Human error caused Google to label the entire Internet as malware. Any search conducted between 6:30 a.m. PST and 7:25 a.m. was returned with the response "This site may harm your computer".
This happened because 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. The company maintains a list of such sites through both manual and automated methods and works with non-profit 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.
Google periodically updates that list and released one such update to the site , but due to human error, the URL of '/' was mistakenly checked in as a value to the file and '/' expands to all URLs. The on-call site reliability team found the problem and reverted the file. These updates are pushed in a staggered and rolling fashion and 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 user was approximately 40 minutes.
Google apologized for the error and promised to "investigate this incident and put more robust file checks in place to prevent it from happening again."
StopBadware.org on their blog clarified their role in the entire situation. Read it here.
Its stories like this that make me wary about the universal reliance on Google... its bad enough that you have to deal with the sponsored results and wiki answers, but this kind of glitch makes me wary of the single-minded confidence we all have in the sites... they may be too big to fail but that does not mean we should treat them as such. Its reassuring to me to see other sites out there that are taking a different approach to search engines.... sweetsearch.com is a recent example of filtering through the junk.
