Google’s worked hard to cultivate a warm and fuzzy image, and by and large, the effort’s succeeded. Still, the company’s reputation took a little bit of damage when it recently classified some legitimate blogs as spam.
Users of the Blogger service began to receive notifications on Thursday. These notes – which let users know they’d been locked out of their blogs and needed to appeal within 20 days – continued to pile up through Friday afternoon.
Blogger Makes, Corrects Spam Mistakes
Then a post appeared on the official Blogger Buzz site. “While we wish that every post on this blog could be about cool features or other Blogger news, sometimes we have to step in and admit a mistake,” it began. “We hope to have this resolved shortly, and appreciate your patience as we work through the kinks.”
Late Saturday morning, another post followed, and this one included a sincere apology and some good news. “We have now restored all accounts that were mistakenly marked as spam . . . . We’ve tracked down the problem to a bug in our data processing code that locked blogs even when our algorithms concluded they were not spam. We are adding additional monitoring and process checks to ensure that bugs of this magnitude are caught before they can affect your data.”
Users writing in English, Spanish, Swedish, and Dutch all commented on the situation at one point or another. None of them seem to be holding too much of a grudge, but Google and Blogger will almost certainly lose some market share if any other goofs occur in the near future.
