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Google Search Flagging Everything As Potentially Harmful

Posted by Soulskill on from the minor-problem dept.

dowlingw writes "It looks like for the moment at least, all Google results are failing the malware checks and being listed with a warning 'This site may harm your computer,' including all pages from Google themselves. Users trying to visit pages at search results will only be able to proceed via manual manipulation of the search result link to remove the Google click-through (which is also broken). Until Google fixes this bug, it looks Google web search is useless." Update: 01/31 at 15:16 GMT by SS: The problem now appears to be fixed.
Update: 01/31 at 22:01 GMT by KD : Google has now posted an explanation, apologizing and taking responsibility for the "human error" that led to the problem.

2 of 407 comments (clear)

  1. Unsurprising by rabbitfood · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    Google's definition of words is continually evolving. 'Evil' was, as older readers may remember, one of the first to mutate. Now it looks like 'harm' is on the move, too, and will soon join its little relatives 'fun', 'tax' and 'useful' in Google's rehabilitation centre for disadvantaged words.

  2. Thought it was my fault! by macraig · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    Damn you, Google! I was freaking out this morning, trying to figure out what I'd done to cause this. I had been setting up PopFile and some other stuff, and thought this was my doing!

    What's worse it that, on the "interstitial" page that appears for the filtered URLs, it informs you that you have choices, but then doesn't give you an easy way to actually choose the first of the two choices! It informs you that you can either "continue on" to the dangerous site or visit Google's analysis of why it's believed dangerous, but the URL of the site as displayed isn't a clickable hypertext link. (There's a link to that analysis, but that link was also dead.) The consequence was that, unless you cut-and-pasted the link back into the browser, you had no easy way to actually get to the page you desired. In my case I was able to double-click on the URLs and get to the pages, but I believe that was because of a specific browser extension I had installed.

    I'm glad this was just a temporary bug, because I *never* want to see those broken "interstitial" pages again.