'Human Error' to blame for Google Issue

Following on from my earlier post, it has been announced by Google that this morning issue was due to simple human error. When importing the malware list from StopBadware.org, someone accidentally included ‘/’ as one of the URLs and added every website.

Google’s VP of Search Products Marissa Mayer gave the following explanation:

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 work with a non-profit called StopBadware.org to get our list of URLs. StopBadware carefully researches each consumer complaint to decide fairly whether that URL belongs on the list. Since each case needs to be individually researched, this list is maintained by humans, not algorithms.

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. 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.

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


I guess everyone makes mistakes ;)

New Compare the Meerkat Ad

I posted about the first ad a little time ago, and was extremely excited to find out this morning that there is a second ad out now. Unfortunately I can't seem to find it available to embed, so you'll have to check it out here.

All-in-all, this campaign is simply brilliant. Considering a fairly flooded UK market, for comparision websites, this campaign has thrust CompareTheMarket.com straight to the top of everyone's minds. It's fun and quirky, but above all it's complete. Here we have a perfect example of a campaign that integrates a seriously heavy weight suite of marketing tools and manages to utilise each to their maximum effectiveness.

Compare The Meerkats is centered around a viral concept. It is the new Cadbury's Gorilla. The campaign has a host of digital executions including a microsite, youtube clips, facebook page and a fantastic twitter feed (this is particularly good with personalised messages and regular updates).

The people behind this are CTM, and I think they deserve a serious pat on the back - this is one of my campaigns of the year for sure!

This site may harm your computer

It would seem that Google screwed up earlier. For a brief period of time the search engine showed almost every site on the net as “may harm your computer”. Twitter conversations indicate that this was a global incident but only lasted about 20 minutes.

Just have to wait and see why Google says it happened.

10 Years of Digital Advertising

With it's 10th birthday on the way, Cybercom (The Digital Marketing People) have put together their "10 key digital events that have been instrumental in shaping a decade of advertising and have left a lasting effect, which will continue to influence the next decade of advertising."

This is a fantastic collection of all those digital moments that have shaped the world wide web as we know it now. Difficult job though trying to chose 10 things out of 10 years. I can definitely think of one or two that I think should have made it - YouTube (in it's entirity), Blogging, Socila Media in general etc. Drop a comment on the blog and let them know what else they missed!

Lenovo Ad

Immature, perhaps. Childish, almost certainly. Funny, absolutely. This had me in stiches. Unfortunately the sad truth is that this is one of the most unlikely situations I think an advertising agency has ever come up with. I feel safe saying that it could never happen. Ah well.

Google Maps Street View

One of the funniest things on the net is Google Street View. I love the amount of people who have been caught, seemingly unaware, while in the middle of some activity that is either unlawful or out-and-out embarrassing!

I'm not entirely sure what's happening at '8 sampsonia way, pittsburgh, allegheny, pennsylvania 15212' but something tells me these guys don't have a lot of friends.

The Goatee Saver

I found this over on Only Dead Fish (thanks Neil). This is flippin' hilarious. I thought the first guy was CGI - doesn't he look odd?