McAfee SiteAdvisor Blog

100,000 Comments and Growing

The past few weeks have been an exciting time at SiteAdvisor.

1. We were awarded “Best of What’s New” by Popular Science.
2. SiteAdvisor Plus launched. It offers premium protection like IM-link checking, advanced phishing protection, and a secure browsing mode that blocks interaction with red sites.
3. “Spyware Rubbernecking,” our “music video” has been viewed over 400,000 times at YouTube.

We’d like to celebrate our latest milestone – 100,000 user comments (and counting) – by thanking our prolific and insightful reviewer community.

About Reviewers and their Comments

Check out http://www.siteadvisor.com/sites/ebaumsworld.com:

SiteAdvisor reviewer comment categories.

In the above screenshot, you’ll see that reviewers classified their comments under seven categories.

1. This site is good
   
2. This site spams
   
3. Adware, spyware, or viruses
   
4. Excessive popups
   
5. Phishing or other scams
   
6. Bad shopping experience
   
7. Browser exploit.
   

Why do we have reviewers? Our reviewer community helps enhance our automated testing in three ways:

1. SiteAdvisor ‘bots can’t identify scams like rogue anti-spyware. We need help from communities like (spywarewarrior.com) for that.
   
2. There are some sites whose practices continue to generate spirited debate. Newgrounds.com is one example, which we’ll discuss later.
   
3. The SiteAdvisor crawler is trained to look for and complete download and registration opportunities but it occasionally misses some files or forms that a human might detect.
   

You might have noticed that all SiteAdvisor reviewers have a “reputation score.” Each time they post a comment, others in the community can rate it for “usefulness.” Each “yes” or “no” click then increases or decreases the revier's reputation score. As reviewers amass higher scores, we’re more likely to consider Web safety rating changes based on their comments.

Correcting a False Positive

SiteAdvisor’s (Reviewer Central) is a hub where our users can keep up on the latest Web safety comments and high-conflict rating debates.

When senior developer David Gatenby built Reviewer Central, he explained:

Not only have user reviews provided a human touch that complements our analytic site data, but they also help keep us on our toes. There have been numerous instances where reviewers have found sites that justify a ratings change, and we have updated our rating of the sites accordingly.

Take for example, nirsoft.net. (http://www.siteadvisor.com/sites/nirsoft.net)

Anti-virus scanners sometimes flag innocent password recovery utilities, and our automated testing attributed this respected freeware domain with a red Web safety rating because it hosted one such download. SiteAdvisor reviewers spoke up; we investigated, and switched the site to green.

Informed user comments help us correct false-positive ratings.

Catching Sketchy Sites

Here’s an example of a rating that went in the opposite direction, from “green” to “red.” Early in 2006, one of our beta testers reported official-green-card.org (SiteAdvisor site details page) as a misleading Green Card site. This site charged users to enter them in a U.S. green card lottery – a free program run by the US State Department (hyperlink dvlottery.state.gov. This simple comment spurred SiteAdvisor research analyst Hannah Rosenbaum to investigate, flag, and write two blog articles about the questionable practice, and identify about a dozen more sites which engage in the same practice.

A single reviewer comment can shed light on a scam conducted by many sites.

Reviewers Challenge Our Analysis

Reviewer Central is also where you can find intense site rating debates.

For example, newgrounds.com: http://www.siteadvisor.com/sites/newgrounds.com

Reviewers sometimes disagree with SiteAdvisor Web safety ratings.

The majority of users who have commented on our analysis of newgrounds.com disagree with SiteAdvisor’s red Web safety rating. It’s flagged because when the SiteAdvisor crawler analyzed this site in the past, it found:

1. 8 red downloads that contained potentially unwanted programs.
2. Links to other red sites, including freeezinebucks.com, which breached browser security on our test PC.

The site owner weighed in on the debate, saying:

“There are no longer links to downloadable games that contain the Zango. We have also suspended links to FreeEzinebucks. Finally, there aren’t any pop-ups on the front page and pop-ups throughout the site should be limited to one per page. We’re hoping the experience is better than it has been for some users in the past!”

Many users have expressed their pro-green perspectives.

SiteAdvisor will continue to monitor newgrounds.com and consider changing its Web safety rating if the site operators remove the flagged downloads, clean up their online affiliations, and maintain a proven track record of safe behavior.

Thanks, Reviewer Community!

If you believe your site was flagged in error, please let us know by sending a site owner note to our mailto:Complaints e-mail address. (see Contact Us) Please review your site report page in detail before writing to us so you can point out the specific areas where you think our testing may be in error.

To leave comments about the safety of a site other than your own, please join our reviewer community and post a comment directly on any site's report page.

We at McAfee appreciate all of the 45,000+ SiteAdvisor reviewers whose contributions help keep the Web safer for everyone.

We’d also like to remind our users how to get an untested download or site analyzed by our automated crawler. This the most efficient, time-effective way:

To queue a site for testing, browse to:
http://www.siteadvisor.com/sites/(insertvaliddomainhere)

To submit a download for testing:

1. Browse to the respective SiteAdvisor site report page.
   
2. Click “Submit a download for analysis.”
   
3. Paste the URL in the form and click “Submit download for review.”
   

We considered marking this occasion by recognizing specific reviewers, but decided against it out of respect for their privacy. You all-star reviewers know who you are. Look for more enhancements to Reviewer Central in the future. If you're interested in joining our reviewer community, we invite you to sign up as a SiteAdvisor reviewer.

Please check back later in the week for Part 2 of our reviewer community feature. We’ll post an overdue guide-of-sorts about what types of reviewer posts are most likely to prompt a Web safety rating change. We’ll also cover what kinds of comments, though well-intentioned and thorough, are unlikely to cause a SiteAdvisor Web safety rating switch.

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Today we released The Safety of Internet Search Engines - Revisited, a follow up report to our study from May comparing the safety of leading search engines. Co-authored by Ben Edelman, this study uses McAfee SiteAdvisor’s safety ratings to evaluate the safety of search results for popular keywords at the top five U.S. search engines (Google, Yahoo!, MSN, AOL, Ask). We also compare organic and sponsored search results and assess the risks of searching for keywords in various categories.

Key Findings:

• All the major search engines return risky sites in their search results for popular keywords. On average across all keywords, 4.4% of search results link to risky Web sites.

• AOL returns the safest results with 3.6% of results rated red or yellow by McAfee SiteAdvisor. At 5.1%, Yahoo! returns the most results rated red or yellow.

• 8% of sponsored results are rated red or yellow – almost three times the 3.0% of organic results rated red and yellow. Notably, scam sites are found at a much greater frequency in sponsored results.

• Overall riskiness of search engines declined by 12%, while the percentage of red and yellow sites in sponsored ads decreased half that amount.

Results in Perspective

We are encouraged to find that the incidence of risky sites in search results has declined from 5.0% to 4.4%. But search engine users still face dangerous sites at an alarming frequency. US users conduct an estimated 6.1 billion searches per month. If we conservatively assume that each search yields one and only one click to one of the sites listed in the results, then even a 4.4% incidence of red/yellow sites would mean 268 million clicks to dangerous sites every month from search engines. And it only takes a single visit to a dangerous site for a user to face serious and lasting consequences. One nasty download can clutter a user's PC with intrusive spyware or pop-up-serving adware. One misused e-mail submission can threaten the privacy of personal information and lead to a never-ending influx of spam. And worst of all, simply browsing to an exploit site can lead to security breaches and uncontrollable changes to a user’s PC.

To Search or Not to Search

We’re not advising anyone to stop using search engines -- we use them ourselves every day, many times a day. Search engines offer a fast and easy way to navigate the Web. But our study shows that consumers cannot rely on search engines to keep them safe. And they certainly shouldn’t assume that search ads are safer than non-sponsored results.

Search engines have made some progress in improving the safety of their results, and we applaud those efforts. We hope this study spurs further improvements.

The full report: The Safety of Internet Search Engines - Revisited (December 2006)

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