Hey. How come Yahoo! search looks different today?
Posted by Shane Keats at 10:04 AM
For millions of Yahoo! users, their search experience is now a little different. Alongside their regular Yahoo! search results, they may encounter a new piece of information – the site’s risk rating!
We recently announced that McAfee and Yahoo! have partnered to launch Yahoo! SearchScan Beta Powered by McAfee, the Web’s first search engine to incorporate such site safety ratings.
What’s under the hood?
Under this beta launch, Yahoo! users in the US, Canada, UK, France, Italy, Germany, Australia, New Zealand and Spain will experience much safer searching thanks to site safety ratings from SiteAdvisor, McAfee’s 5-star rated, award winning safe search tool.
Yahoo! users will immediately benefit by avoiding Web sites that can result in spyware, spam and "browser exploits."
SiteAdvisor users will now see two annotations when they search on Yahoo! – McAfee’s circle and Yahoo! SearchScan’s red triangle. The rating and additional information are the same.
Yahoo! will remove all sites that McAfee has rated red (risky) for download and e-mail practices from sponsored results (the ones on the right and top of the page). In addition, Yahoo will remove all sites that test positive for malicious exploit or "drive-by" code, no matter where they appear on the page. Finally, Yahoo! will display alerts next to red-rated download or e-mail results in the organic part of the search page.
For those Yahoo! users who are unfamiliar with SiteAdvisor, when they mouse over a red rating and click "more details" they’ll open a site profile providing the same in-depth information about the site’s test results that SiteAdvisor’s existing users have come to expect.
The added safety will be "on"by default for all users of Yahoo!’s U.S. search portal. Under Yahoo!’s "Search preferences" consumers can easily turn off the new feature or decide to filter out all red results from search results.
What’s Different?
SearchScan uses almost all of our data – but not all of it. For example, the SiteAdvisor plug-in offers phishing protection. SearchScan does not. Why? Phishing sites are largely a "surfing" phenomenon. They almost never show up in search so it makes sense for Yahoo to work with the most common types of red for now. For another example, we use a pretty complex algorithm to mark sites red if they link to too many other risky sites. SearchScan is brand new to the Yahoo! community and they’re rightly focusing at first on threats that are easiest to understand – like downloads, spam and exploits.
Taking SiteAdvisor wherever you search and surf
If Yahoo!’s users enjoy this safer search environment, we hope they’ll consider adding the SiteAdvisor plug-in to their browser as well. This way, they can take that new layer of safety to the surfing experience.
In fact, Yahoo!’s SearchScan Beta is not a replacement for SiteAdvisor. Our existing SiteAdvisor users will want to keep their plug-in installed so they can benefit while surfing and while searching on other engines.
