When Your Trusted Search Isn't Particularly Trustworthy

Overhype

from the whoops dept

Yesterday, GeoTrust got a lot of publicity for launching a special “trustworthy” search engine built on top of AskJeeves. The idea was that when you did a search, it would alert you to potential phishing and scam sites. This seemed pretty pointless, honestly. Phishing scams work through social engineering — tricking users into clicking through and believing they’re logging in to a specific site. They usually don’t work by someone searching for a certain website and then filling in their info. Furthermore, it seems pretty likely that anyone who actually would know enough to use a special anti-phishing search engine also is probably aware of phishing scams and how to avoid them without having to use a special search engine. Of course, to make matters even worse, it didn’t take long at all for some enterprising journalists to spot a scam site marked as “safe” by the new search engine. When your entire system is based on your ability to tell safe sites from bad sites — and even that doesn’t work, it suggests that perhaps the whole idea wasn’t such a good one.