Beware the Google spider

Josh Breckman helped develop a content management system for a large government website. The site already had an existing content that needed to be uploaded. After six days live, all the content on the site disappeared and when to the default 'please enter content' page.

Breckman told the DailyWTF.com, here, that a single IP had gone in and deleted all the content and the address resolved to googlebot.com.

It was not Google's fault, as such. Breckman found that a user had cut and pasted some content from one page to another and included an edit hyperlink. However the content management system didn't take into account Google's ability to hack.

It ignores cookies and Javascript. It also follows each hyperlink on the page it finds including those with "Delete Page" in the title. The net result was that the Google bot systematically went through the site and deleted everything.

It is not the first time that Google's spider has shown up problems with web site programming. There is another case here. µ