With its tentacles stretched across the entire web, Google is bound to find itself in some rather strange messes. But a bizarre political fight has bubbled out of the blogosphere, and although the story is still developing, it looks as though Google's anti-spam measures aren't as strong as the company had previously boasted.

Late last week, Google notified a handful of bloggers, most of them supporters of Sen. Hillary Clinton, that their blogs had been suspended because the search giant believed they were using Blogger as a spamming platform.

That action sparked a small firestorm when conservative blogger Warner Todd Huston wrongly concluded that Google had thrown its weight behind Sen. Barack Obama. Simon Owens, a blogger who covers the blogosphere on his Bloggasm site, contacted some of the affected bloggers and learned that they may have been the victims of a vicious flagging campaign.

The anti-Obama bloggers, many of whom have since moved their blogs away from Google's Blogger platform, say that their blogs were shut down because Obama supporters repeatedly flagged their posts as spam.

If that's true, the story could prove to be an embarrassment for Google, according to The New York Times.  

On its own website, Google boasts that the flag button "can't be manipulated by angry mobs." The copy explaining the flag button even goes as far as to challenge potential abusers: "Political dissent? Incendiary opinions? Just plain crazy? Bring it on." 

For its part, Google denied allegations that abuse of the flag button had caused the flap. Instead, the search giant issued a vague statement saying that it was still investigating, but that it believed the trouble had been caused by mass spam emails sent from JustSayNoDeal.com, a pro-Clinton website many of the bloggers were affiliated with.

As for Obama, the presumptive Democratic Party nominee is no stranger to the wild whims of the web. Last May, Obama got into a feud with one of his own supporters over control of a MySpace account that had 160,000 friends at the time. Obama overcame that flap and went on to use the internet to change the way politicians organize and fundraise.