As you probably already know from reading the blog, I am a fan of a number of the tools Google produces and watch closely to see what will be next in their lab. However the mess they made on Saturday, labeling every search results with “This site may be harm your computer” was really quite a farce. Though they rapidly solved and rolled back the problem, they then compounded the error by laying the blame on their partner, StopBadware.org.
Google in updating their badware list made a mistake. “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.” This in turn caused all search results to be labeled “This site may be harm your computer” and if you clicked on the results, it brought you to a warning page which referred the person to the StopBadware.org website. StopBadware noted that “This led to a denial of service of our website, as millions of Google users attempted to visit our site for more information.”
Google then claimed that StopBadware.org was providing them with a list of URLs that had badware. Evidently this is untrue and Google then had to go back and correct their post on their official blog. Google are the ones that generate the list of URLs that are labeled as badware in the search engine index. Their relationship with StopBadware.org was amended to say that “We work with a non-profit called StopBadware.org to come up with criteria for maintaining this list, and to provide simple processes for webmasters to remove their site from the list.”
Though this will blow over quickly, I am left wondering about the consequences of having one search engine dominating the market. Though everyone makes mistakes, are the checks and balances in place in Google or has the lack of competition left them less self critical and somewhat careless? If webmasters and users of the web become even more Google-centric, is the emerging monopoly good for us?
Google Official Post revised edition
