Google Blunder Attributed To 'Human Error'

[Logan Westbrook]

Google Blunder Attributed To 'Human Error'

For just over half an hour on Saturday, Google seemed to be afraid of the rest of the internet, but apparently, it's people who are to blame.

The mistake, which flagged all search items as potentially harmful, was apparently caused by the character '/' being accidentally included a list of harmful sites that Google received from StopBadware.org [stopbadware.org], a non-profit organization dedicated to the elimination of 'badware', causing the search engine to list every single website in the world as a hazard.

The error first occurred at around 6:30am PST and was resolved sometime around 7:25am PST, due to Google staggering the update, and subsequently the fix as well. Writing on the official Google blog, Marissa Mayer, Vice-President of Search Products and User Experience, said "Our apologies to any of you who were inconvenienced this morning, and to site owners whose pages were incorrectly labeled. We will carefully investigate this incident and put more robust file checks in place to prevent it from happening again."

Source: BBC [http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7862840.stm]




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[guardian001]

Wow. All it takes to label every single site on the internet as harmful is a single /. That's actually pretty funny. and kind of impressive.

 

[Evilbunny]

Oh yeah I saw this on /b/ a couple hours ago. They claimed it was the work of ebaumsworld, though.

 

[Frank_Sinatra_]

HA HA HA HA HA HA!!! That just made my day. Thanks Escapist! XD

 

[the_tramp]

Damn... all because of a '/'

What would have happened if ^_^ was written? Would every site link to an anime site?

Or (.)(.) linking to porn?

I could go on but i'll leave that to you all.

 

[Fenring]

The headline makes me feel as if it's a computer saying "Stupid hu-mans."

 

[cleverlymadeup]

actually it was even google sites that were labeled as being bad

still rather funny

 

[LyonLee]

So a company dedicated to the identification & elimination of malware accidentally created a piece of malware...

Keep trying.

 

[Dommyboy]

Damn... all because of a '/'

What would have happened if ^_^ was written? Would every site link to an anime site?

Or (.)(.) linking to porn?

I could go on but i'll leave that to you all.

No, that wouldn't happen, it would be stupid. It would be ( . Y . ) for porn.

 

[Retodon8]

(The "stopbadware.org" is appended to the end this site's address, so the link doesn't work.)

 

[Jursa]

Damn... I thought it had something to do with my newly installed antivirus software, what a coincidence

 

[Arcticflame]

I noticed this and laughed when it happened, now I know what caused it .

 

[Syntax Error]

Ahh yes. The Power of Regular Expressions. Just like screwing your C++ program by skipping out a semi-colon in one line...

 

[shadowbird]

Don't even need RegEx. Each and every site contains at least two slashes ("http://" anyone?), but even if the prefix is ignored, there's almost always a trailing slash as well ("domain.com/"). The exact same thing would have happened with "." instead of "/".

 

[Angron]

i was actually on when this happened...i thought it was odd that this normal site was blocked, then i noticed escapist was and also yahoo...

funny how such as small error can effect so many people

 

[Lord_Of_Plum]

Tisk tisk Google.