Google search introduces badware protection

Google search has introduced a malware protection feature. The world’s most popular search engine will warn its users before referring them from the search results to a website which might contain spyware, adware or otherwise malicious code.

“Bad” pages are identified by data from StopBadware.org, a project of the newly founded Stop Badware Coalition with members such as Google, Lenovo and Sun. According to Google, the goal of the new protection functionality is not to remove potentially “harmful” pages from the search results automatically; the user shall simply re-think his actions prior to visiting the site. However, first tests of users indicate that Google’s new malware filter is not convincingly accurate. We’ll see.

The Stop Badware Coalition has been founded earlier this year and is led by the Berkman Center for Internet & Society of Harvard Law School (who are also part of the OpenNet initiative and its Internet filtering report) and the Internet Institute of Oxford University.