For approximately 40 minutes Saturday morning, all Google search results bore the now-familiar warning "This site may harm your computer" an indication the site may contain harmful malware.
Marissa Mayer, VP, Search Products & User Experience at Google posted an explanation to the official Google blog:
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 work with a non-profit called StopBadware.org to come up with criteria for maintaining this list, and to provide simple processes for webmasters to remove their site from the list...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...
I have to admit 40 minutes is an impressive turnaround and even the best make a mistake or two. Still it is amazing that such a sophisticated system wouldn't have a fail safe to prevent such an eventuality. A simple dialog box like "hey you're about to make all search results look like malware" should do the trick.
My guess is they probably have one now.
Read the full post on Google's blog here
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