Google is a “partially dangerous” website and people should be careful when using it, Google has warned.
The site’s main search engine could try and steal the personal information of its users or install malware on their computers, according to Google’s unusually frank assessment of itself.
The warning comes as part of Google’s own online transparency report, which lists reports on how private and safe websites are – and calls out those that are potentially dangerous.
That includes Google itself, which is said to contain pages that have “deceptive content”. It also says that some pages on the domain install malware, steal personal information from their users and redirect users to other suspect websites.
The site does include a warning that potentially dangerous websites might not actually cause problems for their users.
“Users sometimes post bad content on websites that are normally safe,” a warning that shows on every potentially dangerous website reads. “Safe Browsing will update the safety status once the webmaster has cleaned up the bad content.”
Google advises affected websites to head to its “Webmasters Help for Hacked Sites” page. That details the ways that Google can clean itself up, at which point it can ask for its status to be reviewed – by itself.
Google’s rivals Bing and DuckDuckGo are both let off by the transparency report, which lists neither of them as dangerous.
