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Google thinks Google may harm your computer??

Not postal, but curious: Doing a search a few minutes ago, I was surprised to see all of the search results tagged with “this site may harm your computer”. Even sites that my McAfee software tagged as safe. Clicking on a link anyway, I was redirected to a Google warning page. A link on the page offered information about “what we found when we visited this web site”. Clicking on that link produced a Google server error.

So of course, I googled “this site may harm your computer”. The top result was from Google itself, and you guessed it- Google warned me that google.com might harm my computer:

googlebad1

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 31st, 2009 at 9:57 am and is filed under google. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

7 Responses to “Google thinks Google may harm your computer??”

  • 1
    Laron
    January 31st, 2009 10:17

    I got that problem too. Im glad im not the only one

  • 2
    Metablocks | This site may harm your computer - Google on the Blink?! - Widget and Facebook App Development and Design
    January 31st, 2009 10:21

    [...] Postal News Blog [...]

  • 3
    Amused
    January 31st, 2009 10:24

    This is amusing, though not so much for monetized websites.

  • 4
    Nick
    February 4th, 2009 14:37

    It was the result of human error. Here is the link explaining it. – http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/01/this-site-may-harm-your-computer-on.html

  • 5
    Joleen
    February 4th, 2009 15:02

    This Blog Google Blogs Web Blog News
    This Blog

    Google Blogs

    Web

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    “This site may harm your computer” on every search result?!?!

    1/31/2009 09:02:00 AM
    If you did a Google search between 6:30 a.m. PST and 7:25 a.m. PST this morning, you likely saw that the message “This site may harm your computer” accompanied each and every search result. This was clearly an error, and we are very sorry for the inconvenience caused to our users.

    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 maintain a list of such sites through both manual and automated methods. We work with a non-profit called StopBadware.org to come up with criteria for maintaining this list, and to provide simple processes for webmasters to remove their site from the list.

    We periodically update that list and released one such update to 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.

    Thanks to our team for their quick work in finding this. And again, our apologies to any of you who were inconvenienced this morning, and to site owners whose pages were incorrectly labelled. We will carefully investigate this incident and put more robust file checks in place to prevent it from happening again.

    Thanks for your understanding.

  • 6
    Joleen
    February 4th, 2009 16:29

    check the folowing link
    nicholas carrier to me
    show details 2:36 PM (1 hour ago) Reply

    Here is the link explaining it – http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/01/this-site-may-harm-your-computer-on.html

  • 7
    Randy B.
    June 23rd, 2009 12:54

    I’m definitely bookmarking this site. Really great articles. Do you recommend any other readings?

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