This morning for about 45 minutes Google was displaying every site as harmful and throwing up their interstitial.
Sure these things happen but… wow
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Special thanks to Lee Mayne for images.
About the author...
Jeremy Schoemaker – who has written 2415 posts on ShoeMoney.com.
Hi I am Jeremy Schoemaker and ShoeMoney.com is my blog. 99% of the post here are done by me but you will see others occasionally make guest posts. This blog is fun to write but for my day job I run several online companies.
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{ 97 comments… read them below or add one }
hahaha….Google getting crazy. Due to the economic condition maybe? (n_n)
Google CEO : Oh no…the economic condition is eating and break Google Co. into pieces.
Google staff: Are you stress sir? Need help?
Google CEO : Yah, give me some idea! I NEED ONE! I have to release my stress!
Google Staff : I have brilliant idea. Let us make every sites that appear in the Search Engine to be shown as HARMFUL.
Google CEO : Sounds interesting ….wuahhhahaaa.. Lets do it. Lets create a bit of havoc ( plus free and huge publicity)
Google staff : Yah! Lets rock n roll!
Hahaha! You make them sound like such savages. But funny though!
I hope google didn’t banned you for play such a joke to Google..
It was not limited to search results, they even showed the same warning in webmaster tools. I wonder if they resolved the webmaster tools issue.
I am glad it didn’t hit firefox because firefox and google use the same system to flag sites as malware.
I think I read about this earlier today!! I wonder WTF happened!!
Maybe Google was playing around and ended up making their own site harmful. If John had to write about this he would have searched Shoemoney and posted that Shoemoney.com is harmful, LOL.
Considering it for your humour section?
Bunch of idiots over at Digital Point were claiming “Google’s Been Hacked” and posting similar screenshots. Glitches happen I guess…even to the big “G”.
duuude, the castle was breached
LMAO, for sure!
Google says it’s Stopmalware that did it. And Stopmalware denies with that. Then who was responsible for that?
Lol
Google is not God…even Google messes up….
Yeah what to do…
What sucks is that we all suffer from it. Sunday was one of my worse days in months for traffic.
So now Google show it what he can do to all webmaster in only half an hour.
But however this one also flow the negative impression for google as well.
http://searchengineland.com/google-gets-fearful-flags-entire-internet-as-malware-briefly-16387
I saw exactly the same thing but i had accessed the search results for top search queries for some of my sites and thought it was unusual as i have WOT running at exactly the same time.
Signed out of my Google account and back in again and it was gone! strange.
Wow, I noticed that too earlier and thought it was just my comp. But then I saw quite a few people talking about it on Twitter. Glad its fixed now. Looking forward to hearing how google explains what happened.
Now this is the effect of Twitter. Just one thing and whole webmaster community knows about this.
Oh Boy … Twitter is really rocking for this kind of news.
The worst part was there was no option to ignore their warning – the sites were totally blocked
When google parsed the data, the “/” was left on which basically define the root url, and so every site was flagged, google admitted to causing the error, and since then has corrected it..
Still kinda funny though, I always wondered about that innernet thingymabob….
I wonder how much traffic big sites lost due to this malfunction?
Well actuall it lasted for about 15 to 20 minutes only and not 45… I monitor this one.. just my observation
I bet they were panicking by then..
Dang Shoe you’re harmful to us and Google… lol. j/k That’s a trip, one of the larger scale issues I have seen them mess up with. Hopefully they get that fixed quickly.
The same thing happened to me, I didnt know it was everywhere, I wonder how it happened
Lol , google is harmful , google is not only harmful but the devil !
Very Nice sound!!!!
I too accept the same.
Looks like it was human error: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/01/this-site-may-harm-your-computer-on.html
talk about some LINKBAITING !!
Hey Shoemoney,
I noticed that too, but thought something was wrong with my machine. Good catch.
Quest
Yeah, I saw this one this morning, thought I had a virus for a minue…
I thought I was the only one that noticed that!
I wonder how much profit Google made in those 45 minutes since the only untaged and searchable sites at that moment were the paid advertisements (Adsense).
regardless of who caused this error, it just shows how we are all stuck in the mud when the big provider goes down. In one article, it was said that Google controls 70% of the web traffic (true or not, I dont know), but imagine that if this statistic is true, how many people saw that error message and were probably permanently turned off from clicking on a sight that could have been mine, or yours. Human error or computer error, we are slaves to this titan and hopefully it does not happen again.
This was great. I was doing stuff and It made me go out site for some skateboarding so perhaps the higher power was looking after my physical fitness health.
Yes, something is going on Google, in morning i wrote a blog on a LITTLE mistake of google, when you shift your feedburner account to google account, Thou its little but a HUGE company made this mistake, take a look at http://www.hammadbhatti.com/2009/01/31/google-staff-forgets-to-add-space-between-text-and-email-address/
What a perfect example of the fact that we are not our computers. It takes humans to run the show and humans can make errors.
I a surprised it doesn’t happen more often.
Sheila
Big G does make mistake.
It happened for a few minutes only Shoe not 45 minutes as I was doing some search at that time.
what’s going on with google. Did it get hacked
It was apparently a global problem, too. It happened to me here in the Philippines.
I saw this while searching for paypal.com, and I was shocked, but then I saw many results with it, so I knew something was up. They fixed it quite fast though!
check out the hottest trends
http://www.google.com/trends/hottrends?sa=X
Image: http://i41.tinypic.com/derzup.png
I wonder how much cash google collected from adword advertiser due this. None of the links were working except the sponsored links
I must have missed that mishap. First I ever heard anything like that from google
They released the reason behind the error as a file that include ‘/’ in the filter list. ‘/’ matches with every email address.
Interestingly they are blaming StopBadware.org for the eror but StopBadware.org said that it is not their fault as Google maintains their own list.
Google Fail for the win. I just need a Shoemoney fail for the twitter contest in my favor now
Go that error too, I really hope they really fixed the bug that caused this.
Google are slipping. I reckon there is something going on there.
read this post I wrote a few days ago. I had the feeling that all of a sudden things are going wrong and shoemoney backs this up for me.
I was pretty much getting that as well too.. think they have fixed t now
All works now. They might be working on something
This one also affected my blog. I kinda panicked so I removed a particular script. Good to know that it was just Google’s mistake.
Hello,
Well one my uncle all my and said that there is problem with google that its saying “the site may harm your system” but i dont know about that this is google error not system..
This blog sucks. I don’t get the iterest or followers. It’s for the most part useless filler.
I have come often to see these results from Google. However I don’t know why.
even giants stumble. its bound to happen when you are so big. btw Google has been trying to find out from the affiliate marketing community if they are seen as a partner of as more of a threat….. interesting
It would have been better to take screenshot examples without you being logged in to Google.
I saw this while searching for paypal.com, and I was shocked, but then I saw many results with it, so I knew something was up. They fixed it quite fast though!
I really really enjoyed seeing Google screw up!
Wow this is nuts.. Some google bugg?
I have read somewhere that it happened when Google tried to run some “greeting messages”.
Wow a bit of a mess up for on of the Worlds Top Brands … woops
Wonder how much $$ they lost in ad revenue during that time period due to the decrease in traffic?
Gmail also labeled a lot of the emails as harmful and spam that are normally okay.
Don’t put your eggs in the same basquet
Always a good suggestion, although the problem in this case is: The other baskets are barely big enough to really fit eggs into them.
Crazy situation. How can something like that happen to a company like Google? And if this can happen what about all the data stored in there free services like Gmail, Google docs etc.?
someone’s getting canned!
That’s funny!, can you imagine if a link to your very own site was displayed under every single search result in Google!, you would take more hits that the StarShip Enterprise!!.;))
Ok now, how odd, I’m sure they fixed it by now and thank you for the infomation. But how’d they get that? a human error, I have a site their and they said that it was a human error
Alex i oppose your comment its not fair for all the content.
bad news shoe….I already the same posting on quick online
Google is a company after all and not god. Why do people make a fuss even if there is small error on their part. They also rectified the mistake very quickly.
It might have been a publicity stunt or not. You’ll never really know with Google.
I got quite scared.How is it possible that a company like Google can screw up in these things? However, it´s a good idea to develop other traffic streams than rely completely on Google.
I had that happen to me when I was looking for my blogger site. Then I typed in “Rice Pudding” and of course all the receipe sites had that warning so I figured it must be a glitch.
I was searching during the event as well. Tired FireFox and IE both experienced the same.
Then I went to Yahoo and found what I wanted. Looked at MSN and was able to get through as well.
I would think their competitors may have got a splinter of boost in search traffic for the time it ocured.
I’m sure this will spread like wildfire for sometime. Most likely it was a simple human error.
I think John Chow was the only one that didn’t see a traffic drop.
Did anyone try to click through in Firefox? It took the user to a “warning page” and made the user copy and paste the URL into the address bar. What typical user will do that? I wonder how many brands lost trust yesterday?
wow these is amazing, how could that have happened. Google u guys have to be careful. lol
The only safe results are the paid search results
lol…that’s too funny, but true ; )
because it fixed results so they put it before , using keywords but the normal results appears depends on ranking and keywords ” and if paid search results market as harmful they will not accepts them ads from beaning ” .
Paid search will probably always be safe, I love your search on google and it showing up as harmful…
Yeah man, I about died when I did the google search:
Site:zergmoney.com and saw that all over the place. What a joke.
Wow… not so bad for an established brand – but potentially devastating to the little guy.
Was Google marked as harmful?
yes when this happened every site in the index was marked as harmful, Im sure it did a lot of harm in that 1 hour that it was messed up
Wow, I wonder if this is the first time that has happened.
Maybe they are trying tell us something…
I am reading that type of posting first time.
Seems lie this issue has now been solved and google claims that this happened because of a human error!!! wat a waste
I am sure the person that did that mistake should be looking for job right now.
I have this one too and feels that google has something wrong,however,I like it is happen so soon,cause if they do happen long,I am sure more user will tent to leave google
that is fricken hilarious. i bet they’re stock dropped as a result.
this things happen from time to time , specially in maintenance period as i faced in adsense account ” they increased my balance by 500$ ” and it back normal again .
People are just waiting for some error by Google and they will just pounce upon it. Mistakes are bound to happen ..