McAfee SiteAdvisor Blog

You know when you talk to a friend and they sometimes sort of just keep nodding and get that glazed look in their eyes? You can tell that nothing you’re saying is really sinking in. (or does that only happen to us when we start yammering on about the latest adware distribution site we discovered during last night’s automated crawl?)

While our obsession with Web safety may sometimes induce Glazed Eye Syndrome at dinner parties, we want to assure you that when you have something to say about our site, our software, our data, or our approach to online safety, you have our full attention.

Since we launched our Preview Version, we’ve received lots of valuable feedback from our testers. Some feedback has been submitted through the various feedback areas of our site. Other feedback was directly e-mailed to us from friends. Some came in forum discussions about our product. We pay close attention to all of it.

Today we wanted to share some of your early feedback, clarify a few points of confusion, and tell you about some product improvements we’re already working on as a direct result of your suggestions:

* One forum poster noted that we missed a site’s IE exploit attempt, and was absolutely right. Our bad for not making it clear that we are still testing browser exploit detection in our labs. None of the data on our site includes exploit detection yet. We hope to include exploit data in our January release.

* A question came up about how we differentiate between primary domains (e.g.: www.site.com) and subdomains (e.g.:www.shop.site.com) which sometimes are different enough that they could be considered completely separate sites. We realize that a home page doesn't completely encapsulate a domain. We're currently building a list of sites for which that is the case. You can also submit a subdomain for us to prioritize for testing.

* One user wrote in to say that a member of his family who is ‘red/green’ color-blind (the most common form of color blindness) had trouble distinguishing our red and green safety ratings. As a result of that feedback we’ll be adding an option in a subsequent release to give users a choice of an alternate color or pattern for our safety ratings.

* The question came up about how we would incorporate user ratings, and whether users might be able to “game‿ our test results by claiming bad sites were good or vice versa. We’re working on an approach to this issue and will probably introduce a rating system so that users who have provided helpful, verified feedback in the past will have their comments count more heavily than other users. We’re also going to be introducing a ‘SiteAdvisor expert’ (working name) user classification to recognize users who show particular interest and expertise in helping us improve our site ratings.

* We have developed an API for developers to access our data, but have not yet released it.

* Some forum posters noted that we had a site report for 127.0.0.1. As much as we like recursion, we agree that this isn't too helpful. Someone must have submitted this to our crawling queue, and our obedient crawler promptly crawled itself. We've added a check for non-external ips and URLs to prevent this in the future.

* And finally, we know that there are many sites and downloads which our crawlers haven't yet tested. We just scaled up from roughly 10 to 80 servers (to the delight of our Dell rep) which should substantially increase our site coverage very soon. In the meantime, you can also submit a Web site or submit a download to us for prioritized testing.

Thanks for all your feedback to date... and please keep it coming!