So, let’s say you have a serious internet business running on a clean, nice and strong website. One Saturday, while you were chilling out a bit you notice that when you search for your website, a strange “This site may harm your computer” message appears next to your site. More than that, the same message appears next to each of the sites you are searching on Google….what would you do?

Some people logged into GWT and sent several messages to Google staff asking what the hell is that, some others joined the webmaster forums trying to find an answer, probably thousands called their web hosts screaming on the phone, others just quickly remembered there is life outside Google and used Yahoo or MSN…some people celebrated (Yahoo staff) some others probably had suicide attempts (Google crew)…and so on…

Today Google, the indestructible search engine, got sick and suddenly the internet froze for about 45 minutes. Today Yahoo and MSN probably had the biggest traffic since the pre-Google era. Was the “This site may harm your computer” bug just an error or was it planned? Oh, yeah…I’ve heard this question already…don’t know what to say…perhaps we should try to understand the winners and the loosers of these 45 minutes.

Google is getting weirder everyday and that’s a fact. First they penalised lots of old and trusted sites, replacing them in SERPS with silly MFA’s and spammy blogs, then they started to manually adjust the Page Rank of just about any site they liked, cutting even more for themselves at Adsense and now they screw up big time with their beloved search engine. Here is a picture for eternity…oh man, I enjoy this one!

Google may harm your computer

Now let’s see the winners and loosers of this funny bug. Certainly the happiest on the web were Yahoo and MSN as they’ve got quite a lot of traffic. The other big winner of the day is Google, right Google. How come? Well, I forgot to mention that the only sites without the “This site may harm your computer” tag during these 45 minutes were the paid ads so obviously the people clicked on all the paid ads like mad since they were the only “clean” sites when googling for something…all the others being potentially infected, right? I’d say Google made big money these 45 minutes, not sure if the advertisers may be considered winners, some of them probably made a nice profit while the others lost big money just because people clicked their ads to see if they are fine and why they are fine comparing to their own sites in organic results.

Loosers of the day? All the publishers since their websites “may harmed your computer” so no visitor was able to check them out and obviously you, me, and all the other people willing to chill out in front of the computer. Other loosers? The honest businesses selling their products or services through one or more websites.

Right…I have another picture for you.   The USA.gov site may harm your computer! Hehe…I would expect to see that little tag on Google.tb but not just everywhere!  Google.tb? The taleban version of Google eventually…

USA.gov may harm your computer