Interesting – it looks as though Google may be limiting the number of results in their hottrends search page to just 40 now from the 100 that they used to. I’m not very surprised really…. in the last few weeks I’ve been using the hottrends to see which rogue antivirus was the biggest pain in the neck of the moment, but in doing so I see many rogue sites that are using the hot trends to cash in on the traffic by serving up malware. At one point 6 of the top 10 sites in the results for one of the rogue applications were malware and I’ve seen malware served up from sites that weren’t computer related searches either. I’ve seen one person speculate that it’s based on search volume and they trim it to 40 when there are fewer searches being made. Maybe it is a temporary change.
Tag: trends
-
Rootscan.info? More Rogue Security Software on the horizon?
To follow up the last post about watching google hot trends….
I noticed an unusual search in the trends for rootscan.info. It currently seems to redirect to a site talking about rogue antivirus removal so it might not be anything, but the related searches for virus doctor, virus doctor removal, windows pc defender removal make me wonder if we’ve got another wave of rogue applications. Everything I see referenced is older though with the possible exception of Windows PC Defender.
-
Hot Trends – spotting the upcoming searchs and tomorrows news today
The internet is an amazing place you can learn about most anything from carbon nanotubes stopping bullets to a duvet cover. In the last few weeks I’ve learned a few things over at Google’s hot trends page. Basically, about once an hour there is an autogenerated list of the top 100 things people are searching for right now. What I’ve found interesting about it is to see tomorrows news headlines being searched for today. Several times I’ve seen searches in the top 100 that I had no idea what it related to until I saw the news the following day, then it all made sense.
-
Google press day announcements…
It looks as though Google has made a bit of a splash with four product announcements today. Nothing being EXACTLY as forecast it is a bit interesting…. First there is Google Coop where it looks as though people in specific fields can help suggest, review and refine results (like a directory), then users subscribe to an individual who has labelled sites. This is the area that Google Health falls under and there are a couple areas that are “Under development”. This gives some interesting possibilities for refining searches in certain areas.
-
More Fake security sites
More sites that claim to be windows security center or the like are popping up… a list:
securitycaution(dot)com
dnserror404(dot)com
todaywarnings(dot)com
updatesystempage(dot)com
yoursecuritysystem(dot)comFrom sunbeltblog.
-
Takedown phishing sites
Sunbeltblog has a good post on a group that helps “take bad guys out”. The Internet Crime Provention and Control Institute (Link expired). Basically, they will take submissions of complaints and assist in getting sites taken down. A good example would be phishing sites, maybe servers hosting illegal content, stolen information, etc. etc.
Or, perhaps a machine is spewing out viral, nigerian 419 scam or other material. That’s what the ICPCI is there to receive complaints on and coordinate “takedowns”. According to the sunbelt entry (a tip from a reader), they’re pretty effective at the takedowns (even when the site is hosted in places you would think makes it tougher.)