Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
Oh.. if you're wondering all search results displayed this for roughly 20 minutes. Pretty major I'd say..
Google displaying
"This site may harm your computer"
for all sites and any search made me crack up.
Happened for... probably a few hours or so?
Some people said Google could have been hacked.
I thought... "test gone wrong".
But then again some sites including WebmasterWorld becoming unavailable at the very same time can not be a coincidence.
I don't know how much Google relies on real-time checking of 3rd party malware databases but if so, could it be that these going offline resulted in the phenomenon?
...
Anyways, will be interesting to see Google traffic drop in the stats for these few hours.
10 minutes later it was gone, not a single result. Does anyone have any insight about this glitch?
Seem to be happening on and off now.
Google just showed "This site may harm your computer" on the search of every keyword term, even on Google. Although, it has been sorted out now but the results were shown on the SERPs of Google.com and Google.co.in and I quickly took the screen shots.
Did someone else noted out?
Cheers!
Solar System: The following message was added to this thread from:
the depths of my subconscious [webmasterworld.com] by Quadrille - 17.22 on 31 Jan 2009 (GMT)
I knew the web was a dangerous place ... but this is ridiculous :)
This was a business killer today. No sales yet. People are probably freaked off the web today...even for this short glitch period. Google wants our trust, but this stuff makes you wonder how a giant like G can make such a nasty mistake.
For the first time, my trust in the big G is shaken!
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.
[edited by: Quadrille at 5:43 pm (utc) on Jan. 31, 2009]
Will just wait for the stream of nervous client phone calls on Monday... :)
[edited by: tedster at 5:58 pm (utc) on Jan. 31, 2009]
I'm still seeing this right now, but it is sporadic.
It's hurting my site, but at least I know it's not something I did and probably not permanent.
...Come back lost visitors...
"Warning: You are about to throw the really big switch that will make the entire Internet suspect in searches. Your answer may be career decision, so are you very darn sure you want to do this?
Click 'No' to save your job now.
<YES> <NO> <HELP>
"
@Quadrille - thanks much for the link you posted above.
-Commerce
I sent a message to them and it was fixed within minutes so I think something is going on in googleland.
:)
[edited by: tedster at 5:59 pm (utc) on Jan. 31, 2009]
Update: Some news sites cite Google representavive claiming this was some kind of a DNS problem.
I've also noticed a big drop in traffic over the past 3 days. It may have something to do with last weeks ice storm. I also see the MAE-East router is at 0. Not sure what effect that has...
also: this happened on the german google as well and also for their own pages. The glitch seems to be fixed now but I wonder how the summary in financial aspects will be by end of the day!
cheers,
P!
