Yahoo! Search has teamed up with McAfee to bring a safer way of doing search at Yahoo with a new security feature called, SearchScan. SearcScan uses McAfee’s SiteAdvisor technology to warn users if a particular website that appears on Yahoo SERP pose any form of risk to the users. This new feature will be initially rolled out or turned on by default to users from the U.S., Canada, UK, France, Italy, Germany, Australia, New Zealand, and Spain, starting, well today.
Basically, when a user conducts a search on Yahoo, SearchScan will scan (no pun intended) for the following risks/threats and remove the sites from Yahoo SERPs immediately:
- Sites that exploit web browsers by installing malwares when a user visits the sites.
- Sites that offer potentially dangerous software that users would tend to think are normal, harmless software offering free downloads. SearchScan will display warnings next to the search results to alert users and prevent them from visiting the sites.
- Sites that send unsolicited emails or inappropriately share users email addresses to third parties.
With SearchScan in place, Yahoo is hoping to help users avoid getting attacked by these security threats. But since Yahoo is such a democratic organization, it is also giving users the freedom to decide whether to keep the SearchScan feature turned on or off. So, for those who will get annoyed by this red colored texts appearing on Yahoo Search Results, do yourselves a favor – just ignore it and let it stay turned on. It’s for your own good.
