Google Search Can Block Your Browser

Google’s employees are continuously working to improve the company’s solutions and offer more performance to its users. The most important service of the search giant, Google Search, is one of the main targets for new updates and improvements.

Because the search technology owns a huge database with links from all over the internet, the company tries to make Google Search one of the safest search engines. As you may know, Google is currently protecting users from visiting malicious websites using an agreement with StopBadware that flags specific pages as Malware. “Warning - visiting this web site may harm your computer! You can learn more about harmful web content and how to protect your computer at StopBadware.org”, a Google advisory says.

It’s obvious that Google wants to make the search engine more secure, but sometimes this is not enough to assure a good performance of the service. Philipp Lenssen from Google Blogoscoped reported an issue that can block your computer when you search for this keyword (click on the link at your own risk).

“What happens, as Kathryn M. pointed out to me, is that MentalDischarge (site) was once a normal, non-password protected site. However, they now show a password popup. So Kathryn went to check the Google cache for the site, but Google opened the popup as well – and in fact this time at Google, whenever Kathryn closed the popup, it would reappear (not even Alt+F4-ing it worked), until she finally killed Firefox using Windows task manager,” Philipp said.

I don’t think this is quite a Google issue, because any user can include a Java script or other kind of malicious files that can block you browser when you visit the specific webpage. The only thing that Google can do is flag malware websites, a feature already implemented by the company in Google Search.