With Safe Search, color-coded icons accompany all Web results indicating their safety rating. Moving the cursor over the icon displays more information about that rating.
(Credit: Ask/Symantec)Search engine Ask is partnering with Symantec to offer Web surfers ratings on the safety level of sites in search results, the companies were set to announce on Tuesday.
Sites will be rated with a color-coded icon in one of four colors--green for safe, yellow for risky, red for unsafe, and gray for unknown, said Andrew Moers, president of Ask Partner Network. Moving the cursor over the icon will display more information about the rating.
Unsafe sites are ones that pretend to be something they are not and shopping sites that lack security or where the merchants aren't reputable, according to Moers.
Safe Search offers the ratings directly in the search experience so users can conduct searches from the toolbar of Symantec's Norton Safe Web software, which is part of Norton 360. The Web site rating service was introduced in beta by Symantec last August.
Ask also is working on having a beta site open up to the public this week, but the site will not have all the functions that the Norton Safe Web rating service does, Moers said.
The service is similar to an alert system that Google uses, however Google merely displays several warning messages saying that the site "may be harmful to the computer" but does not assign a safety rating. An error last Saturday led to Google warning temporarily that all sites on the Internet were potentially unsafe.
Ask offers adult filtering and re-launched its Ask Kids white list service for children last year.
Symantec's John Thompson plans to retire from the CEO post in April.
(Credit: Symantec)Symantec Chief Executive John Thompson will retire in the spring, according to a press release from the company on Monday. Thompson, who ran the company for the past 10 years, will continue as a non-executive chairman of the board.
Enrique T. Salem, Symantec's current chief operating officer, will replace Thompson at the helm effective April 4 and will also join the board of directors.
In a press conference, Thompson said: "I always thought 10 years was about the right amount time for any CEO at any company."
Enrique T. Salem will become CEO of Symantec in April.
(Credit: Symantec)In January, Salem was named Symantec's chief operating officer. Thompson said he has been working with the Symantec board of directors on a succession plan for about the last two years. He said Salem's appointment was an integral step in the overall succession process.
No external candidates were considered.
Salem is no stranger to Symantec. From 1990 to 1999 he worked in the security business unit at the company before rejoining the company in 2004 with Symantec's acquisition of Brightmail, an antispam company. There, Salem had served as Brightmail's president and CEO. Prior to that, Salem spent a year at Oblix as senior vice president of products and technology, and two years as vice president of technology and operations at Ask Jeeves.
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