Google.com awkwardly lists itself as a partially dangerous website. According to a report in Engadget based on a post by an eagle eyed Reddit user, that’s exactly what the world’s largest search engine is doing.
The details of the security note explains that websites hosted on Google Groups may install malware on the user. It is not as absurd as it sounds, the Washington Post explains. Apparently, the tool flags the whole domain as unsafe if there is user generated unsafe content in any of the services hosted by Google.
The safe browsing diagnostic tool, does seem to be confused over whether or not some sites are dangerous. In the Google.com check, it lists two sites hosted on Google groups as containing potentially malicious code. However, searching the same diagnostic tool with these flagged sites, shows the result as “safe”. As the site status is not updated in real time, this could simply mean that the flagged content is now safe, but the top level domain, Google.com has not had its status updated.
Google.co.in and Google.in in the same tool is flagged as safe. However, there is still a warning, that some pages on the website sends visitors to the following dangerous website: xda-developers.com. However, checking the status of xda-developers.com shows the site as safe.
You can investigate more inconsistencies and embarrassments for yourself, using the security diagnostic tool known as Site Checker.
