John Battelle writes one of the most interesting and popular search engine oriented blogs on the Web.

Today someone has taken over his home page.

Instead of the regular John Battelle list of recent reflections and news, at the moment of writing the address battellemedia.com leads you to a Chinese American blog called “RocknGo”.

This only applies to the home page, however. Battelle’s other pages are still there if you look for them.

Normally such a front page switch should indicate that the front page has been “defaced” or taken over by hackers. In some circles taking over web sites like this is considered a sport, and conquering a well known site like Battelle’s gives even more credit.

That being said, this switch may equally well have been caused by some bizarre technical error. The RocknGo home page that has replaced Battelle’s is one year old (the recent version can be found at rockngo.org). And it is very unlikely that Xiao, the blogger at Rock-n-Go — as it is called now — has done this, as it is very easy to trace his identity.

And indeed, the fact that both sites are hosted at the same domain servers leads us to believe that this is caused by a technical error.

While we are at it: Take a look at Battelle’s predictions for the search engine year of 2006. Under a picture of Nostradamus, Battelle predicts that:

• Someone will make video freely available on the web.
• Google will make a major mistake.
• Microsofts share of the search market will grow.
• “The Next Google” — whathever that will be — will not live up to the hype.
• Mobile and net will merge.
• and much more….