Google’s YouTube property will not be included in the company’s rebranding efforts, but other products beyond Picasa and Blogger could be.

We reached out to Google for more information, but the company told Search Engine Land it would not be commenting on the report.

The last time Google rebranded one of its existing and established properties (i.e., not a new or recent acquisition) was 2007, when Froogle became Google Product Search. At the time, Marissa Mayer talked about the branding and awareness challenges of running Froogle for close to five years:

We were a really young company, and I don’t think we really understood the burden of a new brand. I also think it was very hard to build awareness. Our product offering was very robust, but it will fare better with a Google Product Search name.

What remains to be seen is how closely the products will be tied into Google+ in the process of renaming.

But Wait … Isn’t Google Already Using “Google Blogs”?

Well, yes, they are. The home page for Google Blog Search already shows the exact name that’s being reported as Blogger’s future name.

So, if the report is accurate, it looks like Google Blog Search is going to need a new logo, at minimum.

Other changes they’ll be making include:

• Acting on copyright takedown requests within 24 hours.
• Preventing terms “closely associated with piracy” from appearing in autocomplete.
• Improving AdSense anti-piracy review.
• Experimenting with surfacing authorized preview content in search results. This would enable searchers to preview content that requires registration or payment for the full version. Google has already begun this with music, and the likely next form of media is video (possibly as an extension of Video Sitemap galleries).

So here’s the fun loving site:

The most current article shown comes from Search Engine Land. It’s reprinted in its entirety, without permission. There’s even a credit line shoved in at the end:

Newsflash, to anyone who doesn’t get it. You can’t just shove a credit at the end of a story and assume that gives you permission to reprint an entire article. You have to ask the source. No ask; no permission.

Sometimes this happens by accident. People just don’t know any better. Usually when it comes to my attention, I track down a contact address or form, send a short, polite note that summarizing an article and linking to it is fine, but reprinting it is not. Usually, that works just fine.

In this case, there is no contact address. That’s got me all ranty. Hey Google — you’re going to let someone have free web space? Make it required that there’s a contact address of some type. This blog doesn’t have the standard navbar that has the report abuse link right at the top of the page, probably because they use FTP publishing. Well, figure out a way to require that of anyone. It’s absurd people have to otherwise hunt down a way to report this junk you allow to be hosted.

I did track down links to use. One is the DMCA form. I can see that two pages were stolen from our site. So, I could fill in the incredibly long and complicated form and enjoy the fun of Whack-A-Mole.

But you know, I shouldn’t have to do this. I should have a much simpler form that I can fill out that says “Hey Google, look at this site you’re hosting for free. They’ve clearly stolen our articles — you can see they’ve stolen some other ones. Why don’t you suspend them and see if they mount a defense. If so, then drag out the complicated forms. Otherwise, employ some common sense.”

Yeah, that’s the damn form I want. But you don’t have it. You do have a report spam blog form, so I used that. Just put in the URL and whoops! That’s all you do. That’s all you ask for. You don’t ask for any comments about the blog, what’s wrong with it and so on. Apparently, the URL alone is enough for you to then respond with this not-so-reassuring confirmation message:

Thanks for reporting this possible Terms of Service violation. We will examine it soon and take action as necessary.

Yeah, I’m believing that. Well, maybe I can hit the blog where it hurts — in the AdSense all over the page. Surely Google AdSense doesn’t want to make money off infringing c0ntent, right? Surely there should be an easy way for someone who sees Google ads all around stolen material to report this. Right?

Sure. Those “Ads By Google” links are a way to do it. But check it out. When I clicked on that link, here’s what I saw:

It’s an ad for AdSense and AdWords.

It wasn’t until I went back and looked harder, scrolled down, that I discovered this:

Oh, there’s the link to report a problem with the ads. How could I have missed it?

Hey, that new Browser Size tool you just rolled out? I ran it against that Ads By Google landing page. It tells me, using your own stats, that 80% of the people coming to that page will have to scroll to see that link.

Now here’s a thought. I think most people on the web who want to run online ads at this point know you have them. That “Ads By Google” link? It really doesn’t need to be a product pitch for people who click on it. No, you’ve instead got two key audiences. Those who want to opt-out of your behavioral targeted “interest” ads and those who want to report some crappy site that you’re helping fund. So let’s fix that page and make the message be focused as it should be.

Let me add that when you finally do locate the policy violation page, it rocks. You’re giving me exactly what I wish Blogger would — that one click “Hey, there’s something screwy with this site” option:

Thanks. Fingers crossed, you’ll act on it.

Specifically, hackers can set up “malicious blogs” on the Blogger service, plus they can inject dangerous web links and content into Blogger blogs.

The Google web search team takes malware attacks seriously. They have reviews in webmaster tools and they label malicious web sites in web search results. So isn’t it ironic that Google hosts the number one problem of malware on the Internet?

Yesterday, I said that we had reports of spam on Google Sites, as well as spam on Google Groups. But this report shows that Google’s Blogger is worse than both of those.

A Google spokesperson gave News.com a statement:

Google takes the security of our users very seriously, and we work hard to protect them from malware. Using Blogger, or any Google product, to serve or host malware is a violation of our product policies. We actively work to detect and remove sites that serve malware from our network.

NewsBusters has the best write-up of the charges I’ve seen, covering how a number of anti-Obama blogs received emails recently from Google saying they were unable to publish until after an investigation had been done to see if they were spam blogs. One of the emails sent said:

Dear Blogger user,

This is a message from the Blogger team.

Your blog, at http://comealongway.blogspot.com/, has been identified as a potential spam blog. You will not be able to publish posts to your blog until we review your site and confirm that it is not a spam blog.

Sincerely,

The Blogger Team

Note that the message doesn’t say anything like "You’re anti-Obama — so you’re banned." So those claiming Google censorship on that issue have some nice catchy headlines but no smoking gun.

Still, it is unusual that seven different sites on the anti-Obama topic apparently were frozen, blogs that are apparently part of the Just Say No Deal coalition. I thought — as Newsbusters does — that the more likely culprit would be pro-Obama people misusing the spam reporting tool at Blogger.

You’ll see this tool at the top of Blogger-hosted blogs such as this one. There’s a "Flag Blog" button that, if you click on it, turns red and sends a notice to Google.

This leads to Google’s help pages about it. They say:

The Flag button isn’t censorship and it can’t be manipulated by angry mobs. Political dissent? Incendiary opinions? Just plain crazy? Bring it on.

Well, unless Google is indeed censoring itself, it does look like that button has been manipulated. Real conspiracy people might even think the blogs themselves used it to get themselves banned and attract attention, though I think that’s pretty far fetched. But certainly it seems someone has.

And the search connection? As Nathania Johnson at Search Engine Watch notes, Google encourages public reporting of web spam. If they’re getting it wrong on Blogger, why wouldn’t they get it wrong in web search?

In part, Google has more signals to help keep it straight on the web search side — a quality site with a good history getting a sudden influx of reports, that wouldn’t seem right. Plus, you’ve got different teams looking into different spam reports. Just because Blogger’s spam tool might be messed up doesn’t mean the web search tools are. But still, a valid point to raise.

Postscript: Statement from Google now in:

We think blog spam is a serious problem and we have spam detection software to try to eliminate it. In this case, it appears that our anti-spam filters caused some Blogger accounts to be blocked from creating new posts. While we are still investigating, we believe this may have been caused by mass spam e-mails mentioning the “Just Say No Deal” network of blogs, which in turn caused our system to classify the blog addresses mentioned in the e-mails as spam. We have restored posting rights to the affected blogs, and it is very important to us that Blogger remain a tool for political debate and free expression.

Interesting. This means it wasn’t the flag tool to blame but instead likely that Gmail’s spam detection feature that kicked in and caused it.

Postscript 2: I asked for more info on how the email detection works [based solely on Gmail monitoring? Reports from other providers?], but Google simply responded, “We prefer not to go into too much detail so as to maintain the integrity of our spam-fighting efforts, but suffice to say that our anti-spam filters incorporate signals from a variety of sources.” Also, the New York Times has a story up now here and more coverage via Techmeme here.

Google sent Google Blogoscoped a response detailing the issue:

Whoops! 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. Other Blogger users can make sure this doesn’t happen to them by reporting any problems to the Blogger support team via the Blogger Help Center at http://www.blogger.com/problem.g. We can then investigate.

PC World has more details explaining that the notification sent to the bloggers at the Custom Search Blog was “overlooked” and after a period of time, the Custom Search Blog was deleted.

Soon after the blog was removed, it appeared that the blog was then hacked. But Google quickly restored the blog to the rightful owners, themselves.

Google Security: Google Mac Blog Hacked & Google Calendar Users Not Being Safe covers other hacking and oddities that have hit official Google blogs.

When you access the blog at this time, it says “NONE” and that is followed with “No posts match your query.” But the Google Cache still shows blog posts from the blog, at this point in time. More details at The Sydney Morning Herald.

Steve gives you the screenshots of how the junk shows up on Google Blog Search. My post goes into depth on the redirection and scraping that’s going on. End of story, the junk needs to step. C’mon, Google — fix it.

FYI, here’s today’s latest junk out of my newsreader from just today:

• United States People Search Engine
• Google People Search In Nc
• Google Canada People Search
• Germany People Search Engine
• Map Google People Search Engine
• People Search Hotmail Uk
• People Search Engines Germany
• Search Engine For People ‘s Contact Via Email
• Search Yahoo Com/search P Old People Porn
• Google Usa People Search 20
• Katrina Google People Search
• Yahoo People Search 20
• People Search Engines Germany
• Google’s Blogger Hit By Huge Influx of Redirect Spam

Kill it!

Now that Blogger is officially out with a new version, I guess Google’s ready to get behind the service in a big way. The screenshot above shows a new promotional "tip" I just got in my web search results. I’ve never seen anything like that before for Blogger nor that I can recall for any other Google products. Not like this. The tip reads:

Tip: Want to share your life online with a blog? Try Blogger

It seems to be triggered by any use of the word "blog" in a search. For me, all of these will make it come up:

• blog
• blogger
• blogs suck
• blog about google closing its soap api

By making this a tip rather than promoting Blogger in ad units, Google avoids the entire debate of whether it pays for its ads fairly or not (it recently said it does; last year after similar reassurances, I still found I had a ton of questions I may yet follow up on for answers).

Personally, I’ve got no problem with the tip. As I’ve written, I want Google to do promos like this outside of the ad units, so advertisers aren’t

to lose a spot to Google itself.

Don’t forget, Blogger does sounds like it has some pretty handy new features. Find the rundown on the official Blogger blog here.

Postscript: Google Blogoscoped notes Google Calendar has been promoted this way before.