Well it looks like Google is fubar. Every search result has a This site may harm your computer. link under it.
And they all link to a Warning – visiting this web site may harm your computer! page.
All that is except the ones to Google sites, like Google books. And the blog search seems to be working.
And many blogs is posting about it (small sample):
- Google Just FAILED: Every Site May Harm Your Computer
- Warning: Google thinks every site may harm your computer
- Google says “This Site May Harm Your Computer†for all websites
Update (0:33):
Situation has returned to normal.
Threat rating lowered.
Please return to whatever you were doing.
🙂
Update 2:
TechCrunch has a post on the situation. Apparently there was a problem with an extra forward slash ‘/’. The Official Google blog explains that they use StopBadware.org to filter ‘bad’ sites, and that someone had added ‘/’ (the whole internet) to the list in error. The outage lasted around 40.
This leads me to a few questions:
- Have people become to dependant on one search engine? What happens if someone really hijacks Google? (Everyone uses Twitter I suppose)
- Why doesn’t Google/StopBadware.org check blogs for malware? Is this a notice to malware distributers that they should shift to a blog distribution method? Or do they already know this?
Update 3:
After uploading the screenshots to flickr I found that many others had done the same. So I created the group This site may harm your computer.