Was goggle.com a malware website?

Let me summarise what you are seeing: someone navigates to a typo-squat site (goggle.com) the browser is then flooded with numerous pop-ups, warning windows, etc. eventually, the anti-virus starts to detect malware the machine crashes It is difficult to think that there are young technology professionals now for whom that sequence is new and strange. For those of us browsing the Internet in 2006, this was a reality. I experienced this, myself, more times than I could count.

To answer your question, this was neither crazy nor limited to this one site. The malicious (or hacked) website was coded to flood the user with ads and legitimate-looking Windows warning windows. When the user tried to close the windows, dozens more sprouted until the machine crashed. For many people, events like this are what got them familiar with the Windows Task Manager, which was the only way to prevent a total machine meltdown. The warning windows were, in fact, browser windows, and when you interacted with them, it translated the user's click into an "OK" for installing something. That's how the viruses got installed. So, these little gems crashed your machine (causing a reboot) and installed all manner of viruses. It was sometimes impossible to remove them without "nuking from orbit". Many layers of security now exist in browsers to prevent that type of problem (although the attackers continue to evolve). Pop-up blockers, now standard, were the first thing to be used on the browser side. UAC was one of Windows first attempts to block this sort of application behaviour from the OS.