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.
Thank you so much for the awesome article This is exactly what I needed today :)
My cousin gave me the link to this website, and she is totally right! keep up all the great work
I use Mass-Follow.com to submit my Twitter to like 400 places
You would be crazy to not use more Twitter marketing
Mass-Follow.com is hands down the best Twitter follow site around!
Very interesting way to market on facebook. I also found a way to automate a couple very powerful methods of getting users. You can harvest ID by groups or pages or wall posts with this software. Then once you have the IDs you can do a friend add to your user ID or sudo profile. This by passes the captcha codes too. There is also a cool chat program that you can setup scripts and keyword to work with. This program, when I use it I can see a spike in my site traffic. It is amazing...
Wow, regards a bunch m8
I normally dont publish insite but you Pressured me to, drooling
I find myself returning to your weblog because you have plenty of outstanding insights and you happen to be at this a long time, that is very impressive and tells me you know your stuff.
Your RSS feed does not work properly in my browser (google chrome) how can i fix it?
It's good to see an interesting post about Twitter plus social networking every once in a while. Thanks for an excellent read!
Some specialists tell that lowest-rate-loans.com help people to live the way they want, because they can feel free to buy necessary things. Moreover, banks offer consolidation loan for different persons.
Very good post which is a bookmark worth. I will vist your blog regulary now.
In fact, some of the Swiss luxury watch, in appearance and identity numbers are there, and done a lot of anti-counterfeiting
measures,. For example, Rolex has 5 numbers, they are: (1) case models, (2) Watch production sequence number
movement and on the number, (4) the movement and on the production sequence number, (5) the band number. In addition to the
band number in the band discount out surface, the rest are hidden, not to remove the watch strap or open the rear door in order to
see it.
Hi nice blog You got there. I am from Ireland and I found Your blog on . Keep wrighting and I will check it out again.
Hi nice blog You got there. I am from Singapore and I found Your blog on Bing. Keep wrighting and I will check it out again.
Thanks for this interesting information.
I found this information usefull.
You have mention good post above I really enjoy the information. I wish to come again on your site in future…
That was interesting but I can`t agree at all.
Groovy posting writer dude, are you a teacher. I fink so. Gratias, Hilary