Well, the important part is that AdWords doesn't seem to be broken ;-). I can click through those links with no warning at all! Even when they're the same link as one of the malware links. New way to make money?
On a realistic note, do you think Google will refund their advertisers' money during this problem (since I'm guessing there will be higher click rates for things like "apple" where Apple Computer is both the first "organic" result and has purchased ads, but now the organic results are "malware")?
Honor to the first submission with a correct title, I deleted mine. It's official, Google is broken. It was so unexpected that I wondered if I hadn't a malware.
I wonder how much it's costing me per second. I was right in the middle of some research! Now I'm going to spend a hour surfing HN looking for fresh new Google jokes!
On the other hand, nothing brings people from around the world together like a bug in Google.
The best part is, I thought it was Chrome at first since there is a malware option in the configuration settings.
That sucks. It's going to take twice as long to fix since the engineers fixing it have to edit the URL on all the googled results for "How to fix Google".
It is midnight in Japan and here I am writing emails to customers saying "No no, don't worry, I haven't infected your computer... it is Google that has the problem."
Apropos of nothing, my friends have suggested Xanth to me on and off again for over a decade now. I know nothing about it except that Amazon will deliver it to my doorstep. What three books should I be buying?
Perhaps not the one I mentioned, since I just spoiled it for you. :) I have found that adults don't tend to like Piers Anthony's writing (it's filled with puns and adolescent soft-porn humor), but if you want to better know where your friends - who might have read Xanth books at ages at which they could better appreciate the writing style - are coming from, I would pick the first three of the series:
* A Spell for Chameleon
* The Source of Magic
* Castle Roogna
If you want some more mature books from Piers Anthony, the Apprentice Adept series and Incarnations of Immortality series are better than the Xanth ones. Plus, they're both only 7-8 books long, so it won't take you forever to read them all (if you actually get into them).
Apprentice Adept is kind of a cool dual-world series, with sci-fi in one world and fantasy in the other, and the ability for some to move between them. You should start with the first in the series, of course: Split Infinity.
Incarnations of Immortality also has the juxtaposition of sci-fi and fantasy, but in one world. The "hook" for this series is that the major "forces" in the world (time/death/fate/war/etc...) are actually offices which people fill (think The Santa Clause, but without Tim Allen or christmas). The first book of the series is On A Pale Horse.
A final word of warning: I read both of these series a long time ago, so it could be that they're actually not as mature as I remember =)
I was doing searches on Google and everything was OK. Then I did a search for "Bill of Rights" and I got all those nasty malware warnings. It really freaked me out until I realized Google was doing that with any search :)
"Cutts responded, in effect, that Google knows plenty about running big Web sites, thank you very much. 'Google runs Web services with many users and servers too and we launch changes weekly or faster,' he said."
Actually, I think the problem was misreported. It seemed as though google flagged its own interstitial page as malware, as all the search result links showed as http://google.com/search?interstitial=<URL>, and THAT page was malware -- unless I'm overlooking something obvious, like the interstitial page is only shown when adware is detected.
Regardless, the search engine worked perfectly, it was just the links that weren't working. Simply removing the 'google' part of the URL allowed me to get to the sites just fine.
This is an enormous bug - its similar to Microsoft Office not working for half an hour.
I can't fathom how much this will have cost google - in terms of $$$ and reputation -- millions of people will now be unsure to trust googles "this site may be unsafe"
It'll be fascinating to see if Yahoo/MSN get a noticeable spike in searches.
I don't think we'd ever get to see the data, but this outage created a beautifully structured natural experiment. It's almost impossible for companies to learn how well they would do if a market leader disappeared, but 30 minutes without Google probably told Microsoft, Yahoo, and even a place like Cuil what their best-case future looks like.
I'm not sure whether to be impressed or terrified that Google can -- and, apparently, does -- roll out updates across their entire server farm in a matter of a minute or two.
"Since we push these updates in a staggered and rolling fashion, the errors began appearing between 6:27 a.m. and 6:40 a.m. and began disappearing between 7:10 and 7:25 a.m., so the duration of the problem for any particular user was approximately 40 minutes." from http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/01/this-site-may-harm-yo...
I was doing research this morning for a radio show I host, and Amazon came up as malware. I was like what??? Malware on Amazon? Then I went back, and noticed every website was malware. I had to laugh, but it is interesting that Google doesn't have some sort of testing process before rolling out updates live.
First it was that Android root shell fiasco. Now this. I wonder if this whole "holier than thou" attitude towards Google will finally start to subside.
I don't understand why Google is dabbling in all sorts of areas while neglecting their core business.
The Usenet search and the groups interface were truly wonderful a couple of years ago. Now the interface is a web 2.0 abomination and the search is completely broken.
The web search is still o.k., but not astonishing compared to other search engines. Google is really showing signs of becoming a fat company. I would not be surprised if in a couple of years their calculator returns 77.1*850 = 100000.
I'm not, if that person is the idiot that made a filter mandatory. But I fear the little technician, that reasoned against filtering in the first place, will get the boot.
edit: If I refresh I don't see the false warning every fifth time or so. This happens on the .com and .ch page. It seems they are pushing out an update that hasn't reached all servers yet.
If you enter google.com/ncr anywhere around the world you get to the google.com Version, which often sports more features. By adding the ncr (no country redirect) you don't get forwarded to country specific sites.
On a realistic note, do you think Google will refund their advertisers' money during this problem (since I'm guessing there will be higher click rates for things like "apple" where Apple Computer is both the first "organic" result and has purchased ads, but now the organic results are "malware")?