SearchScanning with Yahoo and McAfee

Did you see the story last week on Yahoo and McAfee partnering up? I went and tried the new team's service and found a feature I hadn't seen discussed. The only problem is that I can't decide whether to use it or not...

If you missed the announcement here's a recap. Yahoo has teamed up with McAfee to offer some warnings when searching with Yahoo's search engine. If you search with Yahoo and Yahoo finds a site that it thinks may have dangerous content or which Yahoo/McAfee feels sends unsolicited mail, you'll get a warning signal next to that site in the search result listing. A link can also take you to McAfee's site where you can get more information about the URL being warned about as well as user reviews. (See the screen shot for an example of a site which Yahoo/McAfee doesn't like.)

Now, does this guarantee that Yahoo and McAfee will be able to successfully screen the entire Yahoo search engine and warn you about every potential threat that might exist? Heck no; it's still important to be cautious when visiting unfamiliar Web sites.

On the other hand it's great to have a tool like this to prescreen the search results for you, even if this prescreening can't be perfect. In fact it's so great that my first question when seeing this tool was, "Why do I want to even see these search results that might be dangerous? Why can't I just eliminate them from my search results entirely?"

You can, though I don't remember that feature from the announcement. Here's how it works. While you're searching in Yahoo, look for the Options button. Pick it and choose Preferences. You'll see an option for SearchScan. If you choose to edit that option and choose "Never display websites indicated as potentially harmful," then any site that Yahoo/McAfee considers potentially harmful won't even show up in your search results. (You don't have to have a Yahoo account in order to use this feature.)

Now this option IS an all-or-nothing proposition; it eliminates all sites which have warnings, even if the sites may not deserve it. WRAL.com, for example, is flagged as sending unsolicited mails. I don't think that's so, and neither do the many people who have left reviews on the McAfee site. It would be better, I think, if Yahoo gave you the option to exclude different levels of sites. I might not worry about visiting sites which might send unsolicited e-mail, but be very worried about sites which might have spyware, use a lot of pop-up ads, etc.

Bottom line: A good prescreening tool, though not 100% perfect in either direction. Be sure to visit the McAfee pages and get the reviews about a warned URL -- they can give you a much clearer picture than a simple warning.