The LinkScanner Advantage
Rating the Relative Safety of Web Sites
LinkScanner and SiteAdvisor are both intended to provide information about website safety. However, that is where the comparison ends. We believe that SiteAdvisor, while clearly a quality product, was conceived in the relatively static world of Web 1.0, a very different place from the highly dynamic Web 2.0 for which LinkScanner has been designed.
| Real-Time Results – LinkScanner inspects the page you want to visit at the time you visit it. |
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LinkScanner’s SearchShield technology actually does a live scan on Google, Yahoo and MSN search results and with no delay in search engine results delivery. This enables LinkScanner to definitively state whether the page behind any link is or is not safe at the only time that matters – the time you plan to visit it. Similarly, LinkScanner’s QuickScan technology scans any link on-demand with a simple right mouse-click.
In contrast, SiteAdvisor "crawls" entire sites over a period of weeks and/or months and renders opinions about entire sites, which are then stored in a central database. When you perform a search, SiteAdvisor simply reaches back to its database and delivers an opinion based on the status of the site the last time it was crawled. Because the Internet is so large and crawling is time-intensive, it might be many months before SiteAdvisor revisits a site to check its safety. It may also take weeks or even months for SiteAdvisor to scan the entire site before it can offer an opinion on its safety – assuming it has ever visited the site at all. A delay of any length of time in today's Web 2.0 world can easily mean the difference between a clean bill of health and an infection for that site you’re about to click through to. |
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| Precise, Relevant Results – LinkScanner tells you which pages are safe, not just which sites. |
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With LinkScanner, if you click on a link that goes to a bad page, we look ahead at that page and, if it's safe, you can continue your surfing without delay. If it is bad when you’re about to click on it, we block access to that page to prevent it from infecting your system. We do this page by page, not site by site or domain by domain.
When SiteAdvisor renders an opinion, it is an opinion on the entire site, not just the page you are visiting. Why is this important? A few weeks ago, an exploit infected thousands of MySpace.com pages in a matter of hours. SiteAdvisor would (if they had scanned any of those thousands of pages that day) have had to make a decision to either label ALL of MySpace.com bad because of those bad pages, blocking you from visiting any of the thousands of safe pages on that domain, or label all of MySpace.com safe, putting you at risk if you visited any of the bad pages.
Additionally, LinkScanner scans any and all of the pages you visit, or that you "see" in a search engine result list, or in a QuickScan of a single link. We don't claim to have scanned the entire Internet – or any percentage of it - from any central point. We scan the part of the Internet you need to be scanned, when you need it to be scanned.
SiteAdvisor claims to have scanned 95% of the "trafficked web", which is their way of saying “the most popular sites on the web”. What this means in reality is that they've scanned perhaps a few thousand domains, which may or may not include the ones you plan to visit today. There are billions of pages that they have never scanned and, if they ever do, the results will be out of date almost immediately. |
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| Proactive Protection – LinkScanner Pro is always on guard against drive-by downloads. |
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LinkScanner Pro’s proactive protection is “always on”, watching the traffic stream for the worst kinds of threat – the drive-by downloads that will infect your system if you just surf to an infected site – you don’t need to interact with that site at all. LinkScanner Pro identifies these kinds of threats before you go there, by showing verdicts in a Google, Yahoo or MSN search, through QuickScan, or if you just click a link or type in a URL. If you try to visit an infected site with LinkScanner Pro installed, you won’t be able to – and you can’t get better protection than that.
But when SiteAdvisor scans a website, it looks at the downloads hosted on that site to see if they contain known viruses or spyware. Of course, if you’re running anti-virus or anti-spyware, you’re probably already protected against these threats, so SiteAdvisor is not really delivering any new benefit or protection in this situation. But because anti-virus and anti-spyware don’t scan the stream of bytes coming into your computer from the Internet to see if there is something bad in that stream, they can’t protect you from drive-by downloads. |
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| Spoof Proof Protection – LinkScanner scans are invisible to the bad guys. |
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With LinkScanner Pro, your request for a webpage looks just like what it is - a client PC requesting the page. This means LinkScanner will see things (and thus protect you from them) that SiteAdvisor won't.
How? SiteAdvisor is a centralized, “fixed-point” scanning engine, so it’s easy for the bad guys to recognize when it – as opposed to a regular user – is making a page request. Once they know that, it’s simplicity itself to serve up web content that is perfectly safe. So SiteAdvisor may be “spoofed” and render a safe opinion on a site, because that’s the verdict the bad guys want them to reach. |
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| Reliable Protection – LinkScanner can’t be disabled by a DDoS Attack. |
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Because LinkScanner maintains its database locally on your computer, it is not vulnerable to a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack. Consequently, the bad guys can't disable LinkScanner Pro protection with a DDoS attack, so we’ll always be there to protect you against drive-by-downloads, phishing and other threats.
With SiteAdvisor, any “bad guy network" out there could, on any given day, launch a DDoS attack on the central SiteAdvisor database. As a result, that single point of failure (the database) would mean that SiteAdvisor would be unable to render opinions about any site on the web. |
Summary
Taking all of the above into account, it’s clear that LinkScanner Pro provides more timely, precise and reliable protection than Site Advisor on the only pages that matter – the ones you’re about to visit.
LinkScanner Lite provides full web page rating functionality and is free. LinkScanner Pro adds Proactive Protection to block exploits and malicious sites, preventing your computer from becoming infected by a drive-by download.
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