If  you’re anything like me, you get up early on Saturday morning and go straight to your computer. What? You don’t do that. Oh, well in that case, you probably missed all the excitement this past Saturday. Okay, it’s not very exciting, but interesting at least.

As I was building a new form for a site, I was interrupted by a fellow web developer via Google chat. “Dude,” he said. “Have you seen Google?” Quickly, I pointed my browser Google-bound to see what in heck he was talking about. Turned out, every site had the warning This site may harm your computer.

Well, that isn’t good, I thought. I guess even Google still has humans working for them. How old fashion…

Here is the explanation Google released shortly after fixing the problem on their blog:

If you did a Google search between 6:30 a.m. PST and 7:25 a.m. PST this morning, you likely saw that the message “This site may harm your computer” accompanied each and every search result. This was clearly an error, and we are very sorry for the inconvenience caused to our users.

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 work with a non-profit called StopBadware.org to get our list of URLs. StopBadware carefully researches each consumer complaint to decide fairly whether that URL belongs on the list. Since each case needs to be individually researched, this list is maintained by humans, not algorithms.

We periodically receive updates to that list and received one such update to release on 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.

Thanks to our team for their quick work in finding this. And again, our apologies to any of you who were inconvenienced this morning, and to site owners whose pages were incorrectly labelled. We will carefully investigate this incident and put more robust file checks in place to prevent it from happening again.

Thanks for your understanding.

Posted by Marissa Mayer, VP, Search Products & User Experience

I only had to do one search that morning. Fortunately, Yahoo! was still in good shape.

“I liked the way it was before! I was used to it! Why did they have to change it! Why! WHY! WHHHHY!” She said.

It seemed similar to the many that ranted about the new Facebook face-lift a few months ago. Though, I think that one was a bit more warranted since it actually made the site more confusing to navigate. Anyway, I digress.

Personally, I like the new Reader look. Actually, the only thing that appears different (to me, at least, but I have a bad memory when it comes to things like this. I actually didn’t even notice that Facebook changed until someone pointed it out) is the left-side column which now has categories that can be expanded and collapsed. Makes it look a lot cleaner if you ask me. Plus, I can play with that new aspect of the site when I get bored!

Anyway, Steph (that’s my wife) actually admitted that most of the people were blogging that they liked the new Google Reader look. She apparently is in the minority. Well, sorry honey, I agree with the masses on this one.