• Bill Hartzer , Monday, July 28, 2008 1:30 PM

Google powers a vertical engine that strictly searches government Web sites, including NASA, the CDC and NOAA (the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration), offering fast, easy access to pages upon pages of civic info. And spam.

"Being the curious one, I thought that I would take a look to see how polluted the US Government websites really are," Bill Hartzer says. In the midst of a search for "online casino," Hartzer found various kinds of spam, including spam blogs and even log file or analytics referrer spam.

Of course, Google can't be blamed for the glut of spam. After all, the custom search engine is just doing its job by indexing all of the government-sponsored content that it's presented with. Hartzer says this trend does raise concerns about data security network safety, however. "Just imagine how secure these websites are," he says. "If an online casino viagra Texas holdem spammer can get their links all over home pages of US Government websites, what's next? Access to sensitive data about you and me?"

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