Google malware error 'reveals huge influence on traffic'

Google's status as a web giant with considerable influence over internet traffic was made clear recently when an error led to all of its results being flagged as malware, according to Royal Pingdom.

The blog states that the mistake, which lasted for 55 minutes, led to a huge influx of traffic for the Stopbadware.org website - to which Google directed web users for more information on potentially harmful search results.

This traffic "effectively created a DDoS attack", resulting in the website experiencing a crash, Royal Pingdom said - something that could highlight the need for reliable web hosting at all times.

It added that Stopbadware.org also received considerable traffic for a few days afterwards as a result of widespread coverage of the incident.

"Google is such a giant on the internet that any changes to its homepage will affect the behaviour of a huge group of web users," Royal Pingdom concluded.

The search engine attributed the mistake to "human error" and said it had put further checks in place to guard against similar incidents in the future.