn't spam -- we restored the official Google Custom Search Blog. The individual who had claimed the URL and published the blog post in reference still has his content; it's just hosted at a new URL."