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Yahoo's SearchScan irks some Web site owners

By Ed Oswald | Published May 16, 2008, 1:58 PM

False positives and errors have some developers seeing red over Yahoo's new security feature.

Released in beta earlier this month, SearchScan culls search results to find possible malicious sites. Users can either choose to have the sites flagged as such or left out of the results altogether.

The feature is powered by McAfee's SiteAdvisor product. However, since the launch of the beta, there have been a few cases where the feature has made some embarrassing misdetections.

For a period of time, a URL issue mistakenly labeled Google as a malicious site; and in another case, a legitimate coupon site was listed as a spammer. In the case of the coupon site, its CEO said Yahoo failed to move quickly enough to correct the problem.

The site AnyCoupons was first removed by Yahoo at the launch of the product. Owned by 77Blue, it took the company nearly a week and a half and several interactions with McAfee and Yahoo to get their name removed from the list.

To its defense, Yahoo has said the above problems were exactly the reason why it launched in beta rather than as a final product. However, its not known how long it will take for all the sites incorrectly flagged by SearchScan to be manually retested.

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davidlewis
May 19, 2008 - 10:26 AM edited

Ed, thanks for bringing this to the attention of your readers.

I agree with you about why this service was launched in beta. The sad thing is that Yahoo only paid lip service to the beta designation. It was nothing more than a stamp placed next to the name.

Anyone reading BetaNews knows that "beta" means not only that the company knows that there are bugs but that it is willing to work with anyone who runs into these bugs and will fix them as quickly as possible.

Yahoo had a Ratings Dispute form for us to fill out for the red warning on the SERPs. The response was that I had to address the issue with McAfee with whom Yahoo and not AnyCoupons has a relationship.

Once McAfee removed the false positive, Yahoo still said that it would take a month for its escalation process. That doesn't sound like beta to me. It took 3 days of Outrider (a division of WPP, one of the largest ad agencies in the world) hounding Yahoo for Yahoo to relent. That isn't beta.

Days after Yahoo said it would fix the problem, we still have warnings on some listing and traffic down 80% or more from before this happened.

This is a great lesson of how NOT to run a beta. I've offered my assistance to Yahoo but have not heard back yet.

-David

Score: 0

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