Google Flags All Search Results as Malware
- by Chad Weaver on January 31, 2009 9:35 AM
No reports yet as to why this occurred. I'm guessing however, since this was a global issue (users in Canada, Thailand, Turkey, India, Japan & Portugal have all reported the same issue) that quite a bit of money was lost on both organic and paid listings.Should be interesting to see how the Googleplex responds to what happened.
- Update#1: It seems that the error started appearing for searches at 9 AM EST and lasted for 15 Minutes. The only site unaffected was YouTube. source (Some outlets are reporting outages of over 1 hour. See Brendon's comment below.)
- Update#2: You can follow the reaction on Twitter here.
- Update#3: Todd Gardner is asserting that the issue stems from an outage on stopbadware.org's end.
Official Google Response:
What happened? Very simply, human error. Google flags search results with the message "This site may harm your computer" if the site is known to install malicious software in the background or otherwise surreptitiously. We do this to protect our users against visiting sites that could harm their computers. We work with a non-profit called StopBadware.org to get our list of URLs. StopBadware carefully researches each consumer complaint to decide fairly whether that URL belongs on the list. Since each case needs to be individually researched, this list is maintained by humans, not algorithms.
We periodically receive updates to that list and received one such update to release on the site this morning. Unfortunately (and here's the human error), the URL of '/' was mistakenly checked in as a value to the file and '/' expands to all URLs. Fortunately, our on-call site reliability team found the problem quickly and reverted the file. Since we push these updates in a staggered and rolling fashion, the errors began appearing between 6:27 a.m. and 6:40 a.m. and began disappearing between 7:10 and 7:25 a.m., so the duration of the problem for any particular user was approximately 40 minutes.
You can read the full google response on their blog here.
It has been rumoured that Google was doing an update today.
I think it was more than 15 minutes. It started at 14:39 GMT and come back fully at about 15:20 GMT. Leading up to this, a tiny number of my search were unaffected, but the majority were.
Thanks,
Brendon.
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