Google May Harm Your Computer

If you Googled at all at about 11:30 pm Singapore time last night, you must have seen something similar to what I did on the left. Google listed that its website “may harm your computer”.

In Marissa Mayer’s posting on the Google Blog, she gave the explanation that she gave made me think about the CS3216 WPF Workshop immediately. (Btw I love how interesting Marissa was during her ETL speech on 9 Lessons Learned about Creativity at 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. Fortunately, our on-call site reliability team found the problem quickly and reverted the file.”

Didn’t that sound so much like half of the bugs that happened during the workshop? A missing closing parenthesis, a missing line here and there, causing the entire database to be messed up. Difference though, is that we’re still testing our products while this came out and had millions of people Twittering about it immediately. Don’t think it will make a difference to Google’s market share of search over Yahoo though.