patrick.net

I used to have a search engine on my blog. Users could enter in text and find related blog entries. Unfortunately, I had to remove that feature because Google began submitting random dictionary words. Hundreds of thousands of them. I think Google was trying to index every possible search result that my blog's search engine could produce. This was just too abusive. When it reached 50% of accesses to my blog (and 50% of my CPU resources), I removed the feature. (I can still search my blog, but the rest of the world can't.) I'm not the only person to see this; lots of webmasters have reported Google submitting crap into text entry boxes.

When I first started FotoForensics, Google began submitting every URL from Imgur to my service. I'm not Google; I don't have infinite resources and infinite bandwidth. And I'm pretty certain that this is a direct violation of Imgur's terms of service. Yet, this is what Google did. Even when I modified my code to return 404 errors to Google, they continued trying to submit Imgur pictures for a month. (They didn't stop until some Google admin noticed my complaints, tracked down the Google employee who was responsible for the abuse, and stopped it.)