This deal will help make Yahoo! Search results far safer for innocent users clicking through to new sites, and it will likely enhance the comprehensiveness of McAfee security products for all of their software users. Viruses, spyware and other forms of malware are very often tied to internet sites. Some webpages are little more than Trojan Horses, for instance, pretending to be a reputable site, and attempting to lure the unwary into typing their passwords in for banking, credit cards, eBay, etc — all so that the unethical people responsible may steal identities, empty out bank accounts, and charge up credit cards fraudulently. And, there are many other types of exploits tied to internet locations, including sites which start to download invasive software and viruses into one’s computer through the browser interface.

The Yahoo/McAfee partnership appears to me to be very valuable to both parties and to the public.

The deal is also likely to provide something of a cost savings to Yahoo!, I would guess, since it could pave the way towards reducing their costs of working to identify malware sites. McAfee is an industry leader in this sector, and contracting for their services could allow Yahoo to not have to duplicate so many security and scanning types of functions.

Here’s one suggestion I have: allow users to personalize Google so that if malware’s been detected, the links don’t appear in the SERPs at all. You could set this as a default setting for all users, and then allow those who desire unscreened results to just opt out of that.

If you’ll ban sites for getting overly aggressive at optimizing themselves to be found, why would you keep sites that may be deploying software to make zombies out of user’s PCs?

The request to help is one more good method for fighting malware, especially since sites can start deploying malware at any time, even right after Google has spidered them. However, I’d still be interested in hearing why a number of apparently legacy black hat tricks were able to work in the first place, which enabled this particular attack to have some teeth.  Just last week, Matt Cutts noted another case of easy black hatters which they’ve recently caught.