Do the new Google Preview Features insulate us from Viruses?

Factual Questions
1

Google has two new preview features.

1. Images - has bigger thumbnails, and if you click a thumbnail it looks like the image is hosted on google.

Example (this url is huge)
http://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://www.savoryexposure.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/richard-blais-eli-kirshtein.jpg&imgrefurl=http://www.savoryexposure.com/2009/08/snapshot-richard-blais-eli-kirshtein-the-variety/&h=599&w=898&sz=143&tbnid=-_EPFp-DIcFLpM:&tbnh=97&tbnw=146&prev=/images%3Fq%3DRichard%2BBlais&zoom=1&q=Richard+Blais&usg=__ievr1S6nZJRwurE2tV_kckvhnv4=&sa=X&ei=s8wITae5KIe1nAfO2-ibDw&ved=0CD4Q9QEwCA

If you close the image preview, you see the web site. Is that a safe preview or the real web site?

2. under web search Google has the magnifying glass that shows a snapshot of the web page. (this was added last month)

I’m not a web developer. I don’t know how to interpret these huge 500 character URL’s.

Is Google insulating us from viruses and malware? Is it 100% safe to use these previews? It looks like these are hosted on their servers.

I like the previews because I think I’m avoiding the risk of actually clicking on the web site. Is that true or not?

2

By clicking on your link, I was asked for a bunch of cookies (I have all cookie requests as prompts rather than automatic, and then block them permanently when the prompt comes up if I think they are intrusive), so I would say that it is the actual website and not google’s cache. I could be wrong, but in this case it makes sense.

3

Your link goes to a Google Images image preview. That is an actual Google web page on the actual Google server … but inside it in an iframe is the actual site from which the image came, not a cached version of it.

So in this instance, your browser is indeed pulling up the code on whatever web site the image is hosted on, even though it is surrounded by a frame of code from Google.

As for the huge site preview images you see in Web search results…those are just flat images hosted on the Google site. Basically Google takes an actual screen grab of the page in the results and stores it, then when you get that page as a result of a search, it serves up that image when you click the “preview” icon.

That image can’t hurt you.

I do not believe that either of these new features - the updated image search results, or the site preview, are meant to keep anyone from getting a virus. The site preview, MAYBE, but I’d venture to guess that is more of a way to keep people from clicking through to a useless site (such as a spam page with no useful content, just keywords).

4

oh well. I was hoping we finally had a safe way to peek at a web site without exposing our self to their code.

Two years ago I tried looking up the lyrics to a rock song. The instant I entered the web site all hell broke out on my pc. Welcome to Vundo. Malwarebytes would clean it and it would resurface two days later. I finally formatted the drive and reinstalled.

Someone needs to develop a web site that would take snapshots & cache of another site. If you click a link, it makes a new snapshot. Make it 100% safe. I’d pay for that service in a heartbeat. A head to toe body condom for my pc. :wink:

5

Google does cache its websites: you just have to use the cache link at the bottom of the search result link. And if you’re really worried, you can then quickly click the “text-only” link at the top of the resulting page.