5.2.1 Google Search engine failure

On January Saturday the 31st 2009 a system error at Google was displaying all links on Google page results with the following warning 'This site may harm your computer'. (cf. AT Internet Institute. (2009). Google breaks down on the 31st of January 2009.)

Google search failure

This warning stayed displayed for 50 minutes and was viewable world widely. According to Google the failure origin was no more than a human error coming from a single and mere typo. (Mayer, M. (2009). "This site may harm your computer" on every search result?!?!.)

Actually there were no dangers at all for Internet users to click on the links but it however show how a single individual can have an impact on millions of people.

If we have a look at the consequences of this Google bug on the Internet traf-fic we can see that in average 70% of Google users stop to use it. This clearly shows that users are quite uneducated about search engines. Search engines are just displaying links of websites and it is high probable that you know and trust a part of them:

Google bug analysis on January the 31st 2009

It shows as well that people are blindly following Google instructions, if Google say that it may endanger the computer then they took it for granted. As a consequence Google lost until 90% of his traffic 20 minutes after the failure.

It is as well very interesting to observe that more than 20% of Internet us-ers leave the Internet with a peak of almost 30% at the beginning. It clearly once more emphasize the Google dependency phenomenon where some people consider Google as the Internet.

A rational behavior should have been to go to another search engine to see if such information was displayed.

According to this graph made by the AT Internet Institute:

Google evolution traffic during the bug on January the 31st 2009

This bug did not even profit to other search engines because only 13,9% changed from Google to another and 16,2% made a direct access to websites. This clearly highlight once more the poor search engine awareness of Internet users

The 70% remaining just abandoned their research on Google.

Almost one fourth of Internet users are considering Google as the Inter-net and do not know other search engines.