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This is Scary - Googlebot Indexing Windows Installer Files .msi

windows-live-writer

Something very surprising - while searching for Windows Live Writer Installer on Google Search, one of the top search results directly links to Writer.msi - an executable Windows binary file stored on one of the Microsoft webservers.

Now since this file is hosted on Microsoft, it maybe pretty safe do download and run it on your hard disk but could there be a situation when Google indexes executables that are trojans or even viruses ?

You click on the search result and if the browser download manager is configured to download files automatically, you could have a potentially unsafe file sitting on your file system that may spell trouble the moment someone double clicks that file.

The filetype search operator doesn't work for msi or exe files extensions but inurl works. For example, we found a couple of exe files on Sourceforge.net appearing in Google search results.

Not sure how Googlebot reacts when it encounters binary files like exe's or msi's but this issue might be something to worry about.

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