The downside of virus protection

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6 years ago

Hi all

Late in 2016, my computer was infected by ransomware after I clicked on an apparent Postnet link. I wouldn’t do that normally, but I was expecting a package at the time and wanted to track its progress.

My computer was rendered 100% useless as all my user data was encrypted. Luckily I had a manual backup from about two weeks before, and stubbornly refusing to pay the ransom, I just restored the backup and caught up the month’s work that I lost.

You can imagine that I was paranoid since that happened and subscribed to Norton Antivirus as a precaution for the future. About a month ago, I also subscribed to Norton Safesearch, effectively a browser which only lists virus-free websites thus preventing your computer from being infected through the Internet.

All good and well, but it seemed if Safesearch’s keyword suggestion feature is much reduced compared with Googles. To confirm my suspicions, I ran a little experiment. I compared a search on “Affiliate Marketing Programs” using both Google and Safesearch.

On this 3-word search phrase, Google found 261,000,000 hits, and Norton Safesearch found only 20,200,000. I cannot imagine that 241 of the 261 million sites are virus infected, and therefore conclude that Safesearch simply has a much reduced search capability (roughly 1/10th of Google's).

But more important even, Safesearch’s keyword suggestions ran out when I entered the 3rd word of my search phrase “affiliate marketing programs” whereas Google still had many suggestions left (please view the screenshots).

Conclusion

I recommend that if you are a Norton Safesearch customer, be aware that you have a much reduced search capability in exchange for the extra security. Consider disabling Safesearch altogether when looking for keywords.