Why I stopped using Blogger – Redux

As I posted on 3/29,  I had finally come to the conclusion that Google’s Blogger service was seriously broken.

Since that time, I’ve continued to read the Blogger help forums (it’s actually like not being able to look away from a car accident),  and searching blogs continues not working.

Additionally, it appears that if any appreciable change is made to a blog, such as changing from the generic blogspot domain to a custom domain, for example, you get treated to having your comments disappear. Sometimes they come back, sometimes they don’t.

The one issue that bothers me the most, is that blogs continue to be deleted as spam blogs, when they aren’t. It’s been said by Google and some of their unofficial support staff that this happens because the spammers are just too good and that in a lot of cases they are scraping legit blogs which makes it difficult for Google’s automated spam checker to tell which is spam and which is legit.

I think it’s more of a case that Google just doesn’t have their act together. I’m seeing more and more cases of private blogs (not visible to the public) getting whacked by their spam checker. Here is a case of a poor soul with what he thought was a blog visible only to him getting deleted as a spam blog:

http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/blogger/thread?tid=5197024060933acb&hl=en

Shoddy operation, Google, just plain shoddy. Obviously, this content can’t be scraped by spammers, and if the content is not available to the public, why is Google scanning it?

It just amazes me that Google can be so good at something like GMail, and yet so entirely bad with something like Blogger or Google Groups, which is a subject for another day.

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