SiteAdvisor was founded in April 2005 by a group of MIT engineers who wanted to make the Web safer for their family and friends. Safety ratings from McAfee SiteAdvisor are based on automated safety tests of Web sites system of automated testers which continually patrol the Web to browse sites, download files, and enter information on sign-up forms. McAfee documents all the results and supplement them with feedback from their users, comments from Web site owners, and analysis from their employees.
McAfee SiteAdvisor complements and enhances existing security software by detecting threats which traditional security products often miss, including spyware attacks, online scams, and sites that spam its visitors.
SiteAdvisor is easy to use software that works with Internet Explorer and Firefox web browsers. It is a plug in that is installed into your browser. It summarizes safety results into red, yellow and green ratings to help Web users stay safe as they browse, search, and transact online. When you search with using a popular search engine, SiteAdvisor's safety ratings appear next to search results. As you browse, a small button on your browser toolbar changes color based on SiteAdvisor's safety results. You can view test results of a particular site to see what threats were found on that site.
In a December 2006 study using McAfee SiteAdvisor’s automated Web site ratings they found that AOL returns the safest search results and Yahoo returned the greatest percentage of risky results. Google, AOL, and Ask have become safer since May 2006.
They offer a free version or a Plus version for $19.99 that includes link safety checking within emails and a Protected Mode which will block dangerous sites automatically.
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