Earlier today all searches on Google produced the “this site may be harmful link” next to every search result. It only lasted an hours and the problem was quickly reversed.
Google issued an apology on its blog and attributed it to a human error.
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.
Click the screenshot below to read more at Techcrunch.
Google Chrome came out of beta today. Users can now download it at the official Chrome site. Users who are currently running the beta version will be notified of the new update on Friday. I can’t wait to see if all the bug fixed have been ironed out, chrome has been my browser of choice since I started getting those nasty firefox/google ssl errors.
I just noticed that Google started showing sponsored listings on the top and right side on Youtube searches. It works for web searches and I think it will work for Youtube. Its one of the many ways Google is trying to monetize Youtube and all its traffic.
Gmail is rolling out a new feature that allows you to view information about the last time your account was accessed and whether it is currently open on another computer.
At the bottom of your inbox, you’ll see information about the time of the last activity on your account and whether it’s still open in another location:
You can view more information about your recent activity by clicking on the details link
You can see open sessions, when they were accessed and how the were accessed, by browser, POP, phone.
It is not yet activated on all accounts. I will be really excited when it is activated on Google Apps.
Adobe Systems Incorporated today announced the company is teaming up with search industry leaders Google and Yahoo to dramatically improve the search results of Flash based content. Adobe is providing optimized Flash player technology to Google and Yahoo! to enhance search engine indexing of the Flash file format (SWF) and uncover information that is currently undiscoverable by search engines. This will provide more relevant automatic search rankings of the millions of flash based websites and other dynamic content.
The improvement is the result of efforts by software engineers at Yahoo, Google and Adobe. In the past, web designers faced major challenges if they chose to develop a site in flash because the content they included was not indexable by search engines. They needed to make extra effort to ensure that their content was also presented in another way that search engines could find.
