Wow, I just had a bizarre thing happen to me while reading an article over on Money-Hacks.com. I'd been on this page for about 30 seconds or so, and had read half the article, before suddenly I was whisked away to another page...no, another site...a Google error page! What The ... ?? Here's where I was...
And here's where I got redirected to after about half a minute of reading the page...
I dug around the source code and saw that Money-Hacks is using Google Adsense, Google Custom Search, and Google Analytics. I don't know which of these error'd out and caused the redirect, but that's REALLY BAD FORM. Oh wait, let me use the latest "hot term" these days... FAIL.
If you are providing a service to a web site, and you cannot load that service for some reason or other, DO NOT ... I repeat ... DO NOT redirect users away from the site to YOUR site so you can show an error message. In other words, Google, don't hijack a site! Fail gracefully by not loading your widget, wodget, or gizmo, but don't hijack a site. I mean, how rude is that!
(P.S. Because the URL never changed, I'm not sure if I actually got redirected or not. Perhaps the Google error just OVERWROTE the entire Money Hacks article page. Either way...RUDE!!!)
UPDATE:My bad...this is hosted on Blogger. So, not a hijack, just a bad FAIL.