The logo and search page of the multi-facetted internet giant Google is displayed on a computer screen on April 13, 2006 in London, England. (Photo : Getty Images/Scott Barbour)
Google has stopped rating their flagship website as a partially dangerous site to visit on April 20, Wednesday. The main cause of the rating was likely due to the some Google web properties that had risky user-generated content.
A spokesperson from the popular website has told Fortune that the flag has been removed, and that the Safe Browsing tool is still looking for security problems that might arise in the coming days. The developer team will fix the issues right away when another warning comes up again.
According to the publication, the specific detail that the safety tool warned was the service called Google Groups, which provides online forums and discussion boards for different users, who want to start their own. The domain of the website would be assessed by the safety tool as a whole if a user posted a harmful item there.
On April 19, Tuesday, Google users noticed that the website's Safe Browsing tool was rating it as partially dangerous. The safety tool, which was responsible for scanning URLs to find potentially malicious website, gave the warning to the users when they entered the website's URL.
Google's main website is not the only one that has been flagged as partially dangerous by its safety tool. Tumblr's microblogging and social networking website, and code sharing website of GitHub were also flagged as partially dangerous, according to The Washington Post. Most of the websites' contents might be safe to browse, but the safety tool from the popular search engine website has scanned and deemed them partially dangerous.
According to the website security's official blog last October 2015, owners of the websites that have been flagged as dangerous can request to rescan their sites again, after they have fixed the issues. After 24 hours from rescanning, the website's status will be updated, and it will be cleared for safe browsing if the safety tool deemed it clean.
Interested users can also visit the Site Status section on the Transparency Report page to check out why the website was flagged by the safety tool. This is also a way for website owners to learn the reason why their websites have been flagged, and to find out the specific issues that needed fixing.
Check out the introduction to the Safety Browsing tool video below:
