Silicon.com: Yahoo! gets tooled-up to fight spyware

Move over Gmail, Yahoo seems to be gunning to have the beta product most alarming to privacy advocates. It announced it is testing an upgraded toolbar product - created by PestPatrol - that searches the content of users hard drives to root out spyware and the like. Offering the toolbar only to a select few (no Mac owners need apply) at beta.toolbar.yahoo.com.

The new product seizes on the two trends of seen growing at this week's AD:TECH conference in San Francisco: everyone and their cat seems to be developing toolbars, and many people are trying to avoid the label of adware or spyware (e.g., toolbars) because of threatening noises made by privacy advocates and legislators.

The hard drive searching toolbar may provide Yahoo an interesting footprint with which it could later roll out web-and-hard-drive search tools.