Search engine giant Google hit a snag last week when it accidentally labelled every user’s search results as sources of malicious software.
The error, which occurred between 1.30 and 2.25 AEDST on Saturday morning, displayed search results with the message, “Warning! This site may harm your computer”.
But vice president for search products and user experience, Marissa Mayer, wrote on the company’s blog that simple human error was the cause for the glitch.
Mayer explains that the group receives updates about websites that contain malicious software from StopBadware.org.
“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.”
The news spread over blogs and forums, as users were discouraged from using Google’s search engines until the service returned to normal at 2.25am.
Google says it will, “carefully investigate this incident and put more robust file checks in place to prevent it from happening again”. It also sends “apologies to any of you who were inconvenienced this morning, and to site owners whose pages were incorrectly labelled”.
Google currently boasts 70% of the internet search market.
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Patrick Stafford is a freelance journalist and a former deputy editor of SmartCompany.
