Google recently stated that not one, but every single site is harmful for your computer. For a short time in the morning itself, Google classified all results as harmful! No matter which URL you saw in the search results, all showed the same warning:

“This site may harm your computer”

And clicking further, the users came across this interstitial: Warning – visiting this web site may harm your computer!

Here are some of the suggestions:

  1. Try login after a particular period of time frame again.
  2. Return to the previous page and try some other search result.
  3. Don’t click on that affected URL as that may harm your system. If it is important for you to do so, then do it at your own risk.

Google warning

Google warning

Google warning

Google warning

Google is saying that:

“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.”

Google further said that they will put up “more robust file checks” in order to solve this problem.

Author

Navneet Kaushal is the Editor-in-Chief of PageTraffic Buzz. A leading search strategist, Navneet helps clients maintain an edge in search engines and the online media. Navneet is also the CEO of SEO Services company PageTraffic which is one of the leading search marketing company in Asia.