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Yahoo's SearchScan irks some Web site owners

By Ed Oswald, BetaNews

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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By sundance79

edited Aug 21, 2008 - 8:31 PM

I see I'm not alone.
When Yahoo's SearchScan first when live I welcomed it. That was UNTIL my own site was flagged. "What the Hell is going on!," was my first throught. As I explored deeper I discovered that we were flagged on the basis on one single email sent in by someone in Canada. Hell we don't even sell or ship to Canada. We have never spammed, or used spyware or any of the things that anyone should be flagged for. I've been unable to get anyone to respone to emails to remove the flagging. I know it is costing us money. Our sales are down and it seems the only way to get their attention would be with a class action lawsuit.

Any lawyers out there?

It seems that at this point Yahoo is just as accountable in that they continue to use a known flawed product that is costing other business.

Score: 0

By VoltageSpike

edited Jul 14, 2008 - 3:38 PM

Class action lawsuit anyone?

I would join in. Our site is currently flagged, because we linked to PC TOOL's anti-spyware download!!! Can you believe it? I highly rated anti-spyware tool is flagged by McAfee as being "dangerous!" This is stupid and ridiculous!!! Get real, you idiots! It's killing legitimate businesses.

Score: 0

By ericcnc

edited Jun 3, 2008 - 9:28 PM

Our site was tagged with a red warning on Yahoo after McAfee said we were involved in spamming when we have never engaged in this sort of activity in the past. Even the e-mails they received from our site had nothing to do with spam, but possibly returned e-mails from a form on our site that was not functioning properly.

To date we have not received a satisfactory reply from either Yahoo or McAfee when this problem would be cleared about. The only reply we received from Yahoo was that it was McAfee's decision. The only reply we got from McAfee was that our site would be retested in eight weeks time, no sooner. Eight weeks! You have got to be kidding. Every day this warning appears next to our site it is hurting our reputation, and through no fault of our own. I realize that this system is meant to protect people from harmful websites, but not at the expense of honest companies.

-Eric

Score: 0

By davidlewis

edited May 19, 2008 - 10:26 AM

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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