Last night I was noticing Twitters and some blog posts, as well as a DigitalPoint Forums thread that asked why did Google ban themselves. In short, a search for [google], [analytics], [adwords], [adsense], [google adwords], and so on, did not return the main Google.com result. So a search for [adwords] would not return http://adwords.google.com/ like it normally would.
Matt Cutts of Google even Twittered that he saw the issue and then soon after it was fixed, magically. ClickZ has captured images of the issue, I tried last night, and I did not see it myself but it did happen.
I have emailed Matt to try to learn what happened, if I find out, Ill update this post.
In any event, this is not the first time Google has been perceived to ban themselves. We covered a time in March 2005 and then again in July 2004.
Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.
Update: Here is a statement from Google:
Unfortunately, for a short period of time yesterday, we experienced an issue where our search engine wasn't returning some pages hosted on google.com in users' search results. We've since fixed this problem, and users can now find all Google-specific sites they are searching for. We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused.
