A glitch occurred this morning, lasting for about 10 minutes or so, that had all Google search results showing a warning that “This site may harm your computer”.

These sites may harm my computer?

Below are several blogs that mention this.

http://thenextweb.com/2009/01/31/day-google-broke/#

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/01/31/google-flags-whole-internet-as-malware/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/pmtorrone/3241481388/

This might all just be funny if it weren’t for the fact that Google is a repository of a lot of information about us.

Privacy experts have long been concerned about the amount of data Google collects from internet users. Every time you do a search or use Gmail or any other Google application, you supply information to Google that it stores in its vast array of servers. We want to believe that information is secure or anonymous. Every time Google suffers a hiccup like this, our trust takes a hit and our concerns increase.

Update: A Google blogger explains the error, http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/01/this-site-may-harm-your-computer-on.html

They open up their new search tool, Glue, to the Western world and we are impressed.

Extensive beta testing in India, with Indian-centric search results, failed to give us a good idea of the usefulness of this application. It’s just been released here today, and there’s not a lot of content at the moment. But searching for Microsoft gives us a good idea of what the resulting search results look like.

Instead of the typical page of search results pulled from websites, blogs and major news sites, you’ll find results from Wikipedia, stock reports, news, job listings, even Flickr and Google search results. The results are more eclectic than we usually get, and can reveal results you didn’t expect to find.

Just when we were getting used to the no-frills search page that is Google, along comes Yahoo with a bright idea that offers a useful alternative. Glue might prove sticky if the content increases quickly.