Search engines are our portals to the Internet--it is the tool we use to springboard our way into locating information on the Web.
Very often, the paths that our web crawls traverse can lead through potentially dangerous websites--malicious ones that can potentially harm a computer by installing trojans and malware.
Google has a tool that helps safeguard against such scenarios--a tool that examines ‘billions of URLs’ per day, aiming to locate and flag potentially dangerous websites. So when that tool marks google.com itself as a ‘potentially dangerous’ web location, it is most definitely curious.
The tool, as of Wednesday 20 April, had still marked Google’s home page with the message ‘Some pages on google.com contain deceptive content right now.’ The details go on to state that ‘Some pages on this website install malware on visitors' computers’ and ‘Attackers on this site might try to trick you to download software or steal your information (for example passwords, messages, or credit card information.)’
Ominous as this may sound, it may not be such a cause for concern--while google.com may itself not be dangerous, it could well be used as a tool for locating other websites and services that could lead to malicious attacks on a computer.
Other popular websites that are marked as dangerous include popular photo sharing site tumblr.com and coding collaboration site github.com.
Although, curiously, Google’s Safe Site search doesn’t list other search engines like bing.com and duckduckgo.com as dangerous.
