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Google Search: Safe or Not? Is it safe to search the Internet using Google's technology?	By Bogdan Popa, Security and Search Engines Editor 13th of March 2007, 15:01 GMT Adjust text size:


Some user might think the title is totally silly. Well, it's not and I'm going to try to explain it for you to understand that searching the Internet is not as secure as it seems to be. Google is surely the most powerful search engine on the Internet, with millions of users every day. Because it is the best search technology ever created, it doesn't necessarily mean that it is also the safest and the most secure. Why? Google's database is based on GoogleBot, a technology also developed by the search giant that automatically crawls and indexes the content published on certain sites, sending the information to Google. Imagine that from millions of websites from every corner of the world, some of them might contain malicious files or other infections able to harm you computer. Let's create a fictional story: an Internet user, without any security application, searches Google for illegal or adult content. Of course, Google will return million of results, some of them redirecting to illegal sites. Is it safe to click on these results? Of course it is, you'll say, because Google provides two types of malicious notifications displayed every time a user click on a malicious link. But, I guess it would be safer for both Google and users to remove all these sites from the index listings or restrict the access to it. At this time, the adult content filter provided by Google is not as useful as it seems to be because even if you enable it, you can still view pornographic material. Today, McAfee's SiteAdvisor published a security research, sustaining the .TK domains are the ones that contain the biggest amount of malicious files including malware, viruses or other infections. Guess what? Many of the sites hosted on .TK domains are also indexed on Google without any malware flag. Maybe they're clean but if they're not, is anything we can do about it? Although most of these reasons make Google look like a vulnerable search engine, it is not because the company is continuously working on the security of the technology as well as filtering the content it provides. Take as example the partnership with StopBadware able to discover the websites containing malicious files. All you need to do is to report the infected pages!

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