Google’s Unfortunate Malware Event
We all suffer from them from time to time, a series of unfortunate events that may not be massive or life-ending but you can do without them just the same. Google, the search giant, has had a few of their own unfortunate events over the last 48 hrs. First off, the news broke on Friday the 30th of January, that a Google Street View vehicle had hit a small deer and then recorded the whole thing on Google Maps. Like I said, nothing shattering, just an unfortunate event, that’s all, then this happened …
I had logged onto the web on Saturday afternoon to check the latest football scores and was met with my favourite sports site being displayed as ‘potentially harmful and dangerous’ in Google’s organic listings.
Only when I unfocussed my attention to the site did I realise that all the listings had the malware message : “This site may harm your computer”.
My first thoughts were, “Eh! This can’t be right!” Then pretty similar to what lookon, says above.
I logged onto Twitter, to see if anyone else was witnessing the same as myself.
And found out that I was about 5 minutes too late in reporting the news, a lifetime in Twitter breaking news standards, my tweet was soooo yesterday. Nevertheless, within about a minute I realised that this Google mistake was just about worldwide and only the organic listings were affected, the paid search listings were fine.
Those early risers in America were also seeing that Google was fubar, however, I do like DazzlinDonna’s version so much better, said with more dignity, don’t you think :
Others, well others were having a bit of fun, as is the norm when things go a bit awry, turn to humour to lighten the mood :
There was also many tweets referring to Yahoo and ‘it also has a search engine’. Considering that Google have a stranglehold on the search market here in the UK (estimated at around 90%) then you can also understand why so many went : YaWHO
A few people in the search industry, were twittering Google’s Head of Search, Matt Cutts, to inform him of what was taking place. Google is a huge company, why does everyone feel that Matt is the overseer of everying Search. Here’s Matt’s reply :
About 40 minutes from when the problem was first spotted, Google had corrected the error and released an official statement :
And life was back to normal. The error was a human one we were informed. A misplacement of a ‘/’ caused all websites in Google’s index to carry the malware warning. Very unfortunate indeed.
Thanks to the following Twitter profiles for helping me build this post, even if you are unaware of your comments being used in this way :
http://twitter.com/Paul_Steven
http://twitter.com/DazzlinDonna
Filed Under : Opinion
It’s often those moments when something isn’t working as it should that are the most revealing.
Outside of Google, others will have learned a great deal from this event.
As an aside, I missed the whole thing .. but hey!
On a more serious note, should we even be seeing malware notices at all? This is a question I asked myself back in May last year, which I then wrote about in a guest article on NowSourcing.
I think Google have got their malware policy completely wrong and it needs sorting right away.
However, had Google got a policy in line with my own thinking, this recent incident wouldn’t have shown anything on Google’s SERPs other than Google’s own properties…
Excellent comment Wayne.
If you want to follow what Wayne has to say on Twitter, and he usually has a lot
, then follow him at :
http://twitter.com/octane
Paid results were working? It’s a FIX!
Actually, I didn’t even notice the paid results were working, i was too busy thinking “S**T, what’s happened to my site, it wouldn’t damage a computer!” and “aaaaaaa panic, panic, panic.” Then I calmed down, switched to Yahoo and carried on surfing. Panic over.
I also missed out on the fun on Saturday. I’m sure that I would have ended up visiting the nearly forgotten Yahoo search engine too in order to continue with what I was looking for.
This proves that Google is as vulnerable as everyone else and that we shouldn’t rely on the Big G for everything. More than likely, everyone will forget the outage and return to Google, business as usual.
What a hullaballoo this all caused, hence my response being so dry
I may be a total cynic, but for a while I considered the possibility that this was all carefully orchestrated from the get go. How many tweets and blog posts have been written now and link to Google?
Not that Google are in any need of pulling a linkbait stunt, but this certainly worked as that for them!
It’s not about how bad you mess up, but rather how well you deal with the fallout. Google seem to have dealt with it very well.
@ Lynne, I’m pretty sure most adwords campaigns experienced a large spike during Google’s 40 odd minutes.
@ Matt, I do rely on G for a lot of my services online, as for the hiccup, what hiccup?
@ Andrew, Big G pulling a linkbait stunt – never!