Google users get bogus site warnings

February 01, 2009|Associated Press

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. - Computer users doing Google searches during a nearly one-hour period yesterday were greeted with disturbing but erroneous messages that every site turned up in the results might be harmful.

The company cited 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 the message "This site may harm your computer" accompanying every search result, the company said.

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. It gets its list of suspicious sites from StopBadware.org, a nonprofit project headed by legal scholars at Harvard and Oxford universities who research consumer complaints.

Yesterday's error happened when the latest update to the list was received from StopBadware but was checked in erroneously 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.