Google To Warn About Pages With Malware

The BBC is reporting that Google will try and warn people ^[1] about pages they return that may contain malware.

Initially the warnings seen via the search site will be generic and simply alert people to the fact that a site has been flagged as dangerous. Eventually the warnings will become more detailed as Stop Badware ^[2] researchers visit harmful sites and analyse how they try to subvert users’ machines.

I had a play with one example that the BBC quotes:

A research report released in May 2006 looked at the safety of the results returned by a search and found that, on average, 4-6% of the sites had harmful content on them. For some keywords, such as “free screensavers” the number of potentially dangerous sites leapt to 64%.

But I couldn’t get it to warn me – perhaps it’s because Google knows I’m not running Windows ^[3] ? 🙂