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NEWS FROM THE LAB - Friday, March 11, 2011
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Searching for Tsunami Results Posted by Sean @ 10:36 GMT

An 8.9-magnitude earthquake has occurred off the north-eastern coast of Japan and a tsunami causing major damage has followed. Naturally, people want to know more, and so they turn to the Web and search for news. And the first place many turn is Google.

As a result, several of Google's home pages now include the following alert:

Google.com Tsunami Alert

Now, we haven't written about Search Engine Optimization (SEO) attacks lately, in part because Google is doing a pretty good job keeping them at bay and out of their search results.

But still, here's a best practice we'd like to advise: use the "news" filter if it's included in your language localization of Google:

Google News Tsunami Alert

SEO attacks generally masquerade as news sites, whereas results from news.google.com are vetted from legitimate sources.

Our thoughts are with the victims of this event. We've been asked about our Japanese colleagues, according to reports, they are well.