Cybersecurity

For about 20 - 30 minutes, Google lost a lot of money in Adsense revenue because of that error, because referral sites via search were not easily accessed and therefore click revenue for ad publishers would be down. Multiple that times the entire Internet, we are talking about a lot of money.

Here is Google's reply:

Official Google Blog: "This site may harm your computer" on every search result?!?!

I also saw that error message while trying to access a Sun Microsystems site from Google search results page. I noticed a lot of sites were flagged but not sure whether it flagged all of them. Needed to manually edit the URL to get to the site eventually. I didn't thought it was error at that time but occasionally I noticed sites being labelled as harmful but couldn't really figure out why.

So, Google told us that visiting any site other than Google may harm our computer. I also noticed a prominent legal page in Time this week pursuant to the Google Books settlement for copyright infringement. What happened to Google these days?

It was just an operational fat finger error where a Google employee entered the "/" URL as a malware site, basically declaring the entire Internet as malware.

Amazingly funny and scarry at the time....

Makes me laugh to think about, really a dumb operational error.