Wired reports that an article they published publicly embarrassed Google about a bug with Google Groups search that has been an issue for over a year now, that was fixed in a matter of a day, after Wired wrote about it.
Wired wrote:
Google has pulled its Google Groups development team out of the basement broom closet and begun patching up its long-broken Usenet library, in response to our story Wednesday highlighting the company's neglect of the 700 million post archive.
700 million lost posts in the archive! Wow! Google's response:
“It turns out there was a bug, a specific bug, that affected search within a specific group,” Google spokeswoman Victoria Katsarou told wired.com late Wednesday. “That bug is something we’re working on fixing, and I think that will be fixed by tomorrow. Thanks for writing this, because that’s how we discovered this specific bug.”
The thing is, as Tedster points out in a WebmasterWorld thread that Slashdot wrote about this in November 2008. But Google did not fix it then.
In any event, Google Groups has now 700 million more posts of content in the system. It only took a day of work and a year of time for Google to make happen.
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.
