David Felstead, Principal Development Lead at Bing, announced a new feature that Bing has been working on to ensure its users are well protected.
For some time Bing has been cautioning users when a search result could be potentially harmful. However, access to any further information was only available to those with a Bing Webmaster account.
Bing has solved that problem with the launch of their new Bing Site Safety Page. The new Bing Site Safety Page is a portal where all Bing users can go to learn why a particular site is being flagged, how long it has been flagged, and when the last scan took place.
In addition to the Bing Site Safety Page, they have also rolled out an update to the warning users receive in the search results when a harmful site has been flagged. The new warning has a link inviting users to “learn more about why this URL was marked as malicious” – when a searcher follows this link, they will end up at the new Bing Site Safety page.
The Bing Site Safety Page will then show the user the following information:
- The reason the page is being marked as malicious, e.g. Malicious Javascript, DriveBy Attacks, Malware Network References, etc…
- The date the infection was first detected
- How often the URL has been scanned
- The date the infection was most recently detected
All of this information is available for each of the tens of millions of URLs discovered as malicious by Bing. Bing says they’re already seeing thousands of users visit the Bing Site Safety Page every day.
With this update, Bing hopes that the Site Safety Page will de-mystify some of the issues around malware on the web, while providing searchers with more insight when a malware warning is presented to them.
