Dropbox.com blocked by Google?
safebrowsing.clients.google.com
safebrowsing.clients.google.com
One suggestion: "It has been widely rumored that Google is developing GDrive, a cloud based file hosting service. Today, Google has blocked Dropbox, a cloud based file hosting service which would compete with GDrive, from appearing in its index. Is it fair that Google can unilaterally cause its competitors to essentially disappear from the Internet, without possibility of appeal, for reasons known only to them?"
If it were my business that was down, I'd go for the PR route before asking for a review, because you know what? Google sucks at putting a human in the loop. They hate it. It costs money and doesn't scale to the entire Internet.
When I type stuff into forms at Google, I expect to hear back around a week later on those occassions when they actually get back to me, and I pay Google thousands of dollars to provide the service I'm asking about. One would hope I'm getting the good customer experience compared to some anonymous malware distributor saying they've reformed their ways.
(Less you think I'm joking: Google for [reinclusion request] to see what Google's suggested timeline is for reinclusion in their index if you are bounced out for SEO practices they don't approve of. Hint: think months, not minutes.]
In the amusing-to-contemplate-fantasy-world where there was any entity as powerful as Google on the Internet, and that entity blocked access to 60% of Google users for distributing malware (well, it is highly likely that Google is a contributing factor to more malware infections than anyone else on earth -- see "owns navigation on the Internet"), I highly doubt that Larry would ask Sergey to write something into a web form somewhere and then, you know, wait until somebody got around to addressing it.
Update: They warnings are gone.
His point holds water for me, getting blocked by Google is a huge problem for any business, and its impossible to get in touch with Google short of making a fuss.
Consider this tweet from Dropbox:
"Having trouble reaching the right folks @ Google re: browser warnings; email abuse@dropbox.com to help, thanks"
http://twitter.com/Dropbox/status/5612052146
Not to mention, the timing sucks: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=935009 (Google announces today they've increased their storage quota to 20GB/$5, which happens to be very competitive with Dropbox).
Not getting out the tinfoil hat, but this isn't right.
Dammit all that free at point of use stuff Google keeps giving us, I want them to have a guy retyping all my emails into Gmail to make it so prohibitively expensive that they have to close all their services?? That'll show 'em.
shows 71 pages indexed
http://www.google.com/search?q=dropbox.com&ie=utf-8&...
has 1.7 million mentions
It works fine for me...
When you switch domains the history of the new domain is somewhat important and how you go about switching is pretty important too if you want to keep your google traffic.
(I know there is a Firefox extension that would let you check this but since I am intensely lazy I opened up a terminal and telneted to www.getdropbox.com on port 80 then typed "GET www.getdropbox.com/" enter, which produced the expected result, a 301 redirect header and some human readable text for idiots like me who test things by telnet.)
Does anybody have a screenshot of what it looks like with the 'problem' visible ?
I wonder how effective this sort of attack would be against Dropbox in the future.
If the block is solely based on malware distribution then Facebook would have suffered the same fait ages ago.
Amisdst all the data Google stores it should be clear that Dropbox isn't a random site freely dropping malware around the web.
If it can't figure it out then a good old fashioned human should.
Screenshot: http://bit.ly/4xZpA8
They aren't free and anonymous, are they? The free and anonymous part tends to be important to malware distributors. Exploiting existing servers is one way, but free sites are also used quite heavily.