What's a great trick for SEO is this sensationalist linkbait article.
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You seem to be accusing him of faking, without any evidence or even a motive.
Edit: also http://www.jamesbreckenridge.co.uk/what-i-learned-today.html
You imagine that someone would have pointed out an honest mistake, but that could take time. Is absence of an immediate counter-demonstration proof (or even evidence) of truth? I don't think it works that way. See Fleischmann–Pons.
In any case, http://searchengineland.com/google-disables-url-removals-aft... appears to indicate that Google has disabled the tool and are investigating. That indicates to me that it isn't totally fake at least. Maybe it only happens in some circumstances, or maybe there is some other explanation, but I doubt Google would disable the tool completely if what he claimed didn't have some basis.
I tried a request for a page on my wife's site, via the prescribed URL mangling, and it was silently ignored.
But thank you for the link -- another voice is good evidence in my book.
My point is that the evidence is wholly insufficient. It was the first post on a new blog (i.e. no reputation), no way to reproduce the reported issue, no reports of it having been reproduced by anyone else, no acknowledgment from Google (ok, maybe it's a little early for that), etc. I mean, from a journalistic, much less scientific, standpoint, it's pretty poor.
How can I provide evidence of a negative? Would you please provide evidence disproving my assertion that flying saucers visited my house last night? And motive? Wasn't that covered earlier by the word "linkbait"?
Maybe my calibration is way off today, but I'm surprised by the level of credulity I've been seeing. My original post (which I deleted and then reposted, sorry about that) got downvoted to subzero with no explanation. I agree with other posters that bugs happen, but I would have thought that such a major claim against a generally competent player like Google would require at least one independent verification.
I'll be curious to see if Google mentions this. Otherwise, we'll really never know. Well, you may, but I guess I'm a little more skeptical.
1) The grandparent to your post accused the post of being linkbait, without explaining it in anyway. You appeared to be supporting this without any evidence that it was linkbait.
2) You took the discussion about it being linkbait, and introduced the accusation that the post was faked (not withstanding your "I'm not saying it is fake thing" - if you aren't saying that, then what are you saying?), which was totally unrelated to the thread of conversation.
3) You didn't provide any justification that it was fake - merely circumstantial evidence that doesn't preclude that it could be fake. It is pretty normal for someone to expose an exploit without independent verification - especially since it appears the author hadn't considered it a security hole (note the article doesn't mention security, and they didn't find the security@google.com email address which is pretty obvious if you are using the term "security" when you search).
Given these factors, I think the downvotes were justified.
I don't think there is anything wrong with being suspicious, but I think your post would have been better received if it had presented your suspicions differently.
But I stand by my main point: I don't see any REASON to BELIEVE.* The only thing separating malice, incompetence and good work here are the unknown motives of some guy with an internet connection -- possibly an NYU student of Panos Ipeirotis, if you caught that story. I think it was fair to ask why people felt so confident with their "OMG! Google is incompetent!" posts, so quickly. I guess I picked the wrong grandparent.
* You've kindly provided a corroborating source, so "good work" is looking more likely.
I'm not saying it's fake, but I don't see any reason to believe it. Am I missing something?