False sense of security

Web safety tools like McAfee SiteAdvisor and Yahoo! SearchScan create a false sense of security. Quite apart from wrongly accusing safe websites like mine as being harmful, they encourage users to believe that sites marked as safe are safe. But that is simply not the case, because there are many bad sites that don't get a bad rating at all.

I was reminded of this while checking out some Yahoo! search results just now. Searching of one product by its name, I was surprised to see an entry beginning "Top-Warez" appear on the first results page. Interested to see if Yahoo! was allowing software crack sites to be listed on the first page of search results, I clicked on the link. A page appeared, that appeared to contain content related to the product concerned. But before I could read it, the page changed to another site entirely. I closed the browser tab before any more harm to be done.

Perhaps instead of promising safe search results that it does not deliver, Yahoo! should put a bit more effort into weeding rubbish like that out of its index.

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