Google has blamed 'human error' for
technical problems that left users believing they were unable to
safely access search results at the weekend.
For more than half an hour on Saturday, every search result was
accompanied by the message: "This site may harm your computer".
Google normally flags search results with the message if the
site is known to install malicious software in the background.
However, "human error" in a Saturday update of the risky sites
list caused all sites to be flagged, instead of only those sites
identified by non-profit organisation StopBadware.org, according to
a
Google blog posting.
Marissa Mayer, vice president search products and user
experience at Google apologised to search users for the
inconvenience and to site owners whose pages were incorrectly
labelled.
"We will carefully investigate this incident and put more robust
file checks in place to prevent it from happening again," said
Mayer.