You may remember the incident that Google had on January 31, when it during 55 minutes accidentally flagged all URL:s containing “/” as a potential malware site. This meant that every single site on the Internet was marked as harmful, including Google.com.

Everyone who actually clicked on a link was met with an information page that the site could contain malware, referring people to visit StopBadware.org for more information (Google has a collaboration with this site).

Unexpected side effect

This incident effectively created a DDoS attack on the StopBadware.org website as a good part of the people accessing Google Search tried visiting this page. Needless to say, the site got so much traffic that it crashed.

StopBadware.org traffic

It seems like the StopBadware.org site continued to receive a lot of extra traffic for a couple of days afterwards when the news about the incident spread around the Web. Here is a very telling traffic graph from Alexa:

There are odd ways you can get a boost in traffic, but this definitely has to rank as one of the strangest we’ve seen…

Searches for “malware”

Another interesting side effect of Google’s malware warning incident was that there were about 5 times as many searches for the term “malware” on the day of the incident, probably as people were trying to figure out what it is and why Google was warning them about it.

Conclusion

Google is such a giant on the Internet that any changes to its homepage will affect the behavior of a huge group of Web users (augmented, perhaps, by the tendency of bloggers and journalists to cover everything Google), and this was an excellent example.

There’s no denying that Google Chrome continues to be the darling of the web browser market. And as we predicted in July last year, Chrome overtook Firefox around November 2011.

So now the question is, when will Google also wrestle down Internet Explorer, and become the undisputed king of the browser world? In December 2011, Chrome 15 became the most popular browser in the world, beating Internet Explorer 8, but if you combine all IE versions, Microsoft still holds the number 1 spot.

Equipped with the latest web browser statistics from StatCounter, we set out to see when Chrome is likely to achieve more than 50% market share.

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Want to see how your favorite US sports site is doing, if it has a perfect 100% uptime score or not? If you want to check the latest scores and it isn’t working, could it be a problem with your computer or connection, or the site? We’ve got the solution for you!

For some time now we’ve been monitoring 34 major US sports and news sites related to sports. Our recent articles on the Super Bowl are a result of that monitoring.

Now you can look at how these sites are doing yourself on the public reports page for this list of US sports websites.

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Who has not used Google Maps? Raise your hand! Since the launch 7 years ago, Google Maps has become the de facto map service that users around the world go to for all their mapping needs.

As we say Happy Birthday to Google Maps, read on to find out some of the critical milestones in its history, and some amazing numbers and statistics.

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In 2010, there were just over 1 million secure Internet websites worldwide. Almost half of those, or 446,992 to be exact, were located in the United States.

But in which country can we find the most secure websites in relation to population? The answer may surprise you.

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The New England Patriots held what seemed to be a commanding lead (17-15) with five minutes left of Super Bowl XLVI last night. But the New York Giants came back and managed to win with 21-17.

As exciting as the game sounds, we missed the whole thing, instead spending our time watching the Superbowl.com website.

It turned out to be a rather dull thing to do because the site held up well and there was no downtime at all. The response time also didn’t give away anything significant in terms of online Super Bowl traffic.

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