Dear Kris and Terry,
We received your message reporting no annotations ( = site advisor ratings) on the google search results page on a Vista OS. Thank you for contacting us.
We would need some more information before we could help you out. Please answer the following questions:-
1. Could you please specify the version of SiteAdvisor you are using. To find this,
(i) Click on the black arrow mark in the SiteAdvisor toolbar
(ii) A drop-down menu would appear. On this menu, click on the "About" option
(iii) In the 'About' dialog box, just above the 'OK' button, 'Version' would be displayed. (e.g., 2.6.0.6253).
2. Could you please specify the google domain on which you performed the search. For example was it on
http://www.google.com or
http://www.google.ca (- Google Canada). It might be possible that in on of the localised search engines that the annotations ( - site advisor ratings) are not displayed. We do annonate on most of these localized search engines. But, it is possible that on some of these search engines annotations are not displayed. In that case, this is a bug and we will fix it.
3. Please specify the browser that you used to perform the google search. Currently, SiteAdvisor supports only Internet Explorer (version 6.0 and above) and Firefox (version 1.5 and above) browsers. So, if you were using other browsers like Safari, Netscape Navigator or Opera, no annotations ( - site advisor ratings) will be displayed by SiteAdvisor.
4. Were you able to consistently reproduce this issue on your Vista machine? Were annotations ( - site advisor ratings) displayed on other search engines like Yahoo! search (
http://search.yahoo.com), MSN (
http://www.msn.com), Live(
http://www.live.com) and ask.com(
http://www.ask.com).
5. Do you have the SSL option turned 'off' on your Internet Explorer browser? To check this,
(i) Open Internet Explorer
(ii) Click on Tools (or press Alt+T)
(iii) Click on 'Internet Options'
(iv) Click on the 'Advanced' tab
(v) In the list of options displayed, scroll down to the bottom where the 'Security' options are diplayed. Here check if 'Use SSL 2.0' and 'Use SSL 3.0' are checked (These options would be checked by default).
If these options are unchecked, then check whether SiteAdvisor SSL option is turned on. To check this, please follow the stpes given below:-
(i) Click on the black arrow mark in the SiteAdvisor toolbar
(ii) A drop-down menu would appear. On this menu, click on the "Settings..." option
(iii) Check whether 'Use SSL communications to server' option is checked (This option will be unchecked by default).
If the SSL option of Internet Explorer is unchecked and SiteAdvisor's SSL option is checked, then you will not be able to see any annotations on any search engine (google, yahoo, msn, live, etc.). This is a known issue. This is because Internet explorer has disabled SSL communications and SiteAdvisor is trying use SSL to communicate with our servers. Hence, SiteAdvisor is unable to communicate and search result are not annotated.
To overcome this, we suggest that you turn on SSL in Internet option. Make sure the option is checked. This is good since SSL provides secure communications on the Internet for web browsing, e-mail, instant messaging, etc. Once you turn this feature 'on' by checking the option , close and re-open your browser and perform any search on Google. you should be able to see annotations ( - site advisor ratings)
Also let us know know whether annotations were displayed on page refresh (Hit the F5 key or right click on the page and click on the 'Refresh' option). Please perform another search on google and check if annotations are displayed.
You could also try re-installing, SiteAdvisor. That might solve the problem.
We will try reproducing this issue on multiple Vista machines. Once you give us more information we'll get back to you immediately with a solution if possible. Thank you for being a McAfee customer.
Sincerely,
Praveen Rajaretnam
Associate Software QA Engineer
McAfee SiteAdvisor Consumer QA