New search engine aims to squash phishers

An interesting new search engine by GeoTrust launches today. TrustWatch’s goal is to help people determine the trustworthiness of web sites. With so many phishing scams polluting the Internet, the idea is that Net users will be able to plug in the name of a web site and check whether it’s verified as a legitimate e-commerce site by GeoTrust or Verisign. A green checkmark means the site is OK, a yellow question mark is a warning, and orange means “Danger, Will Robinson!” GeoTrust is one of the companies that issues the SSL certificates required to operate a legitimate e-commerce site. The search results themselves are powered by Ask Jeeves with the GeoTrust technology laid over it. In addition to checking whether a site has an SSL certificate, the search engine checks to see if the web site is listed in phishing blacklist sites or has a suspicious URL.

“We’re bringing identity verfication into the mass market with search,” Neal Creighton, GeoTrust’s president and CEO told us last week. “We can verifiy it so that you know you’re dealing with a business that’s a real entity and traceable.”