Saturday, January 31, 2009

Google's blunder ever



Google did a blunder of their life today when by mistake the search engine placed the entire internet on a blacklist which caused every site, that appeared as a search result in the search engine's result pages, to be marked as potentially harmful and dangerous.

This caused the Search giant an embarrassment and a search advertisement loss of $2-3m. The problem affected internet pages across the world, and lasted for around 40 minutes before engineeers were able to fix it.

Google blamed "human error" when an engineer tried to add one web address to the list of those deemed suspicious, and mistakenly added them all.

"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," Google said in its official blog.