On Tuesday morning, people using Google were surprised to find that the search engine giant had rated its own website as "partially dangerous." When users entered "google.com" in the search engine's safe browser tool, which automatically scans billions of URLs for potentially hazardous websites, they received this shocking cautionary note.
A number of pages on this website (google.com) install malware on the computers of visitors, Fortune quoted the Safe Browsing Site status page warning. It added some attackers on this site (google.com) may even try to deceive the users to download software or steal their information.
Meanwhile, the Mountain View-headquartered tech giant refused to comment on the website's status by Tuesday afternoon, but those threatening cautions possibly don't mean that visiting "google.com" site itself is unsafe. In its place, the cautions put forward that some unscrupulous users have misused the services of Google either to host or link to something malevolent. As a result, the safe browser tool flagged the entire domain as somewhat dangerous.
The page went on to explain that sometimes users post undesirable content on websites that are usually safe, The Washington Post reported.
However, as of now it is not certain as to what duration google.com has been flagged as "partially dangerous." A number of Reddit users, however, noticed it on Tuesday -- the very day when the Site Status page said its information was last updated. In fact, a flood of blog posts in November 2015 also suggest google.com was flagged with the dubious distinction even then.
Introducing the Safe Browser toll in October, Google security engineers wrote in a blog post, "If a favorite website shows up as 'dangerous,' it's often due to user-uploaded bad content or a temporary malware infection." They added on the FAQ page that Site Status will return to usual when the webmaster cleans up the website."
Meanwhile, it has been noted that Google's Safe Browsing tool had discontinued rating its flagship site as a hazard on Wednesday morning. When contacted, a Google spokesperson confirmed to Fortune that the alert taken down on Tuesday late night. The spokesperson further asserted that the Safe Browsing service is forever on the search for for security issues that might require fixing.
