PostMaker.Com

If you did a Google search between 6:30 a.m. PST and 7:25 a.m. PST this morning, you likely saw that the message “This site may harm your computer” accompanied each and every search result. This was clearly an error, and we are very sorry for the inconvenience caused to our users.

What happened? Very simply, human error. 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 maintain a list of such sites through both manual and automated methods. We work with a non-profit called StopBadware.org to come up with criteria for maintaining this list, and to provide simple processes for webmasters to remove their site from the list.

We periodically update that list and released one such update to 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.

Thanks to our team for their quick work in finding this. And again, our apologies to any of you who were inconvenienced this morning, 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.

Thanks for your understanding.

Update at 10:29 am PST: This post was revised as more precise information became available (changes are in blue). Here’s StopBadware’s explanation.

Posted by Marissa Mayer, VP, Search Products & User Experience

Those of you who use Google Toolbar on Firefox are probably pretty familiar with the many features Toolbar 5 (beta) has to offer — from bookmarks to buttons and search box to “send to.” We’ve added a couple more features to the Firefox Toolbar, so feel free to download this “second beta” to get all the latest and greatest Google Toolbar has to offer.

One of the features I’m really excited about is the new tab page. Now, when you open up a new tab, instead of the blank white page you see by default in Firefox, you will instead see small thumbnails of your favorite sites (up to 9), as well as recently-closed and bookmarked pages based on your browser history. You can edit the thumbnails, and all this data remains locally on your browser, which means none of the information about your most viewed sites or recently closed pages will be sent back to Google. If for whatever reason you don’t like this updated new tab page, you can always change it back to a blank page or to the website of your choice through either your Toolbar or Firefox settings. Some tab extensions may conflict with this feature, and it currently isn’t compatible with Firefox 2, so make sure you check your settings or visit the Google Toolbar help center if you are having any problems.

Next time you want to go to your favorite site more quickly or restore an accidentally closed tab, you don’t need to type out the URL. Typing Ctrl + T or double-clicking to the right of your open tabs will open up the new tab page with all your favorite sites right at your finger tips.

In addition, this release now provides the ability for Hebrew- and Arabic-speaking users to access Toolbar 5 with robust right-to-left text support. We’ve also fixed some of the most reported bugs to give you a faster and more stable experience with this update.

We’re always working on improvements and new features to Google Toolbar based on your feedback, so keep those suggestions coming.

Update on 4/1: Yesterday, Firefox Toolbar 5 came out of beta.

Posted by Sergey Ryazanov, Software Engineer, Toolbar Team