Google Spanks The Little Guys (Update)

Thanks to the several readers who wrote in to let us know that as of today, most (though not all) of the sites referenced in yesterday's post about something rotten in the state of Googleland where the sex blog and indie porn scene was concerned have been restored to their rightful place in Google's search results. As one reader said,

"I've been in the tech industry for many years and I'm wondering if we have an occurrence of what we used to call 'Xmas Software Flu' - where the office newbie (tapped to work through Xmas) is told to 'install that new module when things are quiet' - and royally f*cks it up? Given what Renato Silveiro reported in the BoingBoing version of the article (Google's indexing engine tearing his bandwidth a new one), I'm inclined to believe there were frantic phone calls in the Google neighborhood - including phrases like 'it's doing what? How f*cking often?'."

We may never know whether the glitch was accidental or intentional on Google's part, or whether the sites still affected by what we've heard referred to as the "Google gulag" will start showing up in search results again soon; we're just glad things seem to have resolved themselves in a happy ending for at least some of the parties involved. For now, anyway.

· Previously: Google Spanks The Little Guys