google

A couple of days ago friends at work started telling me that Google was flagging my blog here at robsmart.co.uk as an infested host of nastiness brimming with malware. This was a bit of a shock and kind of an egg on your face moment as I consider myself savvy with this sort of stuff.

However it turns out the slightly old version of Wordpress i was running was open to a couple of SQL injection attacks, and i had been a bit lax in updating to the current version. Googles recent policy of scanning sites for security breaches and then flagging and removing them from search results has brought this to my attention.

So as a solution I deleted my old wordpress install and installed the latest version, one of the issues i found was a line of obfuscated javascript code embedded in the Wordpress theme i was using.

So now I’m all cleaned and security hitch free (promise).

But what about the problem of Google flagging and blocking my site. Well to fix that I used the Google Webmaster tools.

The first step was to add the robsmart.co.uk domain to the webmaster dashboard.

The next step was verifying it belonged to me.

For this i simply made a blank html file as instructed and uploaded it to my website.

next stage was to go to the overview tab and look at the problems listed. I’d completely replaced the wordpress install including the theme and been through each of the pages listed to check they were clean.

after that i hit the “request a review” option

The review happened within 24 hours, i’m now just waiting for the results to propagate back through the google search engine.

Google recently acquired a company called Neven Vision whos description on Googles blog is as follows

Neven Vision comes to Google with deep technology and expertise around automatically extracting information from a photo. It could be as simple as detecting whether or not a photo contains a person, or, one day, as complex as recognizing people, places, and objects. This technology just may make it a lot easier for you to organize and find the photos you care about. We don’t have any specific features to show off today, but we’re looking forward to having more to share with you soon.

Neven Visions technology has also been used in conjuction with Logitech to produce Facial movement tracking technology for use with standard webcams, this sort of stuff would help really bring avatar to avatar interactions to life.

This stuff might look like kids play, but there is some serious comp/sci theory going on in the background here.

Another clever play in the virtual worlds space for Google, or just a coincidence ?