Posted on 01/31/2009 8:03:49 PM PST by bamahead
An apparent system error left millions of visitors to the site puzzled when links to all search results were flagged with the warning 'This site may harm your computer'.
It is thought the site had erroneously identified all other websites - and some of its own pages - as containing malicious software or 'malware'.
The glitch, which prevented internet users from directly clicking through to search results, was fixed within 30 minutes although users of Google's email service Gmail have since reported finding genuine messages sent mistakenly to spam folders.
The errors prompted panic among web surfers who at first feared the popular search engine had suffered some kind of major failure that could have had serious implications for internet commerce.
The Google search page is by far the most popular on the internet, with the overall site receiving several hundred million queries each day. It is the most common homepage and accounts for almost four out of every five internet searches, making it a crucial part of the global economy.
Google automatically identifies sites that may carry viruses and harmful software as part of its searches, but on Saturday all sites that were searched for carried the warning.
It suggests that either every server on the internet had become infected with a virus, an unlikely scenario, or the Google security system had suffered a breakdown.
(Excerpt) Read more at telegraph.co.uk ...
ping...
LOL!
..for about twenty seconds until surfers found other search engines.
Google is a cancer on the internet. Glad they made a buck with their algorithm, but trade organizations would serve consumers and their members much better by having their own search engines for shoppers.
I guess it could spook the average surfer, but it took me about 30 seconds to figure out that their flagging system was screwed. Something called logic told me that Wikipedia and IMDB weren’t sites that ‘may harm your computer’. I didn’t even think much of it until I saw everyone on multiple forums whining about it.
Plus, I’m a Linux user, so that ‘harm’ would apply to someone else’s computer, not mine. :D
It took me a minute to figure out the results were skewed. I then worried that I had picked up something funky on my laptop. Surfing remotely from an office server convinced me that Google had problems.
I wondered if it was a hack.
Personally I say its a leak on how it really intends to take over the world & internet.
In fact, there are hundreds, some of which are specialized and just might be more suitable for your particular search than Google.
There's a site, beaucoup.com that contains a compendium of a whole bunch of them.
Frankly it's past time for us all to be boycotting Google, as they're clearly showing their political agenda and skewing what they present to us as what ought to be unbiased search results.
Google got caught prematurely experimenting with its own Stalinist censoring software.
It is no state secret that now that Barack Obama is in power, Google wants to change protocols so that people who use the web to criticize Obama, Biden, Pelosi, Reid, or the Democrats will have a very hard time finding things as opposed to the Bush Administration.
Remember when Google allowed the open "Google Bombs" to display the Boolean search "Bush" and "Miserable Failure" with thousands of hits?
Look at this from FOX News:
A Google search of 'miserable failure' now returns Web sites about the Googlebombs rather than the original pages that were returned.
Google is already changing things, so that "Googe Bombs" cannot be used as effectively against Obama. Say you want to do a search of "Obama" and "Marxist." In the future, Google wants to wipe out or limit access to photos and links so they will not be posted on political or other forums.
Nice, huh?
Unlike Bush's 'Google Bomb,' Google Quickly Defuses Obama's
Moreover, what Google has planned is that conservative and other "Counter Obama Revolutionary" sites will be listed as "harmful" so they can stomp out dissent.
"It is the absolute right of the State to supervise the formation of public opinion."
"...the rank and file are usually much more primitive than we imagine. Propaganda must therefore always be essentially simple and repetitious. The most brilliant propagandist technique will yield no success unless one fundamental principle is borne in mind constantly...it must confine itself to a few points and repeat them over and over."
Joseph Goebbels - 1938
There is only one thread with this title (which is a current headline on Drudge) in the Free Republic search database.
Bingo.
I didn’t say anything about the thread title. I said “this subject”.
I posted the link to beaucoup on the following threads, and possibly others.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2175832/posts
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-bloggers/2175627/posts
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2175606/posts
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/2175610/posts
A Google spokesman said: "There was a fault. We don't know the nature of it yet. Everything has been solved.
We don't know that the problem is but we are confident we fixed it. LOL
It sounds like a malfunction. I do not deny Google's general left-leaning, but come on. Why would they, to censor conservatives, list their OWN site as distributing malware? According to the article, they listed every site on the planet as malicious. Who does that help? No one. Left, right, up, or down. It just scares the heck out of the unsuspecting.
I notice my Firefox hasn’t updated from Google for phishing protection for several days.
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