Search Giant Google does a mistake

If you did some Google searches between 9:30 a.m. EST and 10:25 a.m. EST, you might have got this message - “This site may harm your computer” - along with your search results. Computer users doing Google searches during a nearly one-hour period Saturday morning were greeted with disturbing but erroneous messages that every site turned up in the results might be harmful.

Google has blamed the mistake on human error and apologized for any inconvenience caused to users and site owners whose pages were incorrectly labeled.

The glitch occurred between 9:30 a.m. EST and 10:25 a.m. EST, Google Inc. said in an explanation on its company blog. Anyone who did a Google search during that time likely saw a message "This site may harm your computer" accompanying every search result.

Google said it routinely flags any search results with that message if the site is known to install malicious software in the background or otherwise surreptitiously, a practice aimed at protecting its users.

Saturday's error happened when Google erroneously applied one of its periodic list updates in such a way that the warning would apply to all URLs, the company said in a statement.

The glitch was caught by on-call staff and the file was quickly fixed, Google said. Since the updates are applied in a staggered and rolling fashion, the errors began appearing at 9:27 a.m. EST and disappeared no later than 10:25 a.m. EST, with the duration for any particular user approximately 40 minutes, it said.

Marissa Mayer, vice president of search products and user experience, said "We will carefully investigate this incident and put more robust file checks in to prevent it from happening again”.

Google scans websites to identify sites that may be dangerous to users. When it finds such sites, Google issues warnings in the search results. This morning, they inadvertently added these warnings to nearly all websites, causing user confusion.

… for more and updated info you may visit Google Official Blog

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