McAfee SiteAdvisor

» see siteadvisor.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

SiteAdvisor showed up on my machines around 2007 the way most people got it, which is to say I never chose it. It came riding in on some other installer at university, on a TTNet line, in the years when every free download in Turkey arrived with a second thing attached. Then Google results had little colored circles beside them and I left it alone, because the circles were usually right.

The company behind it was founded in April 2005 by a group of MIT engineers and demoed publicly at CodeCon on 10 February 2006. Chris Dixon was CEO. The pitch was that nobody could tell from a search result whether a site would ruin their Windows install, and that this was answerable by machine rather than by editors.

Fourteen months after that demo McAfee bought the company, on 5 April 2006, for a figure Dixon later put at $74 million. It was the exit that made his career, and it moved a small research product into the consumer security business, where it stayed for ten years.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ 197 emails a week ~

The method was the interesting part and nobody has repeated it at that scale since. SiteAdvisor ran fleets of bots that visited sites, downloaded whatever executables they offered and installed them inside a Windows virtual machine, watching for adware and for calls out to servers the program had no reason to contact. By early 2006 it had put more than 140,000 programs through that.

The other half was blunter. The bots typed a unique throwaway address into any signup form they could find, more than 900,000 of them, and then simply counted what arrived. That produced warnings written in the first person, of the shape "after entering our e-mail address on this site, we received 197 e-mails per week." It was the rare security product that could show its work in a single sentence a normal person understood.

~ how it got onto everything ~

The ratings were free and the extension was free, so McAfee's return on $74 million had to come from distribution. SiteAdvisor went into the consumer suites, and then into the bundle economy: the pre-ticked box in a media player installer, the offer stapled to a Java or Reader update, the thing your uncle's laptop had four copies of. For a stretch it was one of the most widely installed browser extensions in the world without anybody having asked for it.

The criticism came from the same place as the strength. A rating was only as fresh as the last crawl, so a green check on a site compromised last week told you the opposite of the truth, and there was a long tail of webmasters who found themselves flagged red with no obvious appeal. The Register covered one of those fights in 2008. A safety label at web scale turns out to be a claim you have to keep making forever.

~ the rename ~

There was no shutdown notice, which is why the date on this grave is a year and not a day. The last build shipped under the SiteAdvisor name was version 3.7.290 in March 2016. After that McAfee's consumer line carried McAfee WebAdvisor instead, same ratings, same colored icons, different word.

The proof is still live. Type siteadvisor.com into a browser in 2026 and it answers with a one second meta refresh straight into the WebAdvisor product page on mcafee.com, a redirect somebody set up years ago and nobody has had a reason to remove.

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