Yahoo and McAfee announced a partnership on Tuesday under which potentially unsafe websites appearing in Yahoo search results will be flagged as risky.
The deal will see Yahoo using McAfee's SiteAdvisor technology to label a variety of potentially dangerous websites with red warning text and links to McAfee information about what risks the site poses.
Among the triggers for a red warning message are sites that host spyware, adware, or virus-infected downloads; sites that have links to other websites with dangerous material; and sites that have a track record of harvesting email addresses later used to send spam, the companies said.
The service will be made available in the US, Canada, the UK, France, Italy, Germany, Australia, New Zealand and Spain. It is already possible for individual users to download SiteAdvisor for Internet Explorer and Firefox.
The move, along with related technology at Google and protections now built into browsers such as Internet Explorer and Firefox, highlights a gradual expansion in efforts to combat web-based attacks.
Mainstream computer security efforts began with antivirus software that runs on people's PCs, spread to corporations that screen emails and other network traffic for dangerous traffic, and is now being built into the online search gateways that most people use to navigate the internet.
Priyank Garg, director of Yahoo search product management, expressed high hopes for the Yahoo service, both for user protection and for hobbling attackers who try to exploit network insecurities.
"We expect users will have more confidence when searching on the web," Garg said.
The partnership means the McAfee technology could be used elsewhere within Yahoo, Garg added. "We have the ability to use their data throughout Yahoo," Garg said. "All the teams throughout the company are excited to leverage this information."
Yahoo currently uses Symantec's Norton AntiVirus software to check email attachments sent with its Yahoo Mail service.
Forrester Research analyst Natalie Lambert said the move to using McAfee SiteAdvisor, while helpful, isn't necessarily going to mean a dramatic difference for the company in terms of competition with Google in the search market.
"I think it's going to very much help protect Yahoo users," she said. "[However], fundamentally [customer choice] is going to come down to how good the search is, and I think Google will still lead."
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Google is a formidable search competitor for Yahoo, as it also protects against sites that try to install malware via browser vulnerabilities. The company uses virtual machines to check for websites that launch attacks and those that do are flagged in search results with the warning: "This site may harm your computer."
Currently, Google doesn't check for viruses in downloads, email harvesting schemes for spam operations or outgoing links that could lead to dangerous websites, said spokesman Michael Kirkland. However, he wouldn't rule out the possibility in future.
"It makes sense to assume Google has a vested interest in keeping its users safe and the web safe overall," said Kirkland.
