'Human error' hits Google search

Users were warned that all search results were dangerous

Google's search service has been hit by technical problems, with users unable to access search results.

For a period on Saturday, all search results were flagged as potentially harmful, with users warned that the site "may harm your computer".

Users who clicked on their preferred search result were advised to pick another one.

Google attributed the fault to human error and said most users were affected for about 40 minutes.

"What happened? Very simply, human error," wrote Marissa Mayer, vice president, search products and user experience, on the Official Google Blog.

The internet search engine works with stopbadware.org to ascertain which sites install malicious software on people's computers and merit a warning.

Stopbadware.org investigates consumer complaints to decide which sites are dangerous.

The list of malevolent sites is regularly updated and handed to Google.

When Google updated the list on Saturday, it mistakenly flagged all sites as potentially dangerous.

"We will carefully investigate this incident and put more robust file checks in place to prevent it from happening again," Ms Mayer wrote.

About Google's search service

Google Custom Search and Custom Search Business Edition

Google uses the index they've created for the web search engine, and limits by domain name, host, and/or URLs. When someone enters a query in the search form on your site, the Google server application receives the query, formats the results, and sends them back in either HTML or XML (for the business version) with links directly to the pages on your site.

Features

• Finding Content
  • Can include multiple sites (unlimited pages in the non-business version)
  • Only those pages within the Google search index are available, no promises about additional indexing.
  • No access to pages secured by passwords or other access control.
  • Updates to new versions of pages when the Google search index updates (no daily or weekly updating).
  • Powerful robot crawler can handle most kinds of links
• Indexing
  • Handles file formats: HTML, XML, text, PostScript, RTF, PDF, Lotus, MacWrite, MS Word, Excel, and PowerPoint
  • Excellent character set and language recognition for best tokenization
  • Does not store the contents of meta tags or page properties.
• Querying
  • Defaults matching all words in the query, case-insensitively
  • Uses the Google query language, including Internet Query Operators - (minus) and "" (quotes) , along with OR and various field names and other parameters.
  • Optional Safe Search for eight languages (Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese (Brazilian), Spanish, Traditional Chinese)
  • Light pluralization using an internal wordlist rather than stemming
• Retrieval
  • Retrieves all matching pages (though the CSE doesn't say how many that is)
  • Shows spellchecker "did you mean?" for misspelled and mistyped words, but they may not have any match on a particular site or set of sites, so it can be a dead end.
  • Search results can have "Refinements", zones based on URLs which appear as links along the top of the results
  • Search Suggestions appear using the "subscriptions" mechanism, which is quite poorly documented
• Relevance
  • Relevance ranking uses all the Google algorithms, including PageRank
  • Adjusting relevance weight can only be done via an XML "background label" and "boost" process
• Results UI
  • Default looks like the Google web search results.
  • Can display interface in English, French, Spanish, German, Bulgarian, Chinese (Simplified and Traditional), Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Slovak, Swedish.
  • Hides duplicate pages based on snippet similarity
  • Page size and cache link seem to appear or not appear randomly
  • Basic results page customization: logo, text and link colors
  • Option to use JavaScript and show results in an iframe (not well documented)
  • Option to request XML results and use a scripting language or presentation program to show them.
• Search Analytics and reports
  • Shows traffic by hour, day, week, month or "overall" (since installing the search service)
  • Shows most popular queries in the same time periods, with links to the queries and flags on no match (zero results) with details.
  • Note: report periods for low-traffic search installations may end the previous Saturday, even for daily and weekly reports.
• Administration
  • All admin done via web
  • Option to allow "contributors" who can edit the URLs to be included or excluded, and annotate them with any refinement labels that you have created, but not otherwise change the search engine.
    
    
• Business Edition (CSBE) features
• No advertising
• Google logo ("branding") not required
• XML results option - allowing flexible display customization
  • XML specification
  • Java example project
• Technical support by email, and for larger customers, an option for paid telephone support

Articles & Reviews

• Google Launches Site Search Service for Business InfoToday, July 30, 2007, by Avi Rappoport
  In-depth discussion of the service, description of features, comparisons with other services, and three examples of sites using the service.
  
  
• Google launches Custom Search Business Edition starting at $100/year ars technica, July 19, 2007, by Jacqui Cheng
  A good overview of the release information.
  
  
• Google introduces Custom Search Business Edition CMS Watch, July 18, 2007 Adriaan Bloem
  Good analysis of how the service fits into the Google services line, and its features and limitations.
  
  
• Google to Launch Vertical Search Engine in a Box Andy Steggles' Blog, July 16, 2007
  A description of the services and its implementations by a developer who added it to the HolidayHomeRental.com web site.
  
  
• NEC Selects Google to Provide Search Services on Japan's Leading BIGLOBE Portal Site Press Release, December 19, 2000
  Google will provide both web and site search services to NEC's BIGLOBE portal site and related online properties.

Reference :

BBC

SearchTools

How satellites could 'sail' home

By Jonathan Amos
Science reporter, BBC News

Satellites and spent rocket stages could soon deploy "sails" to guide them back to Earth much faster than they would otherwise fall out of the sky.

With space becoming ever more crowded, there is a need to remove redundant objects that could pose a collision threat to operational missions.

Extending a sail on an old spacecraft would increase drag and pull it into the Earth's atmosphere to burn up.

Major European space firm EADS Astrium says the scheme has great potential.

"It is an interesting solution, especially for the satellite that has no propulsion system at the end of its life," Brice Santerre told BBC News.

Santerre and colleague Max Cerf have been working on what they call the Innovative DEorbiting Aerobrake System (IDEAS).

The concept involves extending booms and sheeting from spacecraft to increase the amount of drag they experience from the residual air molecules still present at altitudes up to even 750km (470 miles)

"The principle of aerobraking is to increase the surface over mass ratio of an orbital object, to accelerate the fall-out by increasing the drag on the system," Mr Santerre said.

"To do that, we need to deploy a very light structure. That's why we chose to use 'gossamer structures'. These are composed of booms and very thin membranes."

Microscope will investigate the behaviour of free-falling objects

Santerre and Serf have been developing an aerobraking sail concept for the forthcoming French Microscope satellite.

Microscope is a science mission that will investigate the force of gravity and the behaviour of free-falling objects in a test of what has become known as the equivalence principle.

The satellite will take about a year to make its measurements and will then have no further purpose.

Ideally, such a spacecraft would be removed from orbit, especially since it will be circling at an altitude where many important Earth observation satellites also operate.

"Microscope has no propulsion system so it cannot de-orbit by itself. If we were to do nothing, the fall-out duration would be between 50 and 100 years," said Mr Santerre.

By erecting their boom and membrane mechanism, Santerre and Serf believe Microscope could be brought out of the sky in less than 25 years, which meets international orbital junk mitigation guidelines.

Astrium is now investigating how the IDEAS concept could be applied to spent rocket stages.

The company leads the production of Europe's premier launcher, the Ariane 5.

The concept developed for Microscope would bring it back inside 25 years

Much of the Ariane's structure - its main core stage and solid boosters - fall rapidly out of the sky at the end of a flight; but the upper-stage is much longer lived in orbit.

Once it has ejected its satellite payload, the stage continues to circle the Earth in a large ellipse, running out to more than 35,000km from the Earth and coming as close as about 250km.

It may take 100 years before an upper-stage falls naturally from the sky.

"Our study shows that if we want to apply the aerobraking concept to an Ariane-class upper-stage then we need a system with booms, or masts, of about 12m and a deployed surface of about 250 sq m.

"This is possible with our current technologies. We need now to check that this is the best solution. We are also thinking whether this type of system can be applied to other launchers as well."

One alternative, of course, is to give the Ariane 5 upper-stage the capability to take a powered dive into the Earth's atmosphere.

The Ariane 5 upper-stage continues to circle the Earth for decades

This was done for the first time last year at the end of the launch of the Jules Verne space station freighter. This was considered essential because of the number of manned missions that routinely follow station's orbit.

Once Jules Verne was released from the rocket, the upper-stage reignited its engine to make a controlled burn-up over the Pacific.

The advantages of de-orbiting in this way are clear, but the extra fuel requirements and complexity of re-ignitable engines adds cost to what is already a very expensive endeavour.

Aerobraking sails, on the other hand, are lightweight and extremely simple. Their operation could even be controlled by a pre-set timer, fixed to deploy a certain number of minutes after the end of a flight.

This means that even an upper-stage that is out of control can still be guaranteed to return to Earth in a timely fashion.

Santerre and Serf presented their latest research at the recent European Conference on Space Debris in Darmstadt, Germany.

The meeting closed with a statement from its organisers saying that effective measures to clean up space debris needed to be devised and implemented.

The upper-stage that launched Jules Verne took itself into a controlled dive

Last-minute Conficker survival guide/Worm

April 1 -- is D-Day for Conficker, as whatever nasty payload it's packing is currently set to activate. What happens come midnight is a mystery: Will it turn the millions of infected computers into spam-sending zombie robots? Or will it start capturing everything you type -- passwords, credit card numbers, etc. -- and send that information back to its masters?

No one knows, but we'll probably find out soon.

Or not. As Slate notes, Conficker is scheduled to go "live" on April 1, but whoever's controlling it could choose not to wreak havoc but instead do absolutely nothing, waiting for a time when there's less heat. They can do this because the way Conficker is designed is extremely clever: Rather than containing a list of specific, static instructions, Conficker reaches out to the web to receive updated marching orders via a huge list of websites it creates. Conficker.C -- the latest bad boy -- will start checking 50,000 different semi-randomly-generated sites a day looking for instructions, so there's no way to shut down all of them. If just one of those sites goes live with legitimate instructions, Conficker keeps on trucking.

Conficker's a nasty little worm that takes serious efforts to bypass your security defenses, but you aren't without some tools in your arsenal to protect yourself.

Your first step should be the tools you already have: Windows Update, to make sure your computer is fully patched, and your current antivirus software, to make sure anything that slips through the cracks is caught.

But if Conficker's already on your machine, it may bypass certain subsystems and updating Windows and your antivirus at this point may not work. If you are worried about anything being amiss -- try booting into Safe Mode, which Conficker prevents, to check -- you should run a specialized tool to get rid of Conficker.

Microsoft offers a web-based scanner (note that some users have reported it crashed their machines; I had no trouble with it), so you might try one of these downloadable options instead: Symantec's Conficker (aka Downadup) tool, Trend Micro's Cleanup Engine, or Malwarebytes. Conficker may prevent your machine from accessing any of these websites, so you may have to download these tools from a known non-infected computer if you need them. Follow the instructions given on each site to run them successfully. (Also note: None of these tools should harm your computer if you don't have Conficker.)

As a final safety note, all users -- whether they're worried about an infection or know for sure they're clean -- are also wise to make a full data backup today.

What won't work? Turning your PC off tonight and back on on April 2 will not protect you from the worm (sorry to the dozens of people who wrote me asking if this would do the trick). Temporarily disconnecting your computer from the web won't help if the malware is already on your machine -- it will simply activate once you connect again. Changing the date on your PC will likely have no helpful effect, either. And yes, Macs are immune this time out. Follow the above instructions to detect and remove the worm.

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A computer worm is a self-replicating computer program. It uses a network to send copies of itself to other nodes (computers on the network) and it may do so without any user intervention. Unlike a virus, it does not need to attach itself to an existing program. Worms almost always cause at least some harm to the network, if only by consuming bandwidth, whereas viruses almost always corrupt or modify files on a targeted computer.

Backdoors can be exploited by other malware, including worms. Examples include Doomjuice, which spreads better using the backdoor opened by Mydoom, and at least one instance of malware taking advantage of the rootkit and backdoor installed by the Sony/BMG DRM software utilized by millions of music CDs prior to late 2005.

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Reference :Yahoo!

Wikipedia