Google Mess

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Last Updated on Saturday, 12 May 2012 18:02

Update: See "Google's Flub" at ZDNet. 

I discovered this morning that Google was flagging this site (far2go.net) and many, many others as "harmful." When I clicked the link to find out why it was doing that, it gave me an "unavailable" error message. This is not in any way a harmful site, nor are any of the others I looked at that it was flagging.

I don't know what their problem was or whether it was temporary. It seems to have gone away while I was typing this announcement. All I can suggest is that if you encounter the same thing, either turn the SafeSearch option off or use a different search engine until it is fixed. The Yahoo and MSN web searches were not doing this.

The problem stopped for me when I tried turning off SafeSearch in Google's Search Preferences. When I turned the feature back on, everything was still OK. I don't know, however, whether it was actually something I did, or whether Google was in the midst of changing something. Who knows...