Searching the web through Yahoo! just became much safer thanks to a new feature called SearchScan. Every time you search the web using Yahoo you will see warning messages alongside the results alerting you to potentially dangerous websites. What a great feature! Now you have a heads up whenever a site you’re about to visit has the potential to harm your computer!

SearchScan was created through a Yahoo! partnership with the well-known antivirus provider McAfee, leveraging their SiteAdvisor technology! The three main protection features SearchScan offers are as follows:

• Browser Exploits — These are sites that can stealthily harm a user’s computer or install malware simply by visiting the site. Beginning today, any such sites or pages included in McAfee’s data will be removed from search results automatically.
• Dangerous Downloads — SearchScan will display warnings next to search results for sites that offer potentially dangerous software, such as viruses, spyware or adware. Users often may be unaware that these can be passed along with the screensavers, games and other software downloads.
• Unsolicited Email — SearchScan will alert users to scanned sites that send unsolicited emails or inappropriately share email addresses with third parties.

The best part about this feature is that any website known to take advantage of browser exploits will be removed from Yahoo! search results automatically. This means once a problem site is found and reported it will be removed from the Yahoo! index preventing it from infecting other Yahoo! visitors.

Another great idea, SearchScan is turned on automatically so everyone is protected right from the start, you don’t have to do anything. I love this and hope other search engines will jump on the bandwagon soon. A feature like SearchScan has the potential to inform and protect millions of users who don’t know how to recognize potentially harmful sites, WAY TO GO YAHOO!

Technorati Tags: Yahoo!, SearchScan, McAfee, SiteAdvisor

Mark Hendrickson of TechCrunch.com is reporting that Microsoft has purchased the airfare prediction search engine Farecast.com (confirmed on their blog). Farecast.com, previously talked about here, is an airline flight search engine similar to Kayak.com. It searches across multiple travel sites including the airlines themselves, finding you the best bang for your buck!

Farecast’s claim to fame is their airfare prediction engine that provides and easy to read arrow display that suggest weather your should buy now or wait based on their prediction of whether the price will rise of fall. A confidence level percentage is also shown to help you decide if you would like to follow their advice or not.

Now that Microsoft owns farecast we’ll probably soon see it integrated into the MSN travel site.

Technorati Tags: microsoft, search, farecast

update 4/17/2007: Farecast is now owned by Microsoft.

Find the cheapest airfare for your next vacation or trip back home quickly and easily using the Kayak.com and Farecast.com flight search engines.

Search for flights on Farecast.com you’ll get the current airfare from multiple airlines and travel agencies sorted from lowest to highest. You can quickly and easily see which airlines will get you the best price. Farecast.com is not a travel agency so they do not sell the tickets themselves. Instead they link you directly to the source (airline, travel agency, etc.) website to purchase your tickets, ensuring you get the cheapest rate. The name Farecast.com comes from their fare prediction feature which shows the trend of the lowest fares over the last 30 days and predicts whether the price will rise or lower. The Farecast.com prediction comes with a percent confidence level to help you decide if you should buy now or wait a few days. The prediction feature is only available for flights within 90 days of the current date.

The site works great and I love the prediction engine, however I’ve recently noticed they tend to favor orbits.com over the airlines themselves. The prices have always been withing a few dollars (assuming Orbits markup for profit) to and from the cities I fly, but I’ve began loosing a little confidence and in this site and I tend to prefer Kayak.com lately. However, the prediction feature is kind of nice so I still tend to use Farecast.com to help me decide whether or not I should wait a few days before purchasing.

Farecast.com also provides a new hotel search featuring “Rate Key”. Rate Key compares a hotels current rate with its past rates and lets you know if it’s a deal, just average or not a deal. The hotel search is still a beta product which means it’s available for use but is not yet complete and may contain bugs.

Kayak.com works in the same manner as Farecast.com but it does not seem to favor any one site over others. You start by entering the start and end city or airport, Choose the dates and time frame for your flight and whether or not you also want to search the surrounding airports. Kayak.com will then search hundreds of travel sites worldwide and return the current flight fares for your selection sorted from lowest to highest.

Along the left side of the search results page you have multiple customization options to help you narrow your search even further (Farecast also has this). Here are just a few of options you have:

• Hate connecting flights? Uncheck the boxes for 1 and 2+ stops so you only see nonstop flights.
• Uncheck all airlines where you’re not part of their mileage program?
• Add or remove nearby airports?
• Set a maximum price to eliminate the fares that are higher than your budget.

The best part about the customizations is how fast these changes take place, the page never has to reload. Just check or uncheck boxes and the results are modified right in front of you. Searching for flights couldn’t be any easier.

One of my favorite recent additions to the Kayak.com website is the “Weekend” search option. During the initial search criteria you have the option to check a box called “Weekend”. This feature is great if your just looking for a cheap weekend to fly but don’t care which weekend it is. After selecting the weekend feature simply enter start and end locations and then choose between “upcoming weekends” or select the month you would like to fly. Next you set the day you would like to leave (Thursday or Friday) and return (Sunday or Monday). Kayak.com then goes out returns to you the fares from hundreds of airlines and travel agencies matching your criteria, all sorted by price. After Kayak.com creates it’s initial list of airfares you can begin customizing to to narrow your search criteria.

Kayak.com is not only a search engine for cheap flights but can also assist with finding the cheapest price for other travel needs such as hotels, cruises, and rental cars.

Minimize the stress of planning your next trip by visiting the Farecast.com and Kayak.com search engines to find the cheapest airline fares.

Technorati Tags: Search, Flights, Kayak.com, Farecast.com

I’ve recently added a new feature to the ComputersConfuseMe Blog. I’ve created a powerful technology search engine (Advanced Search) with highly focused search results using Google’s Custom Search Engine tool and AJAX technologies. I call “Advanced Search” because not only provides search results for this blog but it also displays results from hand selected technology sites, blogs and news stories, each within their own section to make it easier to find exactly what you’re looking for in a easy to use format without all the junk!

The Tech Sites tab features 20+ hand selected technology related website to ensure your search results don’t have any garbage and only returns the most relevant results. The websites are evaluated by Scott before being added to the list, this ensures the search returns only results most relevant to what your’re search.

Stop on over and give it a quick try. If you have a favorite technology related site you would like added to the list please contact me with the website address and I will gladly review the site and add it.

Technorati Tags: search, google, ComputersConfuseMe

Here’s a little search tip for you:

Imagine your doing some research for your boss and you remember reading this perfect reference article that would allow you to complete the research in no time an meet your deadline. You could remember the address to the home page of the website (websiteExample.com) where you read this article but can’t can’t for the life of you seem to remember the articles title. You spend hours and hours browsing through the confusing navigational links and even tried using the sites search feature only to come out empty handed and very frustrated, it seems there article has just disappeared! Now what do you do?

Most likely go to your favorite search engine (possibly google.com) and begin searching for new articles that may not have all of the information you need. If only you could use the power of Google.com with a few keywords you remember from the article to search the entire websiteExample.com website, and only websiteExample.com site, to quickly and easily find the article you’re looking for. You could quickly print it out and make it to your daughters ballet show on time!

You can do exactly that by simply using the “site:” keyword! Using your search query with the “site:” keyword followed by the address of a website tells Google to only return results that match your search query from the website address you entered. i.e. “MySearchWords site:exampleWebsite.com”. Here’s an example of how this feature recently saved me hours or research.

My coworkers and I knew there was an article on appDeploy.com that told how to get around being forced to start an MSI installation using the setup.exe. Searching for this article on appdeploy.com proved to be rather difficult. But by simply searching appDeploy.com using the Google search engine we were able to find the exact article in a matter of seconds. To do this we used the query “setup.exe” followed by the “site:” keyword and then the appDeploy.com address: “Setup.exe site:appdeploy.com“. Google returned results only from the appDeploy.com website and the first result on this page was actually the exact article we were looking for: “Getting Around MSI Packages That Require Setup.exe“.

Other sample searches:

• antispyware site:www.ComputersConfuseMe.com
• Map Services site:http://techcrunch.com
• Canon DSLR site:dpreview.com

Give this tip a try the next time you’re having trouble re-locating an article on a website, I sure you’ll find it a huge time saver.

Technorati Tags: google, search, tip, site

Google is the most popular search engine with 50.7% of all web searching in May occurring through Google owned search engines. Yahoo and MSN follow with a combined percentage of 36.7%. (source)  Search Engine Land is trying to open your minds by stressing “trying alternatives is good”. An article yesterday encourages you to pause and take a look at what Yahoo has to offer, the search engines you turn to on a daily basis may not be the best search for your needs.

Most of the major search companies (Google, MSN, Yahoo and ASK) offer searches in all the same areas but each of them does it a little differently. Take a look at “Yahoo Monday: Today’s Google Free Alternative” to learn a little about Yahoo and how it might benefit you.

Technorati Tags: search, yahoo