mcafee-siteadvisor says what about search engine results?

perhaps you've heard - search engines lead users to dangerous content... actually, that's what siteadvisor (a company and technology recently purchased by mcafee) is saying...

siteadvisor, as you may or may not know, provides technology to tell you which of the search engine results on the result page are safe and which ones aren't... they've basically come up with a list of known bad sites and they mark up the search engine results to show you what's bad and what isn't... why they only do this for search engine results i don't know, search engine result pages are not the only pages that link to other pages - it should be possible to mark up all web pages to indicate link safety...

at any rate, singling out search engines this way is FUD... the implication is (and this is born out by all the alarmist revisionist headlines on articles talking about this siteadvisor study) that search engines aren't safe... search engines just point to web pages, just like other web pages point to web pages... it's not search engines that are unsafe it's the web in general - the same malware infested pages you can encounter using a search engine you can also encounter by following links on other pages (which is necessarily true in order for the unsafe pages to get a high enough page rank to be in the first 5 pages of google results)... search engines just point to the rest of the web - their results are an organized reflection of the web pages that exist...

but what is the siteadvisor study really saying? well, that their technology for detecting unsafe results returned from search engines is detecting unsafe results being returned from search engines... thanks, siteadvisor, for something very close to a tautology, and congratulation on validating your raison d'etre... but y'know - it's not unlike when experts on internet addiction do studies that show internet addiction is a growing problem - whether it's true or not, it's completely self-serving...

mcafee-siteadvisor are basically tooting their own horn trying to get attention, and i think i know what kind of attention they're hoping for... you see, back in the day it used to be a pretty big deal to be the anti-virus company that microsoft used in-house... it was a badge of honour, a matter of prestige and great PR... in today's world the internet (rather than the PC) is becoming the new platform - the web represents the file system, the search engine index represents the file allocation table, and the search engine itself is analogous to the OS... how prestigious would it be to be the scanning technology licensed by google or yahoo or msn to clear the bad pages out of their indices? mcafee-siteadvisor doesn't even have to try hard, they're the only game in town, they just have to hype things up a bit and raise some awareness so as to generate market pressure on the search engines to bite (thus the focus on search engines being unsafe)...

3.1% of organic search results and 8.5% of sponsored search results are bad - yup, that should work... not too outrageous, not too easy to ignore, it sounds 'just right'...