Yahoo and McAfee announced a partnership to make the Yahoo Search experience safer On Tuesday. Launched in beta, the new SearchScan feature, powered by McAfee SiteAdvisor technology, offers always-on alerts for sites with security concerns involving spyware, adware and other malicious software. McAfee SiteAdvisor tests and rates nearly every trafficked site on the Internet.
SearchScan also identifies sites that have shown bad e-mail practices, flooding user inboxes with spam. SearchScan is available for Yahoo Search users in the U.S., Canada, United Kingdom, France, Italy, Germany, Australia, New Zealand and Spain.
Features:
The new SearchScan feature from Yahoo Search makes searching the Web even safer than ever before.No other search engine today offers this level of warning before visiting sites that can damage or infect a user’s PC and cost them valuable time and money.
How it works:
By integrating McAfee’s technology into Yahoo Search, sites that may harm a user’s computer just by visiting them will be eliminated from appearing in Yahoo Search results. SearchScan also alerts users to potentially risky sites with a red warning sign in search results, allowing users to proceed with caution. During this beta period, SearchScan displays McAfee alerts optimal for the Yahoo Search user and does not include all McAfee SiteAdvisor red ratings.
You can configure SearchScan from the settings page to never show potentially dangerous sites, or stop SearchScan completely.
Why SearchScan :
After children’s safety, 65 percent of Americans online are more worried about clicking unsecured search listings than the threat of neighborhood crime, getting one’s wallet stolen or e-mail scams, according to a Decipher Inc Online Security & Web Search consumer survey conducted in March.
Google already offers StopBadware security which flags malicious sites in search results. Google’s search results carry warnings about sites that might harm a consumer’s computer. However, Andrew Jaquith, a security analyst at Yankee Group, expects to see more robust services continue to spring up online.
[Via]
