fantomNews™ — the ultimate know

Another fresh issue of our low frequencynewsletter fantomFlash offering hot news and tips has now gone out to our subscribers and can also be downloaded from our blog. Learn about the economics of cloaking, product and services upgrades, how to monetize misspellings on eBay and get a list of newly detected search engine spiders from Google, Yahoo!, MSN and Naver

Investors beware: if this should turn into a massive trend, it could seriously impact Google’s business – here’s one PR 7 blogger who is not prepared to take any more crap from them.

One would have thought that a company of Google’s resources and technical savvy would be able to prevent further downloads of their established spy- and malware. The more so as this specific download link is still being propagated across a multitude of blogs and fora. After all, they’ve had three full days to do it. But that’s precisely what’s not happening.

Hardly four days to oblivion – the deluge of PR-hurting reports has finally found its first deserving casualty: GWA is no more, at least for the time being. Still, it’s definitely a first victory and hopefully not the last one.

Only three days after its beta launch, GWA has arguably broken a dubious record: that of being one of the buggiest pieces of software ever unlashed upon the unsuspecting general public. Let the downloader beware!

We’ve detected another Google Web Accelerator IP range. Make sure you adjust your existing .htaccess code to cover it!

Here’s a page you can display to people who you are restricting from accessing your site because they’re using Google’s nefarious spyware. Plus some graphics we’re donating to the public domain: spread the message!

And on and on it goes with even the most acquiescent, docile and “we’re so excited to be a part of Google’s dream yadda yadda” industry pimping sites voicing at least some mild concerns about where Google’s latest gizmo may be heading.

In what may arguably be their greatest PR debacle ever, Google’s new Web Accelerator is encountering heavy duty flak by tech savvy webmaster, marketers and privacy buffs across the board. Here’s a first selection of gripes.

Here are the first verified Google proxy IPs as employed by their new Web Accelerator service. You’ll probably hear a lot more of this in future.

But is it search? Well, Gizoogle seems to think so, in its charming little Snoop Dogg way – you jez got ta check dis shit out!

Lots of new spiders detected: ExactSeek, Gigablast, Baidu, Voila.fr, Entireweb, SearchIt, Dir.com

The world’s most comprehensive database of verified search engine spider IPs is an indispensable prerequisite for professional SE research, spider development, IP delivery or Cloaking technology, ultra-reliable traffic analysis, and more.