WatBlog Newsletter Archive: WATBlog Update "How Much Did Google Error Fiasco Cost To Advertisers?" from "WATBlog.com - Web, Advertising and Technology Blog in India"

Sunday, February 1, 2009

WATBlog Update "How Much Did Google Error Fiasco Cost To Advertisers?" from "WATBlog.com - Web, Advertising and Technology Blog in India"

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"How Much Did Google Error Fiasco Cost To Advertisers?" from "WATBlog.com - Web, Advertising and Technology Blog in India"

How Much Did Google Error Fiasco Cost To Advertisers?

It was just last month when google defeated yahoo to become the most visited page on internet and here comes something which made people frighten and helpless to use the internet without google for even 40 minutes.

All google users were taken aback last night when they experienced errors in google results where every search result was flagged as “This site may harm your computer” - the tag line reserved for sites believed to contain malware.

The time of occurence was :6:30 a.m. PST and 7:25 a.m

This resulted in huge hue and cry from blogging community and so called micro-bloggers.

This created havoc because people cant directly get to the search results pages

what really happened-google's explanation?

In their own words:-

"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 maintain a list of such sites through both manual and automated methods.

We periodically update that list and released one such update to 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."

How did this cost advertisers?

All google search results were pointing to loop pages whereas advertisement clicks were working fine so to sum it up almost millions of google users were impatiently clicking on google ads just to check whether there pc was under virus attack or most importantly to witness the moment if google was hacked. This clicking of ads was almost meaningless because users must have hit back button to again see if the problem vanishes and this must have depleted a lot of credits from advertisers budget.

many publishers were also affected due to their dependency on the google search queries.

The money in question is huge because google was down for 40 minutes across the world not just a single country.

It needs to be seen whether google provides any compensation to the advertisers for clicks occuring on those 40 mins.

Lessons to be learned?

This is not a first time where a single error costed pain and monetary losses to users-dreamhost finger mismatch costed 7.5 million dollars which was refunded back.

Big corporations should learn lessons from the bloggers who proof read their articles several time even though they dont have so much on stake as google or for that matter other companies have on their actions,so they atleast double check their actions.