How Google Safe Browsing Builds Safer Web by Helping Developers

1. How Google Safe Browsing Builds Safer Web by Helping Developers Developers have the right tool, Google Safe Browsing, which can help them identify issues with their websites and get them sorted out. (Img source: https://developers.google.com/safe-browsing/) Experienced companies offering web design in Long Island, NY will ensure their clients’ websites offer a safe browsing experience for their customers or potential customers. Safety and privacy are important factors that Google values highly and expects of websites. So while your website must have a great, user-friendly interface and provide all the relevant answers users look for, it also must not harbor threats for users. Over 4 Billion Devices Protected Each Day Google Safe Browsing (GSB) protects more than 4 billion devices each day. It shows warnings to users trying to visit dangerous sites without realizing the dangers involved. It also provides warnings when users try to download dangerous files. Where this helps webmasters is that GSB notifies them if it detects that their websites have been compromised. It also helps them get the issue resolved. Among the details GSB provides are the Transparency Report that contains the Site Status tool which helps determine whether a website contains content that is dangerous as per GSB standards. Keeping All Google Platforms Safe

2. Safe Browsing kicks in whenever the user loads a page in most of the browsers out there. It even activates when the Google Play Store is used for selecting an app. Safe Browsing checks for any malicious behavior and notifies the user of anything suspicious. All major Google platforms are covered, including Gmail, Chrome, AdSense and Android, though there is always the challenge of ensuring that only malicious stuff is flagged and blocked but not any legitimate activity. This challenge is not totally dealt with, though Safe Browsing is indeed credited with making the Web a safer place than it used to be. So the warning message that Chrome shows when the user is heading for a dangerous site or app is the result of Google Safe Browsing kicking in. It also works to keep the Chrome Web Store from extensions that are potentially harmful. All these technologies not only help the end user, but also developers and webmasters who create the website, develop the apps and provide their potential customers with the user experience. Developers are offered free Safe Browsing features. That is important for web hosting, when you want to ensure a safe experience at your website for your users. Google’s Safe Browsing APIs for Developers Google offers the Safe Browsing APIs (currently v4 version). The APIs provide greater power to developers to check if their URLs are part of Google’s vibrant unsafe web resources lists. These lists usually contain sites hosting unwanted software or malware, or sites carrying out phishing or any other kind of deception. In addition, there are other features too offered by Safe Browsing APIs. The Simple Lookup API The Lookup API enables client applications to check the status of their URLs by sending them to Google’s Safe Browsing server. The API is quite user-friendly since there are only simple checks conducted. All you need to send is an HTTP POST request along with the URLs. The server gets back to you stating whether your URL is safe or not. The negatives of this simplicity are that you can’t ensure privacy of your URLs since they are not hashed and the server can see the URLs that you send for checking. The response time of the request could also be delayed sometimes, since it is the server that processes it. For more advanced checking though, you need the more complex Update API. The More Complex Update API With the Update API, client applications can download encrypted Safe Browsing lists for local and client- side URL checks. The big advantage of the Update API is that it provides high frequency verdicts with minimal latency. This is a better solution than the Lookup API when you have large user sets to protect. As a result, many platforms and web browsers typically use the Update API. It also offers greater privacy than the Lookup API since the data exchange with the server is quite infrequent. The URLs are hashed and the server can never really know the actual URLs the client queries. And since the client maintains a local database containing copies of Safe Browsing lists, the server need not be queried every time a URL must be checked. As a result, the response time is a lot less.

3. Because of the greater features the Update API offers, it is also more complex. You must first get a local database set up before downloading and periodically updating the Safe Browsing list copies that are stored as SHA256 hashes of variable length. You must also be able to canonicalize URLs, get prefix and suffix expressions created and also compute SHA256 hashes to compare with the local Safe Browsing list copies and the server-stored lists. Experienced companies providing search engine optimization in Long Island offer all aspects of digital marketing and web development services. The tools offered by Google Safe Browsing can help them make their clients’ websites safer. (631) 494-3324