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Yahoo Makes The World A Safer Place

By: Jordan McCollum
2008-05-07

Yep, Yahoo working to make the world a safer place"to search. Yahoo will now display warnings on SERPs to indicate that some of the sites listed in their results may not be entirely safe. Yahoos SearchScan feature will be a new default for SERPs served to the US, Canada, the UK, France, Italy...

Yahoo Makes the World a Safer Place
Yahoo Makes the World a Safer Place

...Germany, Australia, New Zealand, and Spain. Potentially dangerous sites will feature a highly visible red warning tag under the page title.

The advisories in action:
yahoo has new safe search advisories on serps
The advisories even specify what kind of dangers might lurk in the pages to come.

Yahoos new advisories are based on McAfees Site Advisor findings and are used to denote sites that may feature dangerous downloads (including dangerous downloads disguised as or packaged with legitimate downloads) and unsolicited email harvesters.

Even more encouraging, however, is what Yahoo says about sites using browser exploits (emphasis added):

These are sites that can stealthily harm a users computer or install malware simply by visiting the site. Beginning today, any such sites or pages included in McAfees data will be removed from search results automatically.

SearchScan will also feature the ability, in your Yahoo Preferences, to block all sites that would receive advisories from your search engine results pages.

The safety of search engine results has been a hot issue for a while now. Google has featured warnings (I finally saw one!), but their warnings are the same color as the result title and could be hard to miss. On the other hand, they vouch that their results are 98.7% safe.

Just two months ago, a Virus Bulletin survey indicated that 85% believed that search engines should be doing more about malicious results. While Yahoo certainly could have made these improvements sooner, this seems like a step in the right direction"at least it should to that 85%.

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About the Author:
Jordan McCollum is a staff writer for the popular marketing blog Marketing Pilgrim. She has worked in search engine optimization with clients including 3M, Little Giant Ladders and ADP. After graduating from Brigham Young University, Jordan joined the SEO copywriting team at the Internet marketing firm 10x Marketing. After 10x closed its doors in December 2006, Jordan became a freelance writer and Internet marketing consultant specializing in SEO. She also has extensive experience with web analytics, conversion rate enhancement and e-mail marketing.
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