For some time now, Google have been putting warnings in their search results about potentially dangerous sites - these are perhaps ones that have been reported for phishing or for having potentially harmfull downloads.

It seems now that Yahoo are following this with their own warnings about sites. I was surprised to see this warning when searching for a clients search term "electronic display information":

Fortunately, the warning in question has nothing to do with my client - but the actual listing of the potentially dangerous site included further information about the potential issues with this site:

I think that its good that search engines are alerting searchers to the potential dangers that are associated to a particular domain.

I'm not quite sure that these pages/sites should appear in the search engine listings if there are real dangers associated to them.

However, the counter argument to that is that these pages are ranking in these positions by merit, and a warning of "potential" dangers associated with the site shouldnt prevent that site from retaining that ranking.

I'm sure that the warning about the site stops them receiving too much traffic though, as I am sure that the warning will stop most people from deciding to click on that particular listing.