Google trying to warn about dangerous pages
SunbeltBlog is talking about a new sign that Google is stepping up to try to protect users against potentially malicious sites. They have a screenshot, which I was able to verify, that gives a warning before allowing a user to proceed to a page that “Warning – the site you are about to visit may harm your computer!”. Very good, I suspect they’re either tagging sites based on certain keywords or perhaps even binary blobs found?
They point to stopbadware.org for more information about malware. Essentially the text goes like this….
Warning – the site you are about to visit may harm your computer!
You can learn more about malware and how to protect yourself at StopBadware.org.
Suggestions:
Return to the previous page and pick another result.
Try another search to find what you’re looking for.
Or you can continue to http://thisbadsite/.advisory provided by Google
OK – after READING the page at stopbadware.org – these pages are given warnings if there has been a report filed at stopbadware.org….. currently the link on the warning page goes to the main stopbadware page, but at a future point will likely go to a “report” page related to the site in question.
Since this requires user participation to expand their list of reports on sites… I’m going to make it one of the useful sites in the link list on the main page.
–Update–
The security fix is covering this news as well and has done a slight comparison to Site Advisor. It is good to see Google starting to tackle this. There were surveys within the year that pointed out how risky many of the search results are.