Google’s Safe Browsing Diagnostic Tool

A week ago Google announced the release of a safe browsing diagnostic tool. To use the tool, just append a URL to the end of https://www.google.com/safebrowsing/diagnostic?site=. For example, to test this site, you would enter https://www.google.com/safebrowsing/diagnostic?site=https://searchengineland.com/. Google will then return four sets of security information about that page. (1) The current listing status of a […]

A week ago Google announced the release of a safe browsing diagnostic tool. To use the tool, just append a URL to the end of https://www.google.com/safebrowsing/diagnostic?site=.

For example, to test this site, you would enter https://www.google.com/safebrowsing/diagnostic?site=https://searchengineland.com/. Google will then return four sets of security information about that page.


(1) The current listing status of a site and also information on how often a site or parts of it were listed in the past.
(2) The last time Google analyzed the page, when it was last malicious, what kind of malware Google encountered and so fourth.
(3) Did the site facilitated the distribution of malicious software in the past?
(4) Also, has the site has hosted malicious software in the past?

Google has shown an example of a site that has malicious results. To see such results, go over here, it is safe to click the link. If you do not want to click the link, I have provided a full screen capture below.

Google Safe Browsing diagnostic page for malware.testing.google.test-testing-malware- (20080523)

The Zero Day blog has some additional information on this Google security release.

NOTE: If you saw a malware warning on Jan. 31, 2009, this was due to an error that briefly impacted all web sites. See Google Gets Fearful, Flags Entire Internet As Malware Briefly, for more.


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About the Author

Barry Schwartz

Barry Schwartz is a technologist and a Contributing Editor to Search Engine Land and a member of the programming team for SMX events. He owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics.

In 2019, Barry was awarded the Outstanding Community Services Award from Search Engine Land, in 2018 he was awarded the US Search Awards the "US Search Personality Of The Year," you can learn more over here and in 2023 he was listed as a top 50 most influential PPCer by Marketing O'Clock.

Barry can be followed on X here and you can learn more about Barry Schwartz over here or on his personal site.