Google may harm your computer?
When your server’s been hacked before, you panic at the first sign of trouble.
I just installed a customized Google search form and search results page for all my blogs. I was trying it out when all the results returned had a “This site may harm your computer” warning just below the titles. I wanted to tear my hair out. I ran the script I used the last time the server was attacked to make sure every malicious script was deleted. Surprisingly, no malicious script turned out. I did it twice and there was nothing. Time to report to Google that my sites were clean so that the warning signs could be removed ASAP. Using the Firefox search bar, I searched for “Google webmasters” and, well, just look at the screenshot below.
I made three searches, using different and unrelated keywords (Connie, Brad Pitt and Barack Obama) and, shit, almost all sites had the “This site may harm your computer” warning. What the heck…?!?
UPDATE (some 15 minutes later and after posting the info on Twitter and Facebook): The warnings are gone.
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[...] Connie took a screenshot from her browser of what turned out to be human error from some engineers over at Google: [...]
We feast everyday!
sounds just like what happened to you..
http://www.theage.com.au/world/google-users-get-bogus-warnings-20090201-7uk1.html
cheers!
(long-time lurker first-time commenter here)
Hi Lui. Human error will send the world into a global war.
*Sigh*
Oh, BTW, “commenter” is more fun than “lurker”, eh?
i was also online and doing Google searches last night when that happened. i was freaked out for a while and thought that the problem was my outdated antivirus. but then i saw that ALL google search results were like that, so i just chose to ignore it and copy-pasted the search results’ URLs in another tab to get to the sites i wanted. good thing that the whole thing was just a temporary error and didn’t backfire on me big time
I got that message too last night and almost freaked out but I noticed that even the legitimate sites were involved so I just logged off and decided to check again in the morning. It’s gone now.
Same here. When I saw that every entry carried the warning, I told myself it must be a glitch. Good thing they fixed it asap.
When I saw the strange message, I thought it was my computer causing the problem so I kept on rebooting, and eventually everything went back to normal. After a while, I saw the news that it was because an employee at Google made a mistake which affected Google worldwide. Big mistake! I posted on my blog that it proves that all this amazing technology is only as good as the humans behind it.
Google did some funny mistakes like this over time, some with a plane coliding in twin towers. Human mistake.
OMG… surreal! At first I thought those warnings were due to my search for “Linksys drivers”.
Sheesh!