Yesterday around 11pm when I did a few Google searches, I was shocked with Google claiming LinuxJournal.com as: “This site may harm your computer”

“ha?? How could this be possible?” However, judging from logical mind, I copied and pasted the URL manually into browser, and continue browsing to a LinuxJournal.com article, with so-called “at my own risk” :p

Apparently, the problem was, Google has mistakenly tagged all sites in the world as harmful, including Google’s own site. You can see relevant screen shot at here.

As reported by Google, the issue began appearing between 6:27am and 6:40am (GMT-08:00) and began disappearing between 7:10 and 7:25am (GMT-08:00). In other words, for Malaysia, Singapore and China Internet users, you could have faced the same issue if you did any Google search between 10:27am and 11:25am.

Thankfully, it didn’t take long time for Google to realize and take immediate action to resolve this issue.

As explained by Google, it was a human error.

What happened? Very simply, human error. We maintain a list of such sites through both manual and automated methods. We work with a non-profit called 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.

We periodically update that list and released one such update to 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. (more details at Google Blog)

While the technologically advanced infrastructure and highly optimized binaries are deriving reliable search results in fraction of a second, still, human error could ruin the process. When this issue happened, tons and tons of related tweets are flooding the Twitter-sphere.

If Google analyzes the search for “google” keyword during this time frame, I’m sure it hits the all time high, as many people were trying to verify if Google tags its own sites as harmful as well