For just over half an hour on Saturday, Google seemed to be afraid of the rest of the internet, but apparently, it’s people who are to blame.
The mistake, which flagged all search items as potentially harmful, was apparently caused by the character ‘/’ being accidentally included a list of harmful sites that Google received from StopBadware.org, a non-profit organization dedicated to the elimination of ‘badware’, causing the search engine to list every single website in the world as a hazard.
The error first occurred at around 6:30am PST and was resolved sometime around 7:25am PST, due to Google staggering the update, and subsequently the fix as well. Writing on the official Google blog, Marissa Mayer, Vice-President of Search Products and User Experience, said “Our apologies to any of you who were inconvenienced this morning, and to site owners whose pages were incorrectly labeled. We will carefully investigate this incident and put more robust file checks in place to prevent it from happening again.”
Source: BBC
Published: Jan 31, 2009 08:50 pm