Pagetastic, aka GooglePages

Thursday, February 23, 2006

Pagetastic, aka GooglePages

Peter Dawson in the forum reports that GooglePages.com content, created with Google’s new Page Creator tool, is also available under a Pagetastic.com URL. For example, slash.pd.googlepages.com shows the same content as slash.pd.pagetastic.com.

Added to that, Google allows you to add a dot anywhere in the sub-domain... meaning that philipp.lenssen.googlepages.com has the same content as phil.ipp.lenssen.googlepages.com – without any redirect. So, it looks like Google is creating a lot of duplicate content here. Corsin Camichel notes that Google is now definitely going against their own webmaster guidelines, which state: “Don’t create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content.”

Page Creator was down

For many others today, the Page Creator was partly down. This is yet another item in the growing list of Google launches which didn’t scale to the actual traffic they received. Gary Price of ResourceShelf also reports that the service was closed down for new registrations shortly after launch. Gary saw the following message:

“Google Page Creator has experienced extremely strong demand, and, as a result, we have temporarily limited the number of new sign-ups as we increase capacity.”

A Google press release says this limitation of sign-ups was intentional:

“We decided in advance to limit the number of page sign-ups in order to provide users with an optimal publishing experience. Due to extraordinary demand, we recently reached that limit so we have temporarily paused additional sign-ups.”

Of course, Google said it’s a Beta, and they also said they’d rather get early feedback than wait for the final product release. However, the word Beta lost its meaning, in part thanks to Google’s product strategies, so maybe they should start naming new releases “Alpha.” Or, as Dx0ne puts it, it’s just that “maybe ’20% projects’ are hosted on some ’20% servers’.”

The official Page Creator blog?

In related news, Tony Ruscoe wonders if googlepages.blogspot.com is going to be the official Google Pages blog. Tony says:

“I would’ve thought it was just a squatter, except for the names of the members and the details on their profiles:

Alex V - http://www.blogger.com/profile/9407240
Eric - http://www.blogger.com/profile/16243347“

Eric could be Eric Schmidt, and this is from Alex’ blog – “it sounds like he might have been Project Manager on Google Pages or something” as Tony points out:

“You guys [the Google Pages team] made me realize that I miss writing code :)”

Early predictions

In case you wonder who had the news of Page Creator first – it was Search Engine Watch, on April 1st 2002. Search that article for “GooglePages”... [Via Waxy.]