After the famous discovery that Google Public Search is vulnerable to phishing, Google decided to redirect all the pages hosted there to googlesyndicatedsearch.com. This way, the sites can't read the cookie for google.com and don't appear reliable enough to enter your credentials.
"Google University Search customers have complete control over the header and footer html. Create the Header HTML to fit the look & feel of your site." Unfortunately, the service is still unavailable.
The problem with user-generated content is that it can contain malicious code and that visitors can be easily mislead into thinking that Google owns the site and is responsible for the content.
FYI - it's been redirecting like that since 24 September 2006. I said at the time on the Google Blogoscoped forum:
ReplyDeleteI think the only thing they can do now is setup redirects to forward all these pages to another domain – like googlesearch.com/u/plus – to prevent any cookie theft...
Well, it looks like they did it! :-)