Excellent PR on the part of Google
by Volker Weber
If you did a Google search between 6:30 a.m. PST and 7:25 a.m. PST this morning, you likely saw that the message "This site may harm your computer" accompanied each and every search result. This was clearly an error, and we are very sorry for the inconvenience caused to our users.
What happened? Very simply, human error.
What follows is an explanation of what happened, when it started, when it ended. No spin. Just the plain story.
Comments
Honesty is appreciated. Honesty works. Honesty in business is rare. But, honesty sells.
Have you seen the first version of that post?
There was quite some finger-pointing at stopbadware.org, which only got revised after they issued a contrary statement. Doesn't strike me as very good PR.
Also, if you have a look at the implications on traffic and trust, I must say I don't care much about their PR. If they want to play "internet police" they should be more careful in the first place. This concentration of editorial power worries me deeply.
Will they be more careful?
Martin, no I have not seen prior versions. This one is how you do it.
I especially like the explanation "human error". Big companies like to pretend that the human does not make any difference, that they have procedures, which cannot fail.
