Google sharpens malware alerts for webmasters

[Mercury]

Google Inc. has enhanced the way it notifies webmasters that their sites contain malware, improving on a service the Mountain View, California, company launched in November of last year in a partnership with The Stop Badware Coalition.

Google has begun providing more detailed alerts and to send these notifications via e-mail to webmasters, according to a posting Monday on an official Google blog.

Previously, Google only informed webmasters that their sites had been identified as having malware and made generic suggestions for fixing the problem. Now, the company also points webmasters to specific offending pages from their sites that Google has determined contain malicious components.

"This can be helpful when the malicious content is hard to find," the posting reads. "By providing example URLs, webmasters are one step closer to diagnosing the problem and ultimately re-securing their sites."

Before, Google notified webmasters by placing a note in the site's summary page in Google's Webmaster Tools site, but now it is sending the alert via e-mail as well.

Google flags Web sites according to guidelines set by The Stop Badware Coalition. Webmasters who feel their sites have been incorrectly flagged as having malware need to contact the coalition and request a review.


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[Will.Spencer]

Google has gone crazy with this malware terror. Lately, some of my personal typed-by-hand searches have been producing an error from Google which says:

We're sorry...

 ... but your query looks similar to automated requests from a computer virus or spyware application.  To protect our users, we can't process your request right now. 
 We'll restore your access as quickly as possible, so try again soon. In the meantime, if you suspect that your computer or network has been infected, you might want to run a  virus checker or spyware remover to make sure that your systems are free of viruses and other spurious software. 
 We apologize for the inconvenience, and hope we'll see you again on Google.

I am doing more searches in Yahoo these days.