Google Search Hiccup: Whole Internet is Malware

If you happened to be using any localization of Google to search the internet for anything on Saturday morning you may have been hit with warnings on every single one of your search results.  Between 6:30am and 7:15am PST, Google search experienced a major failure due to "human error".

Google normally flags known malicious websites that contains malicious code which could be harmful to your computer.  The procedure is to notify the user that this search result is potentially dangerous with a warning that says: "This site may be harmful to your computer."  But as TechCrunch reported, anything you searched for, included Google themselves, were returning this harmful tag.  If a user were to continue on to the harmful site, Google displays a warning message and explanation of why it will not connect you.  The only option at this point is to cut and paste the URL manually into your browser's address bar.

This problem was extensively reported first on Twitter.  A search of the tags #googlemayharm and #googlemayhem returns numerous posts by users around the world.  This problem was experienced by users of every operating system and every browser.  According to Google, this error was the result of an input error in the malware black list which Google maintains in conjunction with StopBadware.org.

On Google's official blog, Marissa Mayer, VP, Search Products&User Experience writes: "the URL of '/' was mistakenly checked in as a value to the file and '/' expands to all URLs."  This basically resulted in every searched URL returned being recognized as malware.  Google pushes these updates in a rolling fashion and as a result, users were experiencing the warning at different times around the world but the average downtime for most users were 40 minutes.

Looking at user experiences from Twitter and various forum posts, reactions ranged from worry of virus infections of local systems to conspiracy theories of sabotage by competitors.  However, the error has since been corrected and all is well again within the Google machine.