Oops. Google flags all sites as harmful.

Earlier today Google responded to every search with the message ‘this site may harm your computer’. Google has apologised – with the official line that the mistake was caused by human error. The company said the glitch lasted for 40 minutes – which, in my view, is quite a long time for the world’s biggest and most influential search engine to remain effectively useless. The company has apologised to the owners of sites that were incorrectly labeled as ‘harmful’. It will be interesting to monitor how the company handles the inevitable criticism.

Thanks to Henk Van Ess who alerted me to this problem through his comments on my post on Icerocket.

Icerocket skates in where Google fears to tread

If, like me, you’re wondering why you can’t do a ‘Twitter Search’ from the big two search engines then John Battelle has a few theories. To you and I it might make perfect sense for Yahoo! and Google to include a Twitter search but, it seems, they are both willing to sacrifice functionality because they are reluctant to endorse a potential competitor. ‘Fascinating’ if you’re an industry observer; rubbish if you want a search engine to do the obvious.
That’s where Icerocket steps in. As Phil Bradley noted this week, the very nice Icerocket search engine has recently added a Twitter search option. But perhaps even more interestingly it has added a ‘Big Buzz’ option that pulls in very recent results from blogs, Twitter, Video, News and Images. It even gives you an ‘auto refresh’ option to update those results every minute or so as you are working on a story.
As Phil Bradley notes: ‘the whole area of news and social media is one that is seemingly passing Google straight on by.’ More on Icerocket soon.