Symantec has opened up a beta program for Norton Safe Web that puts the company on course to challenge a similar offering from security rival McAfee.

According to Symantec, Norton Safe Web is available starting today, July 28, as a plug-in for the beta version of NIS (Norton Internet Security) 2009. Safe Web functions as a Web site rating service, providing visual safety ratings of search results from engines such as Google and Yahoo by assessing Web security and leveraging information from members of Norton Community Watch.

"Going to search the Web to find something malicious is a little bit like looking for a needle in a haystack," said Bill Rosenkrantz, Symantec's director of product management for Norton Safe Web. "What this allows us to do is really focus our energies … we augment that approach by analyzing popular sites and utilizing third-party data. So we kind of built some sophisticated rules into our process in how we go recrawl sites, what sites we look at [and] how frequently we crawl them to make sure our ratings are the most accurate."

For example, if a site that has traditionally been considered safe is suddenly flagged as suspicious, Symantec will go back and reanalyze that quickly, Rosenkrantz said. On the other hand, if it is a known bad site, the priority of going back and reanalyzing it is low, he added.

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