Barry Levine, newsfactor
On Tuesday, the two companies announced a partnership that they said will "deliver a safer Web-search experience" through the beta launch of a new SearchScan feature. Built on McAfee's SiteAdvisor technology, SearchScan alerts Yahoo Search users when they're visiting risky sites.
More Than Neighborhood Crime
Those suspect sites could be hiding spyware, adware or other software that is less than friendly to your PC. SearchScan also knows about sites with bad e-mail practices, such as ones that send out spam.
The SearchScan beta is available to users of Yahoo Search in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, France, Italy, Germany, Australia, New Zealand and Spain. The Yahoo-McAfee arrangement is a global agreement to work together on other fronts as well, such as bringing Yahoo Search to McAfee users.
According to McAfee Vice President Tim Dowling, "Research indicates four out of five Web site visits start with a search," and that SearchScan's new, advance warning can be one of the strongest weapons against online threats.
Cited as Worst by McAfee
McAfee said that its SiteAdvisor technology has been downloaded more than 135 million times, and that it tests and rates on an ongoing basis "nearly every trafficked site" for several areas, including browser exploits, phishing, excessive pop-ups, spam, spyware, adware and more.
Yahoo's new advisory warning follows in the footsteps of Google, which has been tagging risky search results since last year.
Yahoo has an interest in working with McAfee technology, not only to improve its users' Web-surfing security, but to improve its own security rating. In May of last year, a McAfee report indicated that Yahoo's search engine had the highest percentage of risky search results. AOL had the safest results.
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