Based on info provided via the Stop Badware Coalition

Aug 5, 2006 09:44 GMT  ·  By

Although the Mountain View Company has not taken an official stand on the matter, the Stop Badware Coalition has reported entering an agreement with the online giant, following the protective Internet surfing measures that will be implemented in the search engine. The combined efforts of the two aim to shield users of the Google search engine from accessing malicious Websites.

As part of the initiative, Google will warn users upon attempting to access a dangerous Website via a search result displayed to their queries. But flagging malicious Internet addresses isn't synonym with denying access. Google will utilize the flagging feature on a simple informative basis; the user will have the ultimate saying in the matter being presented with the possibility to continue to his target or to return to the search results page.

Stop Badware Coalition is a nonprofit institution, the child of a collaboration between Harvard University and the University of Oxford, with Google, Lenovo Group and Sun Microsystems as godfathers. The organization will provide Google with the information to lead to the Websites being flagged as potentially dangerous on generic instances at first and then on individual, specific reports.

"Google is now presenting people with a warning before they visit websites that have been reported to StopBadware.org as sites that distribute badware. These warnings currently link to a general page on StopBadware.org, but as we finish researching sites, we'll replace the general page with one of our individual website reports. Hopefully this next step will bring us that much closer to fulfilling our mission of providing people with reliable, objective information about downloadable applications in order to help them make better choices," reads a message posted by the Stop Badware Coalition.