Secure Search - Yahoo with McAfee

McAfee and Yahoo have launched a partnership to create safer Web searching. The beta SearchScan, built on McAfee's SiteAdvisor, alerts Yahoo Search users to potentially risky sites. Yahoo was motivated to work with McAfee: A McAfee report last year indicated that Yahoo Search had the highest percentage of risky search results.

Web searching can expose users to a whole range of malicious sites, so Yahoo is now teaming up with security vendor McAfee to make its search experience more secure for users.

On Tuesday, the two companies announced a partnership that they said will "deliver a safer Web-search experience" through the beta launch of a new SearchScan feature. Built on McAfee's SiteAdvisor technology, SearchScan alerts Yahoo Search users when they're visiting risky sites.

More Than Neighborhood Crime Those suspect sites could be hiding spyware, adware or other software that is less than friendly to your PC. SearchScan also knows about sites with bad e-mail practices, such as ones that send out spam.

Suspected risky sites show up with a red warning sign and text in the search-results page, thus cautioning users with a visual indicator. For instance, a risky site would receive the warning sign -- a red triangle -- under it, as well as red text that reads: "Warning: Dangerous Downloads, Unsolicited E-mails."

The SearchScan beta is available to users of Yahoo Search in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, France, Italy, Germany, Australia, New Zealand and Spain. The Yahoo-McAfee arrangement is a global agreement to work together on other fronts as well, such as bringing Yahoo Search to McAfee users.

Risky browsing resulting from search engines is a concern for 65 percent of Americans online, according to Yahoo -- even more than neighborhood crime, getting a wallet stolen, or an e-mail-based scam. As an online safety issue, it is second in importance only to children's safety on the Net.

According to McAfee Vice President Tim Dowling, "Research indicates four out of five Web site visits start with a search," and that SearchScan's new, advance warning can be one of the strongest weapons against online threats.

Cited as Worst by McAfee McAfee said that its SiteAdvisor technology has been downloaded more than 135 million times, and that it tests and rates on an ongoing basis "nearly every trafficked site" for several areas, including browser exploits, phishing, excessive pop-ups, spam, spyware, adware and more.

Yahoo's new advisory warning follows in the footsteps of Google, which has been tagging risky search results since last year.

Yahoo has an interest in working with McAfee technology, not only to improve its users' Web-surfing security, but to improve its own security rating. In May of last year, a McAfee report indicated that Yahoo's search engine had the highest percentage of risky search results. AOL had the safest results.

The report also indicated that about 4 percent of all search results linked to risky Web sites -- which, at least, was an improvement from the 5 percent it indicated in the previous year's report.

POP verses IMAP

you access Gmail via a phone or email client using POP, you may be frustrated by the fact that any action you take, such as reading, sorting or deleting, doesn't sync with your Gmail account. You may have read and sorted all your new mail on your phone, for example, but when you log back in to Gmail using a browser, you're presented with a full inbox of unread messages that you have to re-read and re-organize. What you may not realize is that you have another option that solves these problems: IMAP.

It can be a little confusing to learn about different ways to get email on your phone or in an email client such as Thunderbird or Outlook, but this breakdown of the key differences between POP and IMAP should help you decide which way to go.

There are two ways your devices and clients can communicate with Gmail:

1. A one-way communication path (POP). Your device asks us for data and pulls it from our servers -- but that's it. Things you do on your device have no effect on the server. If you read a message on your phone, then log in to Gmail, you will see that same message marked as unread. It may start to feel like Groundhog Day.

2. A two-way communication path (IMAP). Unlike with POP, your devices talk back to our servers and sync your changes automatically with IMAP. When you sign in to your Gmail account in a web browser, actions you've taken on your email client or mobile device (like putting a message in a 'work' folder) will also appear in Gmail (your message will already have a 'work' label on it). This all happens automatically once you set up IMAP, so you don't have to read or sort all your mail twice. This is really helpful when accessing Gmail from multiple devices.

Here's a quick rundown of the key differences between IMAP and POP: