Google tagged every site as harmful site. You probably found the news flashing in your window, if you had searched the Internet using Google during nearly one-hour on Saturday morning.

Al the results that appeared in the search results were marked as harmful.

Google clarified it later and said that this was due to a human error. Google apologized for the inconvenience caused to users and site owners whose pages were incorrectly labeled.

The glitch happened between 9:30 a.m. EST and 10:25 a.m. EST.  Anyone who did a Google search during that time saw the message “This site may harm your computer” with every search result.

Google flags search results with the above mentioned message when it is deemed to be suspicious. Google maintains a list of such suspicious sites. The list is created based on criteria developed with StopBadware.org, a nonprofit project headed by legal scholars at Harvard and Oxford universities who research consumer complaints.

On Saturday, Google erroneously updated the list and every url was showed with the warning. The problem was caught by on-call staff and the file was quickly fixed.

“We will carefully investigate this incident and put more robust file checks in to prevent it from happening again,” said Marissa Mayer, vice president of search products and user experience, in the statement.

Related posts