Google loses $1.5 million in 40 minutes
Internet users, across the world consider Google the last word in the search arena and attribute a demi-God status to it. However, on Saturday(Jan 31) Google showed it’s human. A malware update resulted in losses of around $1.5 million and that too in only 40 minutes. So what went wrong?
As part of Google’s malware blocking system, if it detects any site containing malware, then Google warns the user that the particular site may contain malware and routes the user to a page which says “Do you really want to go to this site ?”. On Saturday morning, Google was displaying malware warnings alongside every site listed and because of this users were routed to the warning page, irrespective of the site having malware or not. So for 40 minutes users could not access any sites from Google. Organic SERPs and PPC results were affected due to this. Tech Crunch, was amongst the first to report this error. The screen shot captured by them(shown below) clearly shows what was wrong in the SERPS.
Google Malware
Google Blog explains what went wrong.
“What happened? Very simply, human error. Google flags search results with the message “This site may harm your computer” if the site is known to install malicious software in the background or otherwise surreptitiously. We do this to protect our users against visiting sites that could harm their computers. We maintain a list of such sites through both manual and automated methods. We work with a non-profit called StopBadware.org to come up with criteria for maintaining this list, and to provide simple processes for webmasters to remove their site from the list.
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.”
Google earns about $2.4 million an hour (total revenue), however since Saturday morning Pacific Time is a bit quieter, Google must not have lost that much. However, because of malware warnings people might have clicked more on PPC ads thus resulting in higher revenue. Google has definitely taken a hit, just that its difficult to find the exact amount. Also, since SERPS were down individual sites must have lost out on traffic and potential conversions. I know quite a few search engine marketers must be fuming because of this, its all part of the game, guys. Yahoo and MSN did enjoy this though as people started using their search engines. However since this error was only for 40 minutes, their happiness was short lived.”
Did your sites show a drop in traffic? Were your conversions down? PPC traffic showed a surge??
Let me know!!
