Google features flag dangerous sites

Google has begun alerting users whenever they click on a search result that may take them to a dangerous Web site.When users attempt to click over to a Web site considered to be potentially dangerous, Google shows users an alert page that informs them of the possible risk and gives them the option to click back to the results page or continue on to the questionable Web site.

The flagged Web sites have been reported as dangerous to The Stop Badware Coalition. Google will progressively replace the generic alert page with pages containing specific reports about the Web sites. The Stop Badware Coalition will provide these individual reports as well.

The Stop Badware Coalition is a nonprofit organization led by Harvard University and the University of Oxford and backed by Google, Lenovo Group, and Sun Microsystems.

In the U.S., people land on malicious Web sites about 285 million times per month by clicking on search results from the five major search engines, according to a recent study conducted by McAfee's SiteAdvisor unit.