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")?

I wonder how much this is costing the global economy per second...

On the other hand, nothing brings people from around the world together like a bug in Google.

"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."

Sounds like an opportunity to add a new acceptance test on items in that list :-)

cf. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=460426

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."

A la The Source of Magic. One day, all of the magic in Xanth was turned off. For awhile, Xanth was like Mundania. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Source_of_Magic

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

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 =)

And ditch your so-called friend.

"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."

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.

http://tinyurl.com/b4k25q

Its really LOL that they mark google.com as "may harm your computer"

I bet whoever just deployed the upgrade is kicking themselves right now though

I wonder how many people around the world are now panicking?

Interestingly:

http://www.google.com/interstitial?url=http://www.google.com...

Google thinks Google may harm your computer.

Google: Trust no one!

Me: Not even wikipedia?

(Encyclopaedia Britannica laughs maniacally in the background)

I find it amusing that Google warned me away from the Microsoft website as it might harm my computer!

Small things...

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.

check out searching "hello" http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=hello&btnG=Sear...

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.

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.