Here’s an example of how it looks:

What malware? Produced by whom? Google’s not giving any details there yet, simply blogging:

This particular malware causes infected computers to send traffic to Google through a small number of intermediary servers called “proxies.” We hope that by taking steps to notify users whose traffic is coming through these proxies, we can help them update their antivirus software and remove the infections.

The blog post itself has the fairly innocuous title of “Using data to protect people from malware.”

This is malware so threatening, so menacing that Google does unprecedented above-the-search results warnings, and Google describes it as an exercise in data analysis? How about: “Warning: Your Computer May Be Infected & Here’s How To Fix It.”

The post also doesn’t mention that the malware is restricted to Windows computers, nor does the help page make this clear. Indeed, the “fix” that the help file talks about is to run an anti-virus program. It doesn’t say exactly what malware that software should detect, if any.

The help page does provide, if you drill down, some guidance that your Windows host file will be changed to apparently reference the IP address of 74.125.45.100 along with some others.

Ironically, doing a search for the IP address quickly suggests that Google is concerned about “Windows Protection Suite,” which one site describes as a fake anti-virus software program.

The IP address, by the way, appears to be Google’s own. The program, I’m guessing, is routing the traffic eventually to Google after monitoring it or logging it for whatever reasons it has.

If you get one of these notices on a Windows computer and don’t already run an anti-virus program, well, that’s as good as reason as any. But it would sure be better if Google provided some more details.

Postscript: A Google spokesperson tells me via email, after I asked why the particular malware wasn’t named:

We detected a large number of variants of the malware. As a result, naming is not so straight-forward. From a user’s perspective, it’s more important to understand that their computer is infected and that they should take steps to fix it. You may have noticed that there is a feedback form in our Help Center for people to report what they’ve found, and they can also ask questions about the results.

I also asked if we’d see more warnings like this going forward and was told:

We haven’t displayed this type of warning before, so we can’t say what we’ll do going forward. We came across this particular type of malware in the course of the work that’s described in the blog post, which is why we were able to take action in this case. As I mentioned, we realized we were in a position to use that information to help our users. Who knows if anyone else would have warned them?

The spokesperson also commented:

The title of your post is not quite accurate. The malware doesn’t redirect to Google’s search results, technically speaking. Something like “modifying traffic to its search results” would be more correct.

I’m uncertain, honestly, what else to change the title to. Originally I’d had the title of:

Google Warns Of Malware Changing Its Search Listings

That was clearly incorrect, and I fixed that a few minutes after the original post went up. There is malware that does alter Google’s search results. It’s a common question we get asked here at Search Engine Land, actually — why do my Google results look this odd way? Malware is often to blame.

That’s not what’s happening here. What is happening is unclear. This malware appears to be redirecting to Google itself, not necessarily its search results. But Google’s putting warnings into its search results, which suggests a search results connection of some type.

Bottom line. Malware isn’t new, nor have users of Windows computers been oblivious to it. Indeed, Windows itself will warn you of the need to protect against malware in various ways. I’m pretty sure Windows Defender even ships with Windows 7, or that Windows 7 at least warns you if you don’t have it installed.

Even if Windows Defender doesn’t detect this type of malware, it’s just not uncommon for Windows users to know they need to have anti-virus / malware detection software. It is uncommon, extremely uncommon, for Google to suddenly issue what seems to be an urgent warning about a particular type of malware.

Over at Krebs On Security, they appear to have interviewed the Google engineer who spotted the malware, which does suggest that the malware was indeed altering search results.

Google Operating System reported the more compact version of the Google web search side bar. Google has merged several groups into a single group, to save space. The two groups remaining are time bound groups and search filter groups, what was removed were the views group and results group. Google also dropped the “related searches” option from the side bar. For screen shots, see the Google Operating System post.

TechCrunch reported Google dropped the “Google Reader” link from the top of the Gmail navigation menu. It was replaced with “Photos,” which takes you to Google’s Picasa. Robin Wauters said this is “more proof that RSS is on its way out.” I am not sure about that, but there are some Gmail and Google Reader users not happy with the change.

Postscript: Late this afternoon, the Google Reader Twitter account posted that the moved Google Reader link was an accident:

The Reader link at the top of Gmail (and other sites) was accidentally removed. It’s coming back soon, we promise. Don’t panic.

How does this come in handy? Well, let’s say you want to track when Google changes their webmaster guidelines. All you do is copy the URL into Google Reader and click on “create a feed.” Google Reader will then periodically visit the page and publish any significant changes it finds as items in a custom feed created just for that page.

Here is a picture:

After you click “create a feed” Google will label the item as “a Google-created feed.”

This can come in handy for SEOs, webmasters, searchers, researchers, news writers, savvy shoppers and many more.

Technically, this cannot track every web page out there. You can opt out your pages from this by blocking Googlebot from indexing it via your robots.txt file or by using the noarchive tag, as specified here <meta name=”googlebot” content=”noarchive”>.

Google has added additional search options by style. So in addition to searching for faces or photo content types of images, or news content, you can also search for line drawings, and clip art. Here is a picture of the available style options in Google Image Search:

Google Operating System reports that some users are seeing Google web history results in Google search suggestions. So when you type a search phrase at Google.com, up comes search suggestions. Typically, those search suggestions are presented based on how popular the queries are but now Google is showing some people search results based on their search history. To me, this is a great addition to Google search suggestions. I personally do not see it, but here is a screen capture courtesy of Google Operating System:

The Google Reader Blog has added a “What’s Hot” section to the right hand navigation bar. What’s Hot is generated algorithmically, Google has not shared how exactly the algorithm works but I would expect it has something to do with shared items and reader counts.

But to my surprise, the whitish color scheme is not just available on the main Google Reader, it has been ported to the iPhone version.

Here is a picture of the new Google Reader look for your browser:

Here is a picture of the new Google Reader for your iPhone:

Here is an old picture, to compare.

Google has also added more “feed bundles,” to give people more blogs and sites to subscribe to. Danny asks a good question, “pity seach engine land isn’t in your google-related or tech bundles.” Agreed, there are a bunch of sites that likely should be in that bundle.

Google Reader now gives you the ability to subscribe to blogs and sites that do not publish content in your native language. You can select the “Translate into my language” option in the feed settings and Google Reader will automatically translate the content into your language. It will also remember this setting and continue to show you the translated version of that subscription, going forward.

The Google Reader team worked closely with the Google Translate team to make this possible.

FYI, so now you can subscribe to Search Engine Land En Español just for the kicks of it.

Let me explore both features below.

Gmail Gadgets:

You can now add the Calendar and Docs gadgets to the left hand side of your Gmail screen, next to the Chat and Labels area. Plus, you can add any Google Gadget to that area, although it isn’t all that easy to add random gadgets. To get started, go to Gmail > Settings > Labs and turn on either the “Google Calendar gadget” or Google Docs gadget or both. Then, if you want to reorder those items on the left navigation, turn on the “Navbar drag and drop” option in the same labs section.

What if you want to add other gadgets? Currently, the last option in the labs section is for “Add any gadget by URL.” You can enable that and then copy and paste the Gadget URL, typically ending in .xml, into the add box. Google does warn that “not all gadgets are fully compatible with https, so if you’re connecting to Gmail via https, you may see mixed content warnings caused by parts of the gadgets being served over http. We’re working on fixing this where we can.”

Google Reader Subscription Statistics:

Google Reader has added detailed statistics for your subscriptions. To see the details, all you need to do is click on the “show details” link at the top right of the subscriptions name. Here is a picture:

Once you click on that link, it will open up and show you three options for charts.

(1) Last 30 Days of posting activity for that subscription:

(2) Posting activity by time of day for that subscription:

(3) Posting activity by day of week for that subscription:

Do not forget that you also have Google Reader Trends, which shows your activity as a consumer of that content.

• Google has expanded the expanded the friends sharing feature to support all “supported” Google Reader languages.
• You can now tag feed items when you add a note.
• You can sort your subscriptions alphabetically or using “My Order” through drag and drop sorting.
• Plus you can see the last crawl date on the feed details view

The Google Reader blog has screen captures of all the features mentioned above, minus where to find the last crawl date. To see the last crawl date, click on a specific subscription and at the top right, click on “show details.” Here is a screen capture of what you will see in the details:

Why is that important? Well, when Google Reader first released friend share items, all your Gmail contacts saw all your shared feeds. So there were privacy concerns over such a feature, where Danny even called for Google to drop the feature completely until they came out with a more flexible solution.

Well, Google did not drop the feature, but they did launch this new, more flexible friend sharing feature, which should address many of the privacy concerns. It only took eight months to happen.

Almost two weeks ago, I wrote my Google Reader Gets Social With Friends Shared Items post detailing how disturbing it was that Google Reader was now sharing items with people it considered my friends, on an opt-out basis. Privacy concerns over this finally exploded this week, with Google Reader itself now reacting mainly to highlight how friend sharing can be enabled or disabled. Lost in the outcry seems to be the point that it’s always been the case that sharing any item would share it with the ENTIRE WORLD, and that hasn’t changed. But the change was significant in making more public a list of items that generally was hidden. Below, a revisit on sharing for the privacy concerned.

In a word, if you don’t want that "secret" item you’ve read via Google Reader to spill out in a way that your friends, family, enemies, or anyone can find it, DON’T SHARE IT!

How does sharing work in Google Reader? It looks like this:

See the big arrow pointing at the "Share" link? If I click on that link, the items gets Shared via my public list. MY PUBLIC LIST, as in a list the entire public can see.

Here’s how my shared items list looks internally to me. I just click on the "Your shared items" link in the left-hand navigation (the big red arrow is pointing at the right link):

After selecting that, I get a page listing my items with a message telling me that they are "publicly accessible," like this:

This isn’t new. Google’s been making shared items available to the entire public since March 2006. Here’s how my public page of shared items looks:

Because the URL is publicly accessible, ANYONE can see it. The only caveat is that they have to know where it is. If you’ve never given out the URL, then your items are somewhat safe. In addition, Google blocks these pages from being crawled and listed in search results.

Of course, click on an item from your public list (or if anyone else does), and your browser will pass along "referral" information that reveals the location to the site owner you visited from that page. So pretty safe, fairly private, but certainly not foolproof.

So why the freakout over this month’s change? As I wrote before in my earlier article:

I have a public feed of shared items here that anyone can access, if they know where to look. Why should these exact same items, being shared with a tiny subset of the entire world that they are already accessible to, freak me out?

The answer is because, as explained, while your shared items were public, pretty much no one knew where they were unless you proactively told them the location. But with Google’s change, Google Reader itself started proactively deciding people in your contact list were "friends" that should get a heads-up. Again, as I wrote:

Google Reader never asked if I wanted to be connected with my friends, i.e., whether I wanted to have Google itself start behind-the-scenes making relationships in Google Reader for me with people that previously were restricted to chat. It’s disconcerting.

Today’s Google Reader blog post doesn’t change the situation. By default, it’s still going tell all your contacts that you’ve shared an item, as my previous article details. Don’t like that? Then Google Reader suggests that you individually unshare items. Alternatively, it suggests that you tag items, then within the Settings area, enable items tagged with a particular word to be shared to the public.

Huh? How’s that help? Well, it goes back to the original situation where you have a public page, but no one knows the URL unless you tell them. Steve Rubel also describes the process here.

Frankly, a better solution would be to dump the friends sharing feature until it comes back in a new form, where you specifically and deliberately create a list of contacts that you do want to share material with. Again, as I wrote before:

I just think that if Google is going to start socializing its various applications, I need more granular control over who sees what, in the way that Facebook offers.

For more discussion, see Techmeme.