This Site May Harm Your Computer

Did you this message yesterday? “This Site May Harm Your Computer” on every Google search your making? Yesterday afternoon I was updating one of my blogs and reinstalling my AVG antivirus. Then suddenly when I was searching Google I was surprised why on the first page I saw every site listed have the warning “This Site May Harm Your Computer”. At first I thought there was really something wrong with the website listed but when I tried to search my own blogs, the same thing happened. I suspected that the Firefox browser I’m using at the moment is going haywire so I looked at the browser’s add-on and disabled the AVG antivirus plugin but nothing happened. So I immediately opened Google Chrome browser and searched Google. Again the same thing happened. OMG! I thought there is something wrong with my computer that some malware or virus have entered into my system.

Then I tried Yahoo! and test if there will be something weird going to happen. But everything is normal. So, by isolating the problem I now have a strong feeling that there is something wrong with Google search. After an hour everything was back to normal in Google search. Today when I visited the Webmaster World I confirmed that the incident is not on my browser or computer system but on Google search itself. Reading the post have brought me to the Official Google Blog that explains what really happened. It was human error. A teenee-tiny error, just a “/” (a slash).

I will quote from the blog:

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.…………………..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.

What about you? have you noticed that too? Fortunately it was resolved within an hour (40 minutes to be exact) and those webmasters and bloggers like myself didn’t loose much visitors to our blogs or websites.