Google renamed and upgraded its Personalised Home Page this week, but one thing the update couldn’t shake was a bug that began upsetting many users last Thursday and persisted until Wednesday.
The bug caused the free service, which lets users turn Google.com into a customized portal, to revert an undetermined number of pages to their default settings or to months-old versions.
The problem rattled users who spend significant time and effort tailoring their Google.com page with syndicated content feeds, as well as with “gadget” applications, to make it their hub for web content, online services and applications.
A source familiar with the issue says the bug affected “a single digit percentage” of users of this service, which company officials have said has “tens of millions” of users. This means that the number of affected users could range from a minimum of 200,000 to several million.
Discussion forums erupted last Thursday morning with reports from upset users, and Google, after acknowledging the problem, didn’t declare it fixed until almost 36 hours later.
However, over the weekend, reports kept flowing into discussion forums of users saying the fix hadn’t reached their pages, and continued throughout Monday, even as Google’s Marissa Mayer, vice president of search products and user experience, hosted journalists in the company’s headquarters to unveil the improvements to the service, now called iGoogle.
At the time, it seemed that the users still complaining had been affected by Thursday’s bug, and that it would be a matter of time until Google rolled the fix to their pages.
However, on Tuesday morning, as the volume of complaints in discussion forums increased significantly, with a new wave users reporting the problem for the first time, it became apparent that the bug had cropped up again and was affecting an entirely different batch of iGoogle pages.
Internet security
bug, google, search products