Yahoo Labels Google As Malware? No, Yahoo URL Mix Up

May 12, 2008 at 8:20am ET by Barry Schwartz

Google Is A Malware Site (Says Yahoo) from TechCrunch reports a funny bug at Yahoo that accidentally made it look like Google’s home page had Malware on it, based on the Yahoo SearchScan feature that was recently launched.

A search for Astalavista at Yahoo returned what appeared to be a Google.com result in the 10th position. But in reality, Yahoo somehow mixed up the astalavista.ms URL with a Google.com URL, and since astalavista.ms had signs of Malware on it, it appeared that Google.com had malware on it.

Here is a screen capture of what the search results originally looked like, when Yahoo labeled the astalavista.ms result and a google.com result:

But now, the same result is labeled correctly and looks like this:

Amit Bhawani commented at TechCrunch, explaining that if you clicked through to the detailed warning, it showed the warning was for astalavista.ms and not for google.com.

It now appears that Yahoo fixed the issue with the search result showing google.com instead of astalavista.ms. Yahoo has been known to mix up the display URL in the search results in some cases, specifically in the past. But I have been hearing some recent noise in the search forums that there are more signs of these Yahoo issues.

Barry Schwartz is Search Engine Land's News Editor and owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry's personal blog is named Cartoon Barry and he can be followed on Twitter here.

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