The BBC is reporting that Google will try and warn people 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 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 ? 🙂