Google disables McAfee SiteAdvisor by redirecting searches
By Jonathan Schlaffer
Users of McAfee’s Site Advisor browser plugin available for IE6+ and Firefox may have noticed something strange when using Google. Just a few days ago everything was fine but Google is redirecting searches and this has effectively disabled Site Advisor when using Google search.
If you pay close attention when you visit Google’s main page and perform a search; the search results page is not www.google.com/search but rather www.l.google.com/search which is strange.
This has something to do with “changes” that Google made over the past few days but beyond that it’s not clear what’s going on or why this is the case. You will notice that by visiting the two URLs above both go to www.l.google.com/search and that’s the way it is, for now.
McAfee will have to update Site Advisor to support the “safe search” feature since it does not currently work with Google’s new search redirect (or whatever it has done) URL.
For the time being Site Advisor is effectively disabled on Google search; if you like the features and protection Site Advisor provides, it is still working on most other search engines including Yahoo!
A big “thank you” to Google for disabling one of my favorite extensions, I’m using Yahoo until Google goes back to the “classic” search or until McAfee updates its software.
This new “redirect” as I’m calling it effects the IE and Firefox version of Site Advisor since the browsers take you to the same Internet.
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Entry was posted
on Tuesday, March 11th, 2008 at 7:37 pm
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March 12th, 2008
Thanks Jon & Google :)
March 20th, 2008
fyi
http://forums.opendns.com/comments.php?DiscussionID=1055
June 27th, 2008
Hey thanks for the update
November 17th, 2008
Interesting . ….
But I am not able to surf google.com and I don’t have mc afee either. …
Then what……
Its still redirecting my pings to http://www.l.google.com when I am pinging http://www.google.co.in
April 25th, 2009
Thanks! Just spent 10 wasted minutes chatting with McAfee support and getting nowhere. I do miss SiteAdvisor and hope Google and/or McAfee will fix it.
May 16th, 2009
There is a workaround. If you initiate a Google search on anything in the search engine box in the upper right of the Firefox screen, you will enter a Google page that enables SiteAdvisor. Once on that page, you can continue with more searches with the SiteAdvisor activated, just as before.