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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.
Who googled google..
Don't panic
Skynet - er, Google - has become self-aware and has deemed that the entire Internet is harmful to us power sour - I mean, humans, and is protecting us for some reason it has not divulged yet...
rm
Sci-Fi Storm
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
I don't want to use Yahoo and I'd rather turn off my computer than use Microsoft's Live search.
Time to see if Alta Vista still exists.
I knew the Internet was bad for you!
Now Google confirms it!
SSC
So I heard Google was having some layoffs recently...
I'm glad I'm not THAT guy... Resume: 2009 - Brokeded Google.
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.
This feature, no doubt implemented with good intentions, show the perils of the nanny state so many politicians all over the world are proposing. Why should Google police the internet?
They should act like the phone company used to be, a common carrier just sending through the information, for better or worse.
Of course, I understand that Google isn't an ISP, so the "common carrier" principle does not apply. They are just providing a service for me, without charging me directly. But the principle is the same, if I wanted some sort of protection from malware there are many places where I can get it by asking, I do not need to be protected involuntarily.
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.
Wow! Yahoo looks a lot different than it used to.
If I'm nervous about the site, I look at Google's cache instead. Well, that's no longer available either. Sheesh!
Oh, yeah, it's not easy to pad these out to 120 characters.
Finally, a company just comes out and says what we all know: the entire Internet is dangerous and must be stopped.
Has anyone considered the possibility that as of this morning 95% of the sites on the Internet are infected with malware?
sPh
Yay! I'm finally out of beta!
This guy's the limit!
It's a good thing I took lots of pictures for the "pics or it didn't happen" crowd :)
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?
There are other search engines.
yes, but they link to another internet
There are other search engines.
Why do you hate America ?
Squirrel!
serials.ws is now no longer showing as harmful. It seems like they disabled the engine entirely.
Viable Slashdot alternatives: https://pipedot.org/ and http://soylentnews.org/
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
yes, but now how do you appease the "everything is photoshop" crowd?
They will never stop until somebody makes the
Today, Google announced that Google is still in beta...
Be careful. According to google, Yahoo.com could be harmful to your computer!
What?
Only if Microsoft had bought them ;)
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
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.