Google Bug & Slow PR Leads To Chinese Hack Rumors

Yesterday, several blogs noticed that the Google executives page was showing up in Chinese language. The initial suspicions was that someone upset about Google’s decision to redirect Google China to Google Hong Kong and they hacked the page to show in Chinese.

As more reports came out, some users noticed the page was also coming up in other languages, such as Spanish, English and so on. These additional reports led to curiosity from the Search Engine Land team. Vanessa Fox was confident that this was not a hack, but rather a bug. We emailed Google to find out what was really going on and we still have not received a response.

Later, The Guardian updated their story after receiving a quick and short response from Google that this issue was “not a hack, but a bug.” And a bug indeed. I believe this bug relates directly to a bug I reported last Friday with language issues on Webmaster Tools. Yes, this was/is not only an issue with the corporate pages on Google, but also with Google Webmaster Tools and, as I reported this morning, Google’s Picasa and other properties. There is some weird bug with Google’s language detection solution that shows people in the U.S. languages designed for in other countries.