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Sunday, February 1, 2009

A Google Hickup

For almost an hour on Saturday morning Google tagged every search result as a possible malware site giving users a message "This site may harm your computer" for every site returned. Here's Google explanation from the Official Google Blog:

"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."

So they are human afterall!

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