When the popular free AVG 8.0 anti-virus product was released recently, it used a ‘pre-scanner’ of sorts on web search results which, ironically, was somewhat virus-like. This scanner led to an significant amount of junk traffic and bandwidth usage which web masters had to deal with.

After some complaint AVG has corrected the problem and is rolling out versions which will address this issue (here is a very unofficial announcement). I use AVG 7.5 on my home computer and was holding back consideration of upgrading until this problem was addressed, as I did not want to knowingly cause ‘web-spam’. I’m still going to wait until support for 7.5 ends, but at least now I know it is web friendly.