By Dennis O'Reilly McAfee's SiteAdvisor security service leaves some Web developers scratching their heads over inconsistencies in its green-yellow-red ratings. The company's promises of more-frequent reviews of its site classifications are welcomed by site owners struggling to win SiteAdvisor's approval.

The Feb. 19 Top Story by editorial director Brian Livingston described McAfee's attempts to ensure that the security ratings generated by the company's SiteAdvisor service are up-to-date. That column followed the previous week's Top Story by Mark Joseph Edwards, which reported that SiteAdvisor's ratings could be as much as one year old.

Eric Legge wrote in to tell us of his efforts to have his site retested after it was assigned a yellow rating by SiteAdvisor:

• "SiteAdvisor is talking rubbish about dealing with complaints promptly. I complained by e-mail and by letter to the [McAfee] CEO about every page on my site having a yellow rating in October 2008. I also requested that my site be revisited after I had removed the [offending] link, which I removed only because I have probably been losing visitors for years because of this lousy service.

  "My entire site [PC Buyer Beware] still has a yellow rating for a link to this page, which SiteAdviser has given a green rating! [The page contains] a valid fix for the Smitfraud virus.

  "You only have to search the Web to find a number of site owners who have had their sites' existence threatened by SiteAdvisor errors. Thanks for taking this 'service' to task."
  

So many people street value of cialis asked us about SiteAdvisor alternatives that we're planning a technical review of the accuracy of SiteAdvisor, Web of Trust, and other site-rating services. This complex task will take a while to finish, but we hope to offer our recommendations sometime within the next few weeks. At this point, it's not clear how bad the situation is and which services are really the most correct.

SiteAdvisor plug-in may not be easy to remove

Our report on SiteAdvisor caused many readers to uninstall the plug-in for their browsers. Unfortunately, getting the program off your system may require some extra effort, as reader Chris Coddington discovered:

• "In the recent article on SiteAdvisor's retesting policy, I and most others certainly read between the lines and know what to expect if [we] continue to use the 'service.' I suspect that many users — including myself — are uninstalling SiteAdvisor. If we can't trust the [service's] red warnings, we can't trust the green warnings, either.

  "Now the only problem is how to uninstall the beast! It certainly can't be found [by clicking] Start, All Programs, and I don't have any other McAfee software on my system. It sounds like they are hiding it someplace. It's getting to sound almost like another virus to worry about!"
  

SiteAdvisor can be removed via standard Control Panel applets: Add or Remove Programs in XP and Programs and Features in Vista. In XP, another way to get to Add or Remove Programs is to click Start, Run; type appwiz.cpl; and press Enter. An alternative way to open Programs and Features in Vista is to press the Windows key, type appwiz.cpl, and press Enter.

Larry Croy offers another suggestion for secure browsing:

• "Just a heads-up for another free alternative to SiteAdvisor. I have been using the Finjan SecureBrowsing software [more info] for several years with no problems. They have both IE and Firefox versions."
  

As I mentioned above, we'll be taking a closer look at Web security programs in a future article. Stay tuned!