Google Search Flagging Everything As Potentially Harmful 407
dowlingw writes "It looks like for the moment at least, all Google results are failing the malware checks and being listed with a warning 'This site may harm your computer,' including all pages from Google themselves. Users trying to visit pages at search results will only be able to proceed via manual manipulation of the search result link to remove the Google click-through (which is also broken). Until Google fixes this bug, it looks Google web search is useless." Update: 01/31 at 15:16 GMT by SS: The problem now appears to be fixed.
Update: 01/31 at 22:01 GMT by KD : Google has now posted an explanation, apologizing and taking responsibility for the "human error" that led to the problem.
Update: 01/31 at 22:01 GMT by KD : Google has now posted an explanation, apologizing and taking responsibility for the "human error" that led to the problem.
slashdotted already (Score:5, Interesting)
Also, the sites
www.stopbadware.org/
and
www.google.at/support/bin/answer.py?answer=45449&topic=360&hl=de&sa=X&oi=malwarewarninglink&resnum=1&ct=help
were slashdotted before this was even on slashdot ...
The ads are broken too... (Score:4, Interesting)
No AdSense ads are displaying, at least for several popular advertising keywords like "refinance".
Has anyone considered... (Score:5, Interesting)
Has anyone considered the possibility that as of this morning 95% of the sites on the Internet are infected with malware?
sPh
Exit to parking lot, run in serpentine fashion! (Score:4, Interesting)
Someone is so getting fired for this.
This is the first Google effective downtime in my memory.. Were there other ones that anyone can think of?
Not all that funny. (Score:2, Interesting)
Multiply the minutes lost by the number of people searching, and we're looking at _lot_ of lost time.
Someone else can do the calculation, but even at $10 dollars an hour, that's a lot of money.
The real economic cost of this also includes the lost reputation (good will) to Google as well.
I hope this is incompetence. It could be worse than that.
Re:What am I supposed to do now? (Score:1, Interesting)
Hard to find though - they seem to have moved to altavista.com instead of altavista.digital.com. When did that happen? And what happened to all the ads? It's just not the same any more.
Update: Google now works fine! (Score:2, Interesting)
reminds me of the classic Letterman commercial (Score:4, Interesting)
the one with Letterman says "imagine what the world would be like without TV", and then you get a couple of seconds of nothing, then Letterman appears again and says "scary, wasnt it?"
They broke one thing to fix something else (Score:5, Interesting)
Failsafe (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Broke the internets! (Score:4, Interesting)
I did, Screenshots here:
Google Flags Itself as Harmful [techemperor.com] Hilarity ensued.
First published news about it (Score:1, Interesting)
I saw this about 10 minutes after this started, and did a twitter search on "google". this tweet [twitter.com] was the first published result anywhere in the world about the failure.
Interestingly enough, google ad results didn't throw up the warning. I guess malware authors now know how to spread their wares without google bothering them. ("Take out ads in google, instantly become a more attractive target for criminals"?)
Re:Broke the internets! (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Not a common carrier (Score:4, Interesting)
That's a simple way to state the goal, but it takes a lot of clever algorithms to achieve it. If your search results are irrelevant, spam, scams, or largely duplicates, you didn't get what you were looking for. And if a web site takes over your computer as soon as you visit it, you really didn't get what you were looking for, hence the interstitial warning page.
Smaller failures common - variable search results (Score:3, Interesting)
I agree that large / noticable Google outages are rare. But smaller ones (as the db is reloaded?) are quite common. I've seen searches return radically different results on the same keywords. Uusually winin a couple of hours, the results are back to "normal".
AFAIK, Google's db is RAM resident -- which is why it can return results _so_ fast. So I presume sometimes part of the dictionary is off-line when a machine crashs / locks-up or is overloaded and slow to respond. No big deal.
The oddest thing about this outage is that anyone cares. Why should it matter? Outages happen. The Internet was designed to be "nuke-proof" which conservely means outages must be expected. Route around them. Do something else. Single points-of-failure are bad.
Re:Has anyone considered... (Score:3, Interesting)
Uh, I wouldn't bank on that. I'm pretty sure they could, so long as the sites are active. As for the inactive sites, don't you think it's the malware making them inactive?