interesting results for "similar pages" on google, too....

[mike_c]

Every time I click "similar pages" below a link, the word "interstitial" is inserted into the related pages search term. Weird!

[Deja Q]

1. "interstitial" makes me think of the Large Hadron Collider...

or at least what might colloquially be known as "Swedish Massage"(tm)

[Happyhippychick]

2. I would love to google that word but I can't :(

[MineralMan]

3. It appears to be OK, now.

The message has disappeared. Looks like Google took care of the problem.

[blaze]

4. Still happening for me n/t

[mike_c]

5. not for me....

I still get the "this site may harm your computer" message, but clicking though now yields:

Google
Error


Forbidden
Your client does not have permission to get URL /interstitial?url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen_Beetle from this server. (Client IP address: 74.196.25.80)

[MineralMan]

6. Close your browser and reopen it. That should clear the problem.

It was some sort of programming error at Google, I'm sure. Someone probably made some change in something that set the flag for the warning on every result. Now it's fixed.

I'm using IE 6.0, if that makes a difference.

[originalpckelly]

7. Here's the meaning of that, very related, very related:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstitials

Me thinks someone hacked them for a point. The malware page is an interstitial. Someone's probably protesting that their site has the Google malware page before it.

[originalpckelly]

8. This was definitely hacking.

[MineralMan]

9. No, it probably wasn't.

Occam's Razor applies here.

It's far, far more likely that someone was working on the code for the searches, made a mistake, and left the "bad site" flag in a state that flagged all search results. Pretty common sort of programmer error. They updated the search code with the error still in there. Boom! Someone caught it...they fixed the error, or reverted back to the previous version, and the problem's gone.

I would think it almost impossible for an outsider to be able to access Google's code in this way.

[originalpckelly]

10. I sincerely doubt Google edits code live.

In other words, they fool around with their website and make sure it works before they make it live. This is clearly malicious.

[MineralMan]

11. No, they don't do it live, but I'm sure they do patches all the time

and put them up. I can't imagine any way a hacker could alter the SQL code or whatever they're using to access data. I can easily imagine someone installing a patch, though, with an error in it. I've certainly done that, myself.