14 DAY TRIAL // As you've probably heard, Google has recently launched a new utility which lets you check the malware status of a certain domain and find out if the website hosts or hosted malware in the past. However, the diagnosis service provides at least surprising information when checking famous Internet pages. And the best example is given straight by google.com.
"Of the 386374 pages we tested on the site over the past 90 days, 4 page(s) resulted in malicious software being downloaded and installed without user consent. The last time Google visited this site was on 05/25/2008, and the last time suspicious content was found on this site was on 03/13/2008," the Google diagnosis tool returns when checking google.com
"Malicious software includes 4 scripting exploit(s), 4 trojan(s). Successful infection resulted in an average of 10 new processes on the target machine," it adds.
However, Philipp Lenssen of Google Blogoscoped explains that this could happen due to the huge number of websites indexed by Google which is said to be somewhere around 12 million. Similar results appear when searching for Amazon.com, eBay.com and many other websites.
A Google Blogoscoped forum reader, reportedly a Google employee, said that this new malware diagnosis tool was actually part of the Safe Browsing API and it had already been implemented in the 3.0 version of Mozilla Firefox. "I think it's really cool because I often see people who have issues regarding malware being injected on their sites. This (along with the information in Webmaster Tools) helps them to work things out fairly quickly," he wrote.
In case you want to check a website for malware, here's what you must do: copy the following link into your address bar and replace the softpedia.com tag with any domain you like: