Pandia Radio Search is dead, long live Pandia Radio Search.

One of our more popular sections of the Pandia site is Pandia Radio Search, a directory of online radio station for people who want to have radio shows streamed to their computer. Lately this has been the only part of the site that has been fully outsourced to another service provider, namely the TVRadioNetwork.

Malware infection

Needless to say, we were very much disturbed when Google the other day sent us an email explaining that www.pandia.com/radio “can cause users to be infected with malicious software”.

Somehow the TVRadioNetwork directory had been used to distribute malware – we guess using the banner ads included in search results. The fact that the entire TVRadioNetwork site has a warning in Google search results is a dead giveaway.

If anyone has caught malware using the directory, we truly apologize. We had reason to believe the directory was safe. It turns out it wasn’t.

The directory itself was not hosted on our server (we framed it), and our own server has not been infected!

The new radio and music search portal

We would really hate to abandon a useful service completely, however, so we decided to turn the bad into something good.

We decided to establish a whole new Pandia Radio Search portal giving radio and music hungry searchers easy access to the best radio and music directories in the world.

For good measure, we have also included links to podcast search engines and essential apps and software used to stream music to PCs.

In collaboration with RadioTuna we also provide a malware-free radio player embedded in the portal itself. All for free.

So what about the Google warnings? They will remain until Google has reviewed the site. If your site is affected, you can ask for such a review by registering your site at Google Webmaster Central.The warning will appear in the Message Center.

Webmaster Central guide to removing malware.