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Google Search Flagging Everything As Potentially Harmful
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.
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.
Results from Adsense which appear at the top aren't getting flagged as malicious, so advertisers are at least free from the damage (but not on their regular indexed link).
When the foot seeks the place of the head, the line is crossed. Know your place. Keep your place. Be a shoe.
It isn't entirely useless, you can still get the link for your results, it is just overly annoying. I also found that it was NOT flagging youtube sites, which I found interesting.
Redirect Remover
Google use stopbadware.org to check if a site is bad or not - this site is down.
I think it should work when it's back up.
But now I'm back to unfiltered content, the WWW as it was meant to be :)
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
Update: apparently it has been fixed as of Sat Jan 31 15:24:58 UTC 2009
I work for Google.
I would bet a lot of money that won't happen. Any failure like this one has many sides to it and responsibility will always be distributed over multiple people. The result of this will be a detailed post mortem, better processes, tools, and software, to ensure that something like it does not happen again.
google.com stopped resolving back in 2005 for 15 minutes. Nobody got fired.
Here's the explanation from Google's official blog:
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/01/this-site-may-harm-your-computer-on.html
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. 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.
This may have already been posted (there are a lot of posts) According to AFP they accidentally included / in the list of "harmful" sites. Here's the story: http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5j4Sn-ehiL1W52Xn6UoqhUx2AQ_tw