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Since Grisoft, the company that makes the popular free anti-virus software AVG, stopped supporting updates for version 7 of their software, I made the plunge and downloaded the upgrade to version 8 a few days ago. I hadn’t really noticed any differences in the new version (one of the best things about AVG is that you never really notice it’s there, unless it’s updating), but today I started wondering about what I initially thought was a new feature in Google: some weird green stars that appeared next to my search results:

After a while, I got curious and moused-over one of them. Turns out they’re a feature of AVG’s software, not Google’s site, called LinkChecker. It basically analyzes sites for potential mal- or spy-ware content, then rates them as either a red X, yellow !, or green star. Since I’d only seen green stars so far, I did a quick search for ‘warez,’ which is guaranteed to get you crap every time. Sure enough, the picture was a little different:

I’m not really sure about the diagnosis of some of the sites as ‘Risky’–they seemed pretty much to be categorized as such merely because they were ‘Cracks’ sites–but then again, I kind of had the same assumption based on my choice of search term. Most importantly, I haven’t noticed any performance change in Firefox. If the page doesn’t load quickly enough, a throbber simply takes the place of a rating until it can be returned. You can click through to any page without having to wait. All in all, a pretty nice feature.