In addition to the badware notices that Google is now displaying for sites identified as malicious, the search company has decided to start displaying notices for redirect URLs.  Previously, a URL that looked like this:

 http://www.google.com/url?q=http://www.someredirectsite.com

Would simply take you to http://www.someredirectsite.com.  But without going into much detail I can assume you'd see where the problem with that approach might lie.  If I'm an unobservant or unknowing Internet user I might think that the URL was part of Google's website.  And since I trust Google, I'd just assume that the linked site was also trustworthy.

To correct the potential problems that could arise from this,  Google has started displaying messages like this:

This should certainly help detour malicious website and phishers from being able to use Google as a redirect to their shady sites.  And unlike the badware warnings, which can sometimes be tacked on to innocent or unknowing websites, these notices shouldn't really be of any concern to legitimate websites.

I'm glad to see Google taking a proactive stance on this possible manipulation of their search engine.