Wow, I just had a bizarre thing happen to me while reading an article over on Money-Hacks.com. I'd been on this page for about 30 seconds or so, and had read half the article, before suddenly I was whisked away to another page...no, another site...a Google error page! What The ... ?? Here's where I was...
And here's where I got redirected to after about half a minute of reading the page...
I dug around the source code and saw that Money-Hacks is using Google Adsense, Google Custom Search, and Google Analytics. I don't know which of these error'd out and caused the redirect, but that's REALLY BAD FORM. Oh wait, let me use the latest "hot term" these days... FAIL.
If you are providing a service to a web site, and you cannot load that service for some reason or other, DO NOT ... I repeat ... DO NOT redirect users away from the site to YOUR site so you can show an error message. In other words, Google, don't hijack a site! Fail gracefully by not loading your widget, wodget, or gizmo, but don't hijack a site. I mean, how rude is that!
(P.S. Because the URL never changed, I'm not sure if I actually got redirected or not. Perhaps the Google error just OVERWROTE the entire Money Hacks article page. Either way...RUDE!!!)
UPDATE:My bad...this is hosted on Blogger. So, not a hijack, just a bad FAIL.
About the Author: Donna Fontenot
13 Comments
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You forgot the fact the The Site is running on Google’s Blogger! The error you saw wasn’t from any of their service (Google AdSense, Google Custom Search or Google Analytics), but it was a error from Google’s Blogger (Blogspot 502 Error)!
More Details if you Google Around – http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q=Google+Server+Error+-+Blogger+Error+502&btnG=Search&meta=
It would wise if you had actually googled the error you saw ratherthan checking the source code. But again, I am not sure that Blogger was the only cause of this error…I have seen such error whilst visiting blogs hosted at Google’s Blogger.
Just my view!
Cheers,
Vinay
Erm… It’s a Google Blogger site, Donna.. They are just redirecting the money-hacks URL. I don’t think “Google is hijacking pages” or sites.. The site is hosted on a Google service: Blogger, which had an error.
Mystery solved. Scare-monger-title-much.
Pipped.
Still. Research kplz.
No I didn’t “forget” that fact…I didn’t “know” that fact. Never even considered the fact that it might be running on Blogger. I hardly ever run across any good sites on Blogger, so that never even crossed my mind. Ok, so, in that case, it’s not a case of hijacking, just a case of FAIL.
could be to do with this ??
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/securityfix/2008/08/new_tool_automates_cookie_stea.html
I found the site was on Blogger by just looking into the screenshot – look into the “favicon” – its Blogger’s!
And the image in his blog article – when you mouse-over, you could actually see the blogspot.com url linked to it!
Simple way to confirm its hosted at BlogSpot/Blogger from Google! 🙂
“just a case of FAIL.”
Happens to the best of us 😉
Have to keep an eye on that one. I have a blog on blogger.
So here I am reading email and see that one of my blogs has been linked to. Oh, joy! It’s great being linked to, but then I find I’m being linked to because the reader/author (DazzlingDonna) is reading one of my posts and — all of a sudden — gets taken to a Google error page.
Nice. Thanks Google.
I have seen this occur once or twice. Now, I’m a little concerned. How often does it occur? Once is too many in my opinion. How many readers has it chased away? I know when I get an error page on a supposedly valid url, I generally never go back.
So, to you commenters and other readers: Should I move from Blogger? I know WP is all the rage, but I have a lot of time invested in Blogger and I like it, FOR THE MOST PART 🙂 (except for this part, of course).
Please, before you simply say, WordPress, consider the downsides of WP (are there any? I seem to think so, but I may just be too stupid to figure it out) as well as upsides to Blogger (are there any?)
Thanks.
And thanks for bringing this to light!
Various Google services have been issuing sporadic 502 Errors on and off for the last 48 hours or so.
It’s not possible for a random website like google to “hijack” other websites unless: a) the other website has bad code or its code was modified by hackers. b) The user has a virus on his computer that is causing popus and redirects. I don’t think google is doing either of these things… 😉
thats pretty annoying and there are far more better services than blogger e,g wordpress i have a blog on wordpress and its 2 years old and i can’t remember when i found it down.
I think blogspot is better at these days if you dont have your own domain…..Cause you can also place your ads from adsense……