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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.

16 of 407 comments (clear)

  1. slashdotted already by buchner.johannes · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Also, the sites

    www.stopbadware.org/
    and
    www.google.at/support/bin/answer.py?answer=45449&topic=360&hl=de&sa=X&oi=malwarewarninglink&resnum=1&ct=help

    were slashdotted before this was even on slashdot ...

    --
    NB: The message above might reflect my opinion right now, but not necessarily tomorrow or next year.
  2. The ads are broken too... by duffbeer703 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    No AdSense ads are displaying, at least for several popular advertising keywords like "refinance".

    --
    Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
  3. Has anyone considered... by sphealey · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Has anyone considered the possibility that as of this morning 95% of the sites on the Internet are infected with malware?

    sPh

    1. Re:Has anyone considered... by drachenstern · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Uh, I wouldn't bank on that. I'm pretty sure they could, so long as the sites are active. As for the inactive sites, don't you think it's the malware making them inactive?

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      2^3 * 31 * 647
  4. Exit to parking lot, run in serpentine fashion! by GreyLurk · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Someone is so getting fired for this.

    This is the first Google effective downtime in my memory.. Were there other ones that anyone can think of?

  5. Not all that funny. by seantrue · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Multiply the minutes lost by the number of people searching, and we're looking at _lot_ of lost time.
    Someone else can do the calculation, but even at $10 dollars an hour, that's a lot of money.

    The real economic cost of this also includes the lost reputation (good will) to Google as well.

    I hope this is incompetence. It could be worse than that.

  6. Re:What am I supposed to do now? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    Hard to find though - they seem to have moved to altavista.com instead of altavista.digital.com. When did that happen? And what happened to all the ads? It's just not the same any more.

  7. Update: Google now works fine! by PNP_Transistor · · Score: 2, Interesting

    As of 10:18 PM in my time zone, 20 minutes after the article was posted, Google is working fine again. We posted a whole Slashdot article and had a huge discussion about a Google bug that got fixed in a matter of minutes.

  8. reminds me of the classic Letterman commercial by WormholeFiend · · Score: 3, Interesting

    the one with Letterman says "imagine what the world would be like without TV", and then you get a couple of seconds of nothing, then Letterman appears again and says "scary, wasnt it?"

  9. They broke one thing to fix something else by gcnaddict · · Score: 4, Interesting

    serials.ws is now no longer showing as harmful. It seems like they disabled the engine entirely.

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  10. Failsafe by fyrewulff · · Score: 5, Interesting

    At least it failsafes to every site being flagged. Much better than it just letting people get malware ridden sites.

    --
    "We need to get over this notion, that, for Apple to win... Microsoft must lose." - Steve Jobs, 1997
  11. Re:Broke the internets! by Kintanon · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I did, Screenshots here:
    Google Flags Itself as Harmful Hilarity ensued.

    --
    Check out JoshJitsu.info for Brazilian Ji
  12. First published news about it by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    I saw this about 10 minutes after this started, and did a twitter search on "google". this tweet was the first published result anywhere in the world about the failure.

    Interestingly enough, google ad results didn't throw up the warning. I guess malware authors now know how to spread their wares without google bothering them. ("Take out ads in google, instantly become a more attractive target for criminals"?)

  13. Re:Broke the internets! by Darkness404 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Umm... How many spammers actually click through image links to get e-mail addresses? Most go through sites with a spider or similar to get them.

    --
    Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
  14. Re:Not a common carrier by jesser · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Search should be simple: give the user what they are looking for.

    That's a simple way to state the goal, but it takes a lot of clever algorithms to achieve it. If your search results are irrelevant, spam, scams, or largely duplicates, you didn't get what you were looking for. And if a web site takes over your computer as soon as you visit it, you really didn't get what you were looking for, hence the interstitial warning page.

    --
    The shareholder is always right.
  15. Smaller failures common - variable search results by redelm · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I agree that large / noticable Google outages are rare. But smaller ones (as the db is reloaded?) are quite common. I've seen searches return radically different results on the same keywords. Uusually winin a couple of hours, the results are back to "normal".

    AFAIK, Google's db is RAM resident -- which is why it can return results _so_ fast. So I presume sometimes part of the dictionary is off-line when a machine crashs / locks-up or is overloaded and slow to respond. No big deal.

    The oddest thing about this outage is that anyone cares. Why should it matter? Outages happen. The Internet was designed to be "nuke-proof" which conservely means outages must be expected. Route around them. Do something else. Single points-of-failure are bad.