Now that 40 million Americans-almost half (40%) of the single adult population -are using on line dating services to search for their soul mates, it's no surprise that Valentine's Day is being widely merchandised and celebrated on line. Romantics can send bouquets of virtual flowers, research poems, and avoid the stress of shopping in stores for that special card or gift. In fact, according to the Greeting Card Association, Americans now send over 420 million e-cards every year. Here are three myths of search engine security and a way to practice safe surfing:

1. I know how to search-I've been doing it forever. Really? Research shows that every major search engine-AOL, Ask, Google, MSN and Yahoo!-returns sites with potential threats in their results for popular keywords, such as "Valentine's Day cards", "love poems" and even "Valentine's Day recipes". McAfee, the information security pioneer, estimates that U.S. consumers make 276 million clicks to hostile sites every month through search engine queries. Think you're one of them? 
2. I can trust the search engines to get tough on untrustworthy sites: No, you can't. Search engines don't have automated link-based analyses of advertisers' trustworthiness - the only thing keeping organic results relatively safe.  And they can't (or won't) invest staff time to manually determine advertisers' integrity without jeopardizing their business models. So what you get is what you get. 
3.  I know where I'm going on line: No, you think you know. Use an option such as McAfee SiteAdvisor, a free download at http://us.mcafee.com, which detects sites that push adware installations, on line scams, excessive e-mail and other nefarious tactics. For more powerful protection, use McAfee Total Protection which can be purchased at that Web address. 

Related Items:

---

Be first to comment this article

Only registered users can write comments.
Please login or register.