The headline is a bit of a stretch; the author in the article is merely speculating that their database has been hacked. I'd be pretty shocked if that were actually the case.
Instead, it looks like someone has found a flaw in the current ranking algorithm and is using that to their advantage.
Apologies for using the word "hacked" -- I meant the system was hacked, not necessarily the database. Durn title was long enough already.
I wasn't trying to do a Digg, honest. My point was that as sites grow in popularity, there's this huge arms race that goes on. In addition, as the internet goes everywhere, you can pay a thousand people a buck a day to do the hacking for you. It's a huge problem, and some thought has to be given to it even as a startup, imo.
Lately my parents have been complaining about certain search results on Google linking to completely different pages than what they clicked on (like car part search results linking to travel websites). They are using a combination of Windows, IE, and AOL so who knows what the hell is going on. I've gone over it with them step-by-step on the phone and there is definitely something there. It must be some program running locally because the same search result on my mac goes to the right page.
To deal with the problem... my dad reinstalled Windows.
I think this is a nameserver problem. My girlfriend's parents' computer did this, too, and there was an entry in the registry which I needed to change in order to fix it. Obviously, the problem originated from some type of malware changing the registry, but after that, it doesn't require a program to continue running. What happens is that the request for a website is sent to the malicious nameserver, which returns its own malicious IP. The address is then scanned for certain information (e.g. Google search information), and if it finds anything relevant, it redirects the user to their own ad-riddled site; otherwise, it redirects them to the originally-intended site. Obviously, this is a security issue in that all information you are transmitting is going through a malicious site. I would recommend trying to do something about this problem ASAP, even if it involves re-installing the OS.
I've seen it. Unfortunately, I can't remember the query phrase but I remember being confused about the pages and pages of .cn sites with no other results. It didn't reoccur on subsequent searches so I forgot about it.
It's incredibly frustrating to see how search quality is an arms race just like email spam. First there was keyword stuffing, then link trading, keyword stuffing on many other sites, blog spam, made for AdSense pages and now we don't even understand what is going on.
There's a lot of ways you can trick or "hack" Google. I can think of 2 or 3 right now that might work, and I'm sure there are others.
This looks like something that involves a lot of resources. We may be seeing the beginning of a sort of economic Web war, where one side spends tens of millions to break into and use a trusted system and another side spends tens of millions to prevent it. We've seen a lot of little petty stuff with botnets and DOS attacks over the years, but it could be that the game is scaling up to a even higher level.
Instead, it looks like someone has found a flaw in the current ranking algorithm and is using that to their advantage.