Monday, February 2, 2009

Google's nightmare - Minor blunder by a Major Software Giant

On Jan 31 st between 6:30 and 7:30 am (PST) all google search results were accompanied with a warning message "This site may harm your Computer".Its a malicious software alert which was supposed to be shown only with dangerous links, but unfortunatley it showed up for search results and links.If I was visitng a website for first time and if I happen to get the malware alert,would I ever visit it again . So this alert is not a small error or just a blunder , its lots more. But after hearing the response from Google's authority you will forgive them.Its a human error it seems.But how could such a big organisation, thousands of big heads and large servers commit such a blunder???Lets read what the Google's VC of Search Products and User Experience,Marissa Mayer had to say on this..........
"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. We do this to protect our users against visiting sites that could harm their computers. We work with a non-profit called StopBadware.org to get our list of URLs. StopBadware carefully researches each consumer complaint to decide fairly whether that URL belongs on the list. Since each case needs to be individually researched, this list is maintained by humans, not algorithms.

We periodically receive updates to that list and received one such update to release on the site this morning. 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. Fortunately, our on-call site reliability team found the problem quickly and reverted the file. 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."

Very funny indeed.Now atleast whenever I do such blunders at my work or in my blog I can co-relate with Google.

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