Google Glitch Labels Internet as Malware (PC Magazine)  

Posted by: shilpz

An alarming glitch that plagued Google's search engine Saturday morning was blamed on human error, Google said in a blog post.

From about 6:30 AM PST until 7:25 AM PST, most searches for any site in Google's database returned the message "This site may harm your computer." If a user attempted to click through to the result, a subsequent page referred users to StopBadware.org, causing that site to crash from the millions of visitors trying to access the site.

The errors began appearing between 6:27 AM and 6:40 AM and began disappearing by 7:10 AM and 7:25 AM, so the duration of the problem for any particular user was approximately 40 minutes,Marissa Mayer, Google's vice president of search, wrote in a blog post.

"What happened? Very simply, human error," Mayer wrote. Google works with StopBadware.org, compiling a list of sites that could harm a user's computer. Unfortunately, a Google employee apparently added a "/" URL, which resolved to every URL in Google's database.

Google originally claimed that StopBadware.org compiled the list of sites, essentially blaming the organization for the glitch, which was later corrected.

"The mistake in Google's initial statement, indicating that we supply them with badware data, is a common misperception," StopBadware.org wrote in its own blog post by Maxim Weinstein, the leader of the team. "We appreciate their follow up efforts in clarifying the relationship on their blog and with the media. Despite today's glitch, we continue to support Google's effort to proactively warn users of badware sites, and our experience is that they are committed to doing so as accurately and as fairly as possible."

Google apologized for the error, and promised to put in place processes to prevent it from happening again.

"Thanks to our team for their quick work in finding this. And again, our apologies to any of you who were inconvenienced this morning, and to site owners whose pages were incorrectly labelled," Mayer wrote. "We will carefully investigate this incident and put more robust file checks in place to prevent it from happening again."


This entry was posted on Sunday, February 01, 2009 . You can leave a response and follow any responses to this entry through the Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom) .

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