Google users greeted with bogus warning

A glitch in a computer security program embedded into Google's search engine caused some confusion last Saturday. Computer users doing a search were redirected to a page that warned: "This site may harm your computer."

The company blamed the mistake on human error and apologized for any inconvenience caused to users and site owners whose pages were incorrectly labeled.

Google said it maintains a list of suspicious sites based on criteria developed with StopBadware.org, a nonprofit project headed by legal scholars at Harvard and Oxford universities.

Saturday's error happened when Google erroneously applied one of its periodic list updates in such a way that the warning would apply to all URLs, the company said in a statement.

For more on Google:
 - see this PCMag.com article