Google Glitch Flags Every Site As Harmful

During One-Hour Period, Every Search Result Labeled Risky; Blame Game Goes Awry, Too

(CBS/AP)  Computer users doing Google searches during a nearly one-hour period Saturday morning were greeted with disturbing but erroneous messages that every site turned up in the results might be harmful.

The company blamed the mistake on human error and apologized for any inconvenience caused to users and site owners whose pages were incorrectly labeled.

The glitch occurred between 9:30 a.m. EST and 10:25 a.m. EST, Google Inc. said in an explanation on its company blog. Anyone who did a Google search during that time likely saw the message "This site may harm your computer" accompanying every search result, the company said.

Google said it routinely flags any search results with that message if the site is known to install malicious software in the background or otherwise surreptitiously, a practice aimed at protecting its users.

Google said it maintains a list of suspicious sites based on criteria developed with StopBadware.org, a nonprofit project headed by legal scholars at Harvard and Oxford universities who research consumer complaints.

Google initially said that StopBadware.org provides it with a list of potentially harmful URLs and that it in updating this list that the error occurred. StopBadware.org disputed that claim and Google vice president of search products and user experience Marissa Mayer later updated her blog post to clarify that StopBadware.org provides criteria and not a list.

It was an additional embarrassment for the search leader on top of the erroneous messages. CNET's Natalie Weinstein has much more on the debacle here.

Saturday's error happened when Google erroneously applied one of its periodic list updates in such a way that the warning would apply to all URLs, the company said in a statement.

The glitch was caught by on-call staff and the file was quickly fixed, Google said. Since the updates are applied in a staggered and rolling fashion, the errors began appearing at 9:27 a.m. EST and disappeared no later than 10:25 a.m. EST, with the duration for any particular user approximately 40 minutes, it said.

"We will carefully investigate this incident and put more robust file checks in to prevent it from happening again," Mayer said in the statement.

[marydpreachr]

Google Glitch Flags Every Site As Harmful


....including CBS?

[rsmik]

couldn''t have been just a root error

[amurguz]

Looks like someone applied an incorrect, security, policy to one or, in Google%u2019s case, many firewalls and/or computers or other peripheral, that acts as such a deterrent to the company%u2019s internal searches. Oh well, stuff happens%u2026.and it the digital world, its very had to have %u201Ceverything right.%u201D Just look at Microsoft, a company that does everything, but nothing well!

[andie52]

Come on Google fess up-what really happened and how many paid advertisers are going to get refunds?

Google says:


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.

Google implied that it obtained a list of risky sites from StopBadware.org, which replied:

This is not accurate. Google generates its own list of badware URLs, and no data that we generate is supposed to affect the warnings in Google''s search listings. We are attempting to work with Google to clarify their statement.

[evian_ycnan]

When Google`s "anti-virus" site StopBadware.org, took a powder, they flagged almost all search results sites as potentially dangerous.

Would you have preferred that they not default to the safest mode?

[smurfcrusher]

well... maybe the ARE harmful!

Computers never lie, after all.

[piercetheval]

...well, Mercury is retrograde...[cue Robert Plant]''Communication Breakdown"...thats what usually happens at such times.

[cameraphone]

Hey! Hey! You! You!
Get off of my cloud!

[forever1973]

Posted by lyndon at 08:22 PM : Jan 31, 2009

You sound a bit bitter. Did you get fired or something?

[gargueii]

And Google wants your to move their data to them, so you can run it from their cloud environment.

Give me a break