Can you trust Google sponsored results?

Friday, February 18th, 2011

It’s a simple question, do you trust Google? My confusing answer is yes and no. Yes, I trust Google to find more relevant information in less time than other search engines. No, I don’t trust Google to filter out all the cons and scams.

Indeed, the level of trust that I associate with Google search declines dramatically when it comes to those results that appear at the top and side of the page, you know, the ones with the very light text saying ‘Ads’ next to them. I cannot recall ever clicking on a ’sponsored search result’ for a couple of very good reasons:

1. The whole point of using Google is to uncover information that has been deemed relevant courtesy of the hugely complex algorithm at the heart of the search engine’s success, and not which has been dropped onto the page simply because someone paid for it to be there.

2. The bad guys have, for as long as I can remember, been using such sponsored results to lure people to their sites and whatever nefarious activity lies within.

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Twitter goes down (again) but will it soon be counted out for good?

Tuesday, August 11th, 2009

Earlier today (Tuesday 11th August) Twitter went down, albeit briefly for around half an hour, with the official status blog reporting first “a site outage” but then changing tone later to say it was busy analysing traffic data to “determine the nature of this attack”.

Of course, while the Twitter servers may well have been up and running in under an hour of going down, the same cannot be said of third party applications which took considerably longer to recover it would seem. Not, it has to be said, as bad as last week following the 15 fat Russians in a revolving door DDoS attack which saw the Twitter service impacted for days and some third party apps struggling to get back up to speed for days after that. (more…)