I figured maybe it was just because I was up early and hadn't had my coffee yet. But after trying it on three different computers, I'm pretty sure that Google has gone bonkers today. Every non-News/image search result that comes back for any query I attempt in the search engine returns with a warning beneath the link "This site may harm your computer." Click on the link anyway, you get this text:

Warning - visiting this web site may harm your computer!
Suggestions:

* Return to the previous page and pick another result.
* Try another search to find what you're looking for.

Or you can continue to http://jeffnolan.com/wp/2008/03/07/gmail-imap-and-mac-mail-houston-we-have-a-problem/ at your own risk. For detailed information about the problems we found, visit Google's Safe Browsing diagnostic page for this site.

For more information about how to protect yourself from harmful software online, you can visit StopBadware.org.

If you are the owner of this web site, you can request a review of your site using Google's Webmaster Tools. More information about the review process is available in Google's Webmaster Help Center.

Click for detailed information, you get a 502 server error.

I'd never really used the search engine options button for the search box in Firefox before, but I'm Yahooing it this morning. Screwups are inevitable in technical endeavours, but while I have seen Google's system gamed before, I've never seen it just broken. Considering that search is their core functionality, though, it's a disturbing issue (assuming my DNS provider hasn't been hacked, and this isn't actually Google... in which case this may not actually be my blog host and I may not actually be making this post. Hey, maybe I don't really exist!).

I think there has always been something to be said for Google's radical, simplistic approach to search, and even though I appreciate some of the new tools and features they have introduced, there has been a little blinking warning light going off in the back of my head at the same time. Now I know why: the more extraneous crap you load a system down with, the more likely it is to break (even if you are Google, which seems to be, or at least believe itself to be, immune from other realities of development and software marketing). The more toys and features you add, the greater the risk of destroying what it was that made your product great in the first place. Google may be nearing a tipping point there, and this may be another sign that this is so.