Yahoo Adds a New Security Feature
June 18, 2008 by AntivirusWare. - Download Norton Antivirus software instantly!Yahoo is going a step further to protect their users this month by adding a brand new security feature. They have joined forces with computer protection software giant McAfee to start offering war
nings about potentially malicious websites in their search engine results pages.
Effective Tuesday May 6th, Yahoo will display a red exclamation point next to any site that has been identified by McAfee as potentially dangerous. The criteria McAfee will use to determine this is sites that are offering dangerous downloads or sites that have been known to use visitors’ e-mails to send out spam. McAfee classifies dangerous downloads as any download that may contain adware or spyware.
Yahoo operates the second most popular search engine on the Internet and they have had a hard time competing with search engine giant Google, which gets almost 60 percent of search engine traffic to Yahoo’s 21 percent. Yahoo is hoping that by stepping up their user protection features they will increase the amount of users who want to use their search engine.
Yahoo made the decision to add this particular feature based on user surveys and concerns. Users stated that it was hard to determine which websites in a search engine results page were legitimate and which were malicious. Billions of websites have harmful content and this feature aims to steer users away from those websites and towards safe, legitimate websites.