After a three-day hiatus because some Autobot automated system over at Google took the decision to erroneously classify our site as a spam blog, Carscoop is back online.
Now to explain. Google's "robots", "automated systems", or whatever else you'd like to call these "tools", do make mistakes. For the non-believers, here's what Google has to say about the matter:
"The disabling [of a site] is a result of our automated classification system marking it as spam. Because this system is automated there will necessarily be some false positives, though we're continually working on improving our algorithms to avoid these. If your blog is not a spam blog, then it was one of the false positives, and we apologize."
Unlike humans, Google's... HAL 9000 continues to work during weekends and if for any reason it decides to lock down your site, then you'll just have to wait for an actual breathing human being to review it and see if the automated system took the correct decision or not.
The problem here is that Google's employees don't review blocked websites during weekends, so we had no choice but to wait until Monday for the issue to be sorted out.
Well, at least for now, it appears that humans do have the last decision...
In any case, Carscoop is back, and I'd like to personally thank all of you that offered their help and support through emails and Tweets during this mini-crisis.
John
