Human error. That’s the root issue of a major glitch at Google over the weekend.
If you tried to conduct a Google search between 6:30 a.m. PST and 7:25 a.m. PST on Saturday, you probably were one of the untold numbers of searchers who got an unexpected message: “This site may harm your computer.”
Google has confirmed that every search conducted during that time got that unsettling response. It was clearly an error, Google said, and the company has apologized for the inconvenience. But what happened?
Marking Malicious Sites
Marissa Mayer, vice president of search products, offered an explanation on the Google blog. The short answer is that it was human error. The deeper explanation is that Google flags search results with the message “This site may harm your computer” if the site is known to install malicious software.
“We do this to protect our users against visiting sites that could harm their computers. We maintain a list of such sites through both manual and automated methods,” Mayer said. “We work with a nonprofit called StopBadware.org to come up with criteria for maintaining this list, and to provide simple processes for webmasters to remove their site from the list.”
Periodically, Google updates that list and released an update Saturday morning. But the URL field was mistakenly set as “/,” which means all URLs. Google’s on-call site reliability team fixed the problem quickly.
“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,” Mayer said. “We will carefully investigate this incident and put more robust file checks in place to prevent it from happening again.”
Searching for Answers
StopBadware.org got some problems of its own from…