Google breaks the Internet, accidentally

For almost an hour last Saturday, every search returned from search giant Google came back tagged with the message, "This site may harm your computer." Clicking on the search results caused a second safety warning urging users to "return to the previous page and pick another result." Though the problem was corrected in less than an hour, online businesses suffered where page hits are concerned.

Marissa Mayer, Google's VP of search products and user experience, posted an apology shortly after the incident. "Google flags search results with the message "This site may harm your computer" if the site is known to install malicious software in the background or otherwise surreptitiously," Mayer wrote in a blog post.  "We maintain a list of such sites through both manual and automated methods... Unfortunately... the URL of '/' was mistakenly checked in as a value to the file and '/' expands to all URLs."

In short, the entire debacle is all the result of human error at Google. As I recall, the last widely-reported "human error" at a major corporation took down the BlackBerry smartphones in North America.

If anything, the hundreds of headlines appearing around the world as a result of the less than an hour of service disruption highlighted the sheer dependency on Google. John Byrne, a senior analyst at Technology Business Research Inc, agrees.  "I think it makes everybody step back a little bit and look at the bigger picture. Maybe users and companies are looking around and saying, 'Let's find a second source.'"

What about you? Do you use other search engines besides Google?

For more on this story:
- check out this article from Computerworld
- check out this article from Official Google Blog

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