31 January 2009 | Author: Andrew Girdwood Head of Strategy

The day Google banned the internet

On Saturday the 31st of January 2009 Google placed the entire internet on a blacklist. Every single site in the search engine's result pages were marked as potentially harmful and dangerous to visit.

The effect was worldwide as local Google versions (.com, .de, .co.uk, etc) each presented their own localised warning.

Here we can see Google suggesting that the UK's Government site No 10 could be harmful.

The day Google banned the internet

The yellow highlighting in the second listing was added by bigmouthmedia to indicate the warning message. The same warning message can be seen in the top listing too.

Google Germany blacklisted every single match for [search engine optimisation] including Wikipedia.

The day Google banned the internet

Google provides a link to their help page on potentially harmful websites. It was this page which users were directed to if they clicked on Google's warning.

From here searchers are introduced to StopBadWare.org which Google works along side on the blacklist. Not surprisingly the StopBadWare site crumbled under all the traffic it received.

It is possible that Saturday's gremlins originated from the technology used by StopBadWare rather than Google.

Users trying to click through to websites in Google's natural search results had their clicks intercepted by this standard warning page.

The day Google banned the internet

Just after 3pm (GMT) this warning page eroded into a simpler version from Google. Here we can see Google intercepting a click to the White House website.

The day Google banned the internet

By 3:30pm the errors in the search engine's system had been corrected.

Throughout the glitch Google's paid search results were not effected. Sponsored listings were not marked with badware warnings and clicks went straight through to the intended landing pages. It is likely, however, that many campaigns would have received higher than usual click through rates while the organic results were highly unattractive to searchers.