Search Engine Journal reports that online security firm Aladdin Knowledge Systems identified a potential “flaw, which allows the search engines to deliver malicious pages that have already been removed from the web.” What that means as a practical matter is that hacked pages, which have already been taken down or otherwise cleaned up, may still be visible to end users through Web search via caching, which generally speeds up delivery of search results.

The following statement was provided by Yahoo:

“Yahoo! is committed to protecting its users from malicious sites on the Web and we follow up aggressively on reports about potentially malicious pages. This is an ongoing battle for all search engines and Yahoo! has processes in place to quickly remove cached pages.”

Related Topics: Channel: Consumer | Legal: Security

About The Author: Greg Sterling is a Contributing Editor at Search Engine Land. He writes a personal blog Screenwerk, about SoLoMo issues and connecting the dots between online and offline. He also posts at Internet2Go, which is focused on the mobile Internet. Follow him @gsterling. See more articles by Greg Sterling

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