Google suffered a mild case of embarrassment on Saturday after a human error resulted in all search results coming up with the legend ‘this site may harm your computer’.
The problem lasted about 45 minutes before it was rectified.
The internet search engine works with stopbadware.org to ascertain which sites install malicious software on people’s computers and merit a warning, Stopbadware.org investigating consumer complaints to decide which sites are dangerous.
The list of malevolent sites is regularly updated and handed to Google.
When Google updated the list on Saturday, it mistakenly flagged all sites as potentially dangerous.