Search Engine Shakes Up Computer Rental Realm with New Virus Detection Abilities

Is there anything that Google can’t do?

As of today, news resources are reporting that Google can now flag certain kinds of malware – notifying users of the threat. The function is driven by the fact that certain types of computer infections can intercept real traffic, to generate massive proxy traffic through Google.

Designed as drivers for traffic, these malware institutions keep users from getting to Google properly.

Google discovered the unusual malware-driven traffic flows during some routine maintenance – and decided to do something about it. The company put a warning message across the top of their popular search engine’s landing page, that only appeared to infected computers.

Matt Cutts, a Google engineer, Tweeted to spread the word. Cutts said, "This is important: Google has been able to detect a large number of computers infected with a specific piece of malware. If you go to Google and do a search (any word will do) right now, check to see whether you get a "Your computer appears to be infected" warning at the top of the search results. If you see the message, you need to clean up the infection from your machine."

Cutts went on to say, "We're trying this as an experiment to alert and protect consumers that we believe have infected machines. Please share this widely."

And widely did it spread across the Twitterverse.

The threat, only Windows-specific, can impact any device upon which Windows is installed. Reactions to the news were mixed, but all in all, the general public seemed thankful.

Although, I will say from trolling most of the Twitter responses that not many people seemed to be getting the malware message. Could it have been a jab at Microsoft – or is Mr.Cutts much too respectable for that?

Having "Big Brother" alert a user to a nearly imperceptible malware threat might not be such a bad thing. All in all, this innovation may prove helpful for all manner of device, whether they’re a computer rental or an ctual purchased machines.

Keep in mind Google’s malware alert function is only helpful for one strain of malware.

For now.