A glitch in Google's search engine on Saturday morning was blamed on human error, according to a blog posting. From about 6:30 AM PST until 7:25 AM PST, most searches for any of the sites in Google's database returned the message “This site may harm your computer.” Furthermore, if someone attempted to click through to the results, a subsequent page referred them to StopBadware.org.

Of course, that site crashed from the millions of visitors trying to access it. The duration of the problem for any particular user was approximately 40 minutes, according to Google's vice president. Google works with StopBadware.org, compiling a list of sites that could harm a user's computer. It looks like one of Google's employees added a “/” URL, which resolved to every URL in Google's database.

Even if the company originally blamed StopBadware.org for the glitch, they later corrected the accusation. In response, StopBadware.org said they will continue to support Google's effort to proactively warn users of badware sites. Of course, Google has now developed processes in order to prevent this from happening again.

Unfortunately for Gmail users, the e-mail client uses the same filtering system for identifying incoming e-mails as spam, and many legitimate messages had been erroneously labeled spam, but senior product manager for Google apps announced these messages will get back in the inbox folder. As of Sunday, Google announced the problem has been fixed, but cautioned users to still check messages identified as spam, that arrived between 6 am and 8 am PST on Saturday.