For at least fifteen minutes in the morning all searches in Google returned results with a warning “This site may harm your computer”. All the websites listed in the search results were flagged with this warning. Users of Google were also wondering if Google has been hacked. Few others were wondering if all servers of Google have crashed. Users from various countries including Canada, India, Japan, Turkey, Portugal and Thailand noticed this problem. During this problem, Firefox was well for a short time was blocking access to the flagged sites. The problem was noticed only with Google’s website search results; Google news and other blog searches were still working fine.
This issue was approximately started by 9:00 am EST and was recurring for at least fifteen to twenty minutes many regular users of Google as well had started using Yahoo to get the desired search results. This has certainly become a threat for Google and immediate attention towards the issue could be the only way to have the users of Google retained. There might have been economic losses as well as for a search giant serving millions of users all over the world with millions of queries and search results every second being in a situation when no user uses and clicks on the search result (that too for twenty minutes) would have certainly cost more.
Looking at what had happened today with regard to Google search results, millions of users all over the have been worrying and were wondering on what alternative can be used to replace Google’s service. Though Google’s service has been remarkable over all its lifetime, users were still forced to use Yahoo and other search engines to get their work done. Investors who have invested their money on this search giant have also been wondering if there would be any change in their share values because of the problem that took place today. It was a problem for website owners as well to a certain extent as users searching for specific keywords did not visit their websites despite the fact that they were ranking top on Google’s search results expecting more traffic. This would have also affected them in small percentages.
The problems are no more noticed and everything was repaired very quickly. All searches seem to be functioning normally now. However, the media and the users are all still awaiting Google’s explanation on the cause for the problem. Everyone is also curious to know about what security precautions have been taken to avoid such issues in the future. Though nothing has been officially announced, few online media reports guess that Google was probably working on its latest anti-malware and were in the process of testing it. However, Google as of now has just said that they are not sure on why the problem occurred but that have said that they would explain in later. Answering to questions raised by BBC News a Google’s spokes person has said, “There was a fault. We don’t know the nature of it yet. Everything has been solved. We are still making initial enquiries”.