Google Identifies Google.com as Malware Site & Stops Visiting Search Results

I can assure you that the attached image is original. If you are still lucky (check the date of this post) you can still search google in google.com and find out that Google identifies its own site as malware. Specifically it says:

Suggestions:

• Return to the previous page and pick another result.
• Try another search to find what you’re looking for.

Or you can continue to https://www.google.com/ at your own risk. For detailed information about the problems we found, visit Google’s Safe Browsing diagnostic page for this site.

For more information about how to protect yourself from harmful software online, you can visit StopBadware.org.

Not just Google.com. Google is mis-identifying any site as malware in its search results page. I informed Matt Cutts, QA lead for Google.

The biggest issue is that Google search is preventing you to visit any sites in the search results. Unless you are tech-savvy (and know how to get the actual url from Google’s interstitial page) there is no way, no link to visit the original page from its malware warning page. Effectively Google search is now useless to millions of users worldwide.

Google’s QA should have caught it. Let’s see how soon & how effectively they handle this debacle.

Update: Google fixed it, details below:

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.

The highlighted section seems to indicate that Stopbadware was at fault. However Erica G from Stopbadware disagrees. She mentioned that Google will be issuing a correction soon.