What is the domain "safebrowsing-cache.google.com" used for?

Safe Browsing is a service from Google that helps fighting the spam and phishing sites by blocking them in the browser.

When you go to a site, it's checked by Google. If it's returned as problematic, you get a warning in the browser.

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Safe Browsing is integrated in Google Chrome and in the Google Toolbar.

Snark

Posted 2009-11-13T07:31:56.550

Reputation: 30 147

If used by a browser, then it's not used in all browsers. Like obviously Internet Explorer uses its own database for "SmartScreen (See http://www.carbonwind.net/blog/post/2009/09/15/IE8-SmartScreen-Filter-and-TMG-Beta-3-URL-Filtering%28using-Microsoft-Reputation-Service-Beta%29-Whate28099s-inside-SSL%28e2809cquery-traffice2809d%29.aspx) Firefox 3 and later (even without the Google toolbar) uses Google's API though, but makes calls to http://safebrowsing.clients.google.com/? (See http://code.google.com/p/google-safe-browsing/wiki/Protocolv2Spec)

– Arjan – 2009-11-13T07:43:01.753

1Ah, it seems that the response to calling http://safebrowsing.clients.google.com might include instructions to fetch details from http://safebrowsing-cache.google.com. Problem solved. The browser should indeed cache these results, so one should not see a browser fetching the full list all the time. – Arjan – 2009-11-13T07:52:44.747

Thanks , i have no idea why its so huge but caused quite a bit of traffic on the network – RC1140 – 2009-11-13T08:10:58.407

If it's huge all day long, then some browser is not behaving right. Or maybe some portable browser (on a USN stick) does not cache the results, or maybe someone is wiping all cache from disk every time. (I assume that the bad URL cache is not cleared when clearing the regular browser cache though.) The initial load of the list of bad URLs might take some time indeed, but I don't know if that's minutes or hours. – Arjan – 2009-11-13T08:37:02.533

What is the domain "safebrowsing-cache.google.com" used for?

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