Google admits to accidentally eliminating Digg from search
The search giant says it inadvertently removed Digg, in its entirety, from its search engine.
If you queried Google for Digg links earlier this morning, you found that the search giant had no recollection that Digg ever existed. Seriously. As Martin MacDonald, an online marketing specialist, observed in a blog post, Digg disappeared altogether from Google's index.
Fear not. It's just a case of temporary amnesia -- well, actually a case of botched brain surgery. When reached for comment, a Google spokesperson told CNET that the company accidentally wiped its memory of the social news site.
"We're sorry about the inconvenience this morning to people trying to search for Digg," the spokesperson said. "In the process of removing a spammy link on Digg.com, we inadvertently applied the Webspam action to the whole site. We're correcting this, and the fix should be deployed shortly."
Oddly enough, the search giant failed to share the faux pas, or its pending fix, with Digg. General manager Jake Levine told CNET earlier today that though Digg had contacted Google for clarification, the company had yet to hear back about the issue. Levine, however, seemed unfazed by the matter, which he said he only discovered through tweets from Digg users.
"The good news is that it doesn't really impact us all that much," Levine said. "The vast majority of our traffic is direct (like 90 percent) so it's not a huge deal for us from a business or user perspective."
Coincidentally, Digg's disappearing act from Google comes just days after the reborn company, previously run by now Google Ventures partner Kevin Rose, promised to build a replacement for Google Reader, the RSS reader that the search giant is killing off this July.