Whether you think about it or not, the issue of safety probably affects just about every decision-making process. After all, even if you favor a grocery store based on its low prices and convenient location, you must also on some level recognize that muggings don’t occur there every day. And Microsoft wants to make sure you feel safe using Bing, too.
Yesterday, a post on the Bing Community Webmaster Blog stated, “Bing has invested in ways to identify and filter sites that download malicious software. We call this Malware Filter. This feature compliments our pre-existing Drive-By-Download detection by identifying and removing social engineering malware sites from our results.”
The upshot, then, is that Bing “can block new threats from existing malicious sites, even if those threats are not yet blocked by traditional anti-virus or anti-malware signatures.”
Assuming the system works as advertised, this is an important achievement. Malware and spam can easily spoil a person’s online experience, leading them to switch email providers, browsers, or, perhaps, search engines. Bing, being new, might be at an even greater risk for abandonment, as well.
Finally, on a related note, there have been multiple reports about spammy search results showing up in Google News, and the timing of this problem obviously seems a little less than ideal for the search giant.
