Google May Harm Your Computer?

1. Aye Chihuahua
   January 31st, 2009 at 10:17 am

   I would say that there's some sort of glitch going on there.

   I noticed it this morning too.

2. Matt
   January 31st, 2009 at 10:18 am

   yes. It's happening but only with the google search engine. Yahoo search was fine.

3. Alex
   January 31st, 2009 at 10:19 am

   One more thing: this happens only when I'm logged into my Google or gmail account ...

4. meggymoo
   January 31st, 2009 at 10:20 am

   i just got that message confused the hell out of me. maybe jeeves is sabotaging them.

5. KIT CLOUD
   January 31st, 2009 at 10:23 am

   I'm not getting it. My first thought was that it was anti virus or spy ware inserting it in the page.

6. Mij Chanroc
   January 31st, 2009 at 10:25 am

   Just posted the same question on my blog. Live Search works fine, but I'm already developing Google withdraw symptoms.

7. chudez
   January 31st, 2009 at 10:29 am

   i was very alarmed when i saw this on my favorite sites (dpreview.com and wikipedia of all places!). since i always search for sites and rarely type in a URL from scratch (i always forget if it's .com or .net or what) this was a big deal to me.

   i guess it's a glitch. it was gone after about 30 minutes. i'm emailing security@google.com to let them know my displeasure about this.

8. Doug
   January 31st, 2009 at 10:31 am

   I've been experiencing the same problem. Time to dust off the ol' Yahoo.

9. graymccarty
   January 31st, 2009 at 10:33 am

   Working fine for me....

10. Aye Chihuahua
    January 31st, 2009 at 10:36 am

    It's fixed now.

11. Miss Cellania
    January 31st, 2009 at 10:38 am

    It's working fine for me.

12. Cheezwhiz
    January 31st, 2009 at 10:51 am

    Works for me.

13. Jmanna
    January 31st, 2009 at 10:52 am

    I had the same problem. It seemed to occur from about 10 am to 10:30 am EST. I thought maybe it was my computer.

    Oh well, encouraged me to do a registry clean up and run my more intense virus scanning programs.

14. werD
    January 31st, 2009 at 10:58 am

    That is their standard warning for sites that have malware; they briefly let loose a bug that had it coming up on every result. The inconsistent experience between users probably means that only some datacenters were affected.

15. Leif
    January 31st, 2009 at 11:02 am

    I don't know what it all means, but it blocked a bunch of sites for me so now I'm mad at Google!
    Boo-urns Google.
    Youlose.

16. yes
    January 31st, 2009 at 11:20 am

    Job openings at google!!!

    I think that it is time for us to apply for a job at google (because almost certainly someone will get fired...) Big oportunity!!!

17. nenen
    January 31st, 2009 at 11:32 am

    I'm told it Google was hacked.

18. Rob Williams
    January 31st, 2009 at 11:41 am

    I was able to grab a shot of most of the Google products listed as malware: http://www.flickr.com/photos/orangejack/3240712047/

19. STLBob
    January 31st, 2009 at 12:16 pm

    Yeah, I noticed that this morning, too.

20. Stephen A Carter
    January 31st, 2009 at 12:27 pm

    Google's response:

    "If you did a Google search between 6:30 a.m. PST and 7:25 a.m. PST this morning, you likely saw that the message "This site may harm your computer" accompanied each and every search result. This was clearly an error, and we are very sorry for the inconvenience caused to our users.

    What happened? Very simply, human error. Google flags search results with the message "This site may harm your computer" if the site is known to install malicious software in the background or otherwise surreptitiously. We do this to protect our users against visiting sites that could harm their computers. We work with a non-profit called StopBadware.org to get our list of URLs. StopBadware carefully researches each consumer complaint to decide fairly whether that URL belongs on the list. Since each case needs to be individually researched, this list is maintained by humans, not algorithms.

    We periodically receive updates to that list and received one such update to release on the site this morning. Unfortunately (and here's the human error), the URL of '/' was mistakenly checked in as a value to the file and '/' expands to all URLs. Fortunately, our on-call site reliability team found the problem quickly and reverted the file. 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.

    Thanks to our team for their quick work in finding this. And again, our apologies to any of you who were inconvenienced this morning, and to site owners whose pages were incorrectly labelled. We will carefully investigate this incident and put more robust file checks in to prevent it from happening again.

    Thanks for your understanding.

    Posted by Marissa Mayer, VP, Search Products & User Experience "

21. GailW
    January 31st, 2009 at 12:39 pm

    I had a situation with this just today as did a friend of mine. Needless to say I did not click on any of the sites after I got a second"Warning" page. WTF?

22. Mr.EvilEric
    January 31st, 2009 at 12:52 pm

    something fishy going at google...... i think its something to do with the offline thingy they have release last week...

23. 2try4.com
    January 31st, 2009 at 1:00 pm

    2try4 is used for deep web search, 2try4.com emulates Google mobile, which had no problems during the outage.
    2try4 is used to provide a different function. All 4 search screens provided results with Google. Google is included in several searches on 2try4.

24. Jay
    January 31st, 2009 at 5:01 pm

    That happened to me too! But not for all sites--only some.

25. Abz
    January 31st, 2009 at 6:56 pm

    I had this about 8hrs ago... for every site as you did... I quickly downloaded Dogpile (which is also donating to ASPCA each search) and just kept searching... Spun me out at first as I thought I must have a virus... thanks for posting on it

26. Chris Johnston
    February 1st, 2009 at 4:17 am

    Oh, good, so I'm not the only one!

27. leah
    February 1st, 2009 at 7:39 am

    @ Leif

    "Boo-urns Google."

    You made me lol.

28. tomtom
    February 1st, 2009 at 9:08 am

    You're playing with fire.

    “I have it on good authority, if you type “Google” into Google, you can break the internet.”

29. tripleX
    February 1st, 2009 at 10:00 pm

    It happened to me too here in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. The first 30 pages or so every searchresult had the warning (in Dutch).

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