Could it be the end of the world as we know it?

The Internet officially imploded today when Google’s search engine returned results which found every single site on the Internet to be “harmful for your computer”. 

At first, I thought it was a Google Chrome glitch, so I tested out FireFox and IE to find that it was a cross-browser Google problem.

As Robin Wauters at TechCrunch pointed out:

Clicking the message takes people to a support page from Google (image below), but this is being bombarded with millions of people right now so it’s very slow to respond. I saw the page briefly, and it pointed to StopBadware.org (which is obviously also loading slowly or not at all right now).

I turned to Twitter and of course, they’re all over it. I put a “HELP” out and kind sould pointed out to me that there was a #GOOGMAYHARM hashtag already setup on Twitter to cover the issue.

#GOOGMAYHARM hashtag on Twitter Search

@Technicavita was quick on the draw with this story as was TheNextWeb.

Reports are also coming in that GMail was also effected with many emails mistakenly being filtered as spam. Oh dear.

The problem seems to have been fixed, but I’m sure this has done much to shake people’s confidence in Google Search. 

MS Live, Yahoo and Ask must be smiling today with schadenfreude!

I’m keenly awaiting Google’s apology response… so far nothing on the official blog.

***Update: 4.11pm January 21, 209***

Google’s official response:

“This site may harm your computer” on every search result?!?!

1/31/2009 09:02:00 AM

If you did a Google search between 6:30 a.m. PST and 7:25 a.m. PST this morning, you likely saw that the message “This site may harm your computer” accompanied each and every search result. This was clearly an error, and we are very sorry for the inconvenience caused to our users. 

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.

Thanks to our team for their quick work in finding this. And again, our apologies to any of you who were inconvenienced this morning, and to site owners whose pages were incorrectly labelled. We will carefully investigate this incident and put more robust file checks in place to prevent it from happening again.

Thanks for your understanding.

Posted by Marissa Mayer, VP, Search Products & User Experience