I have been using the internet ever since I was a kid. Trust me when I tell that it is rare to see the world's top web search engine go crazy. Yeah I know, I have seen the April fools day stuff but today is not April 1st. I always wanted to visit the American white house website after US President Obama's presidency but never could. So today(31.1.09), I started my computer at 8:00pm IST and started Firefox at 8:10pm IST(yes, my laptop is the slowest computer you could ever think of). Google being the home page sprang open. Not being sure of the URL and not to waste time with bogus sites, I typed whitehouse.gov in the search box. First result had the same URL that I typed but said it was malicious and I was surprised when all the URLs in that page was tagged malicious. Just to be sure of any errors with Google I typed Google in the search box. Another surprise just blew me off. Let us see the screen shots
I knew Google did not provide integrated search boxes for malicious sites that could harm your computers. so of to my next search
My next search item was Google and the search results were just, you know, totally interesting! Search engine claiming itself to be harmful.
Being the most trusted online payment gateway I next tried Paypal. Guess what, the most trusted is now one of the harmful lot. With a closer look, you will see Wikipedia too joined the same lot.
Next was Youtube.com, and Youtube was malicious too.
I knew Microsoft always had a handful of bugs and problems but never knew Microsoft was malicious or harmful!
And finally I tried our blog and it was not tagged. We are not malicious. After all these searches I collected a few screen shots but never could spread the word as everything returned to normalcy at about 8.50pm IST. But you know it is sort of fun and frightful when a reliable source goes wrong. Lets hope to see more interesting stuff from Google this year.UPDATE: Google came with the reason for its malfunction. The official Google blog says "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.". A human error was the sole reason. How easy a '/' can capsize Google
