Yahoo! has partnered with McAfee to integrated the security firm’s SiteAdvisor technology in Yahoo! search results. That means Yahoo! will remove some of the most dangerous sites from search results altogether, and will include highly visible warning messages on search listings that force downloads, include browser exploits, or sites that send unsolicited emails.
Google offers a similar service, through a partnership with Stop Badware. But Google doesn’t check for web sites that initiated automatic downloads when you load them, or sites that include links to harmful web pages. Yahoo!'s new SearchScan feature does.
SearcScan will be turned on by default for Yahoo! users in the US, Canada, the UK, Australia, France, Germany, Italy, New Zealand, and Spain. You can turn it off by visiting the SearchScan settings page
http://tools.search.yahoo.com/newsearch/searchscan
Just another thing to keep me away from Yahoo, these checks are bandwidth robbing when on dial-up. To have it on by default is wrong you shouldn’t have to go searching to disable it, you should go searching if you want it enabled rather than disabled.
There are too many b****y default opt-in schemes as it is.
Hi DavidR,
I’d rather do a scan with scandoo, it was build that way. And in the case of the merged SiteAdvisor rating. Apart from the bandwidth problems, cannot this also be a privacy concern? Then these results are not actual results, I’d prefer a DrWeb online bookmark as an occasional live URL scan for this purpose. Stay away from dark alleys, and you have a fair chance not being clubbed over the head “with malware in this case”.
In case of bandwidth problems you surf faster with a complete cache on your machine, through the help of akamai servers, the Google cache, and of course with NoScript installed, you do not have to load lots of crap you probably weren’t interested in anyways, same goes for ABP. Then FF 3Beta 5 is loads faster on dial-up. Also FF 3Beta 5 saves all the pages you viewed last inside the browser, you do not have to load these next time you go on where you came from.
pol
Caches require update or they are worthless, I by far prefer using OpenDNS which will alert to phishing sites on their list so there is no extra overhead of pre-scanning search results as you have to get the IP address when you click on the link anyway.
I just don’t want to have so much security that it in itself becomes the problem. I much prefer using my brain and common sense to much of this clutter.
just reporting the news davidr my friend-and also use OpenDNS as you do and also WOT and Finjan in my IE7 and Firefox 