Yahoo-McAfee Teaming Up To Make The Web Safer

With all the news, and rumors of the Yahoo-Microsoft deal scouring the web, a different collaborative effort has slipped through the cracks. Yahoo and the company built on the anti-virus, McAfee, are teaming up to make the internet a safer place to be. I like to think of them as the dynamic duo; I wonder who’s playing Robin?

Aslong as man has been around, we’ve created beautiful and wonderful things. While at the same time taking these wonderful things and trying to impose harm on others. The same goes for the internet. You never know what you’re going to find when you’re out searching sites. Most of the time it’s safe, but then you stumble across a site that’s uploading a trojan onto your system, and before you know you’re hard drive is gone. With Yahoo’s new plan to integrate McAfee’s SiteAdvisor technology into their search engine, they are hoping to remedy some of the problem.

McAfee’s SiteAdvisor, will search the internet, finding sites that are host to some bad mojo for your computer. Different triggers the program will pick up are, spyware, adware, virus-contaminated downloads, and sites that have links to other sites with malicious content. The new program will also be able to find sites that should be stripped from their search engine entirely. Sites that provide “drive-by-downloads” , are ones that will be stripped from the search engine.

It’s ironic that Yahoo and McAfee are teaming up, as Yahoo uses Norton’s Anti-Virus in-house. If SiteAdvisor helps improve their search traffic, then I’d venture to say that Yahoo wouldn’t mind investing into some Anti-Virus software as well.

The SiteAdvisor program will start in the US, along with, Canada, the UK, France, Italy, Germany, Australia, New Zealand, and Spain. It will be interesting to see how their new program effects their traffic numbers. After the failed Microsoft-Yahoo deal, they should be hoping that this will improve internet user’s minds when deciding where to perform their searches.