By Rosa Golijan

Google is now capable of detecting a particular type of malware and warning you if it's lurking on your computer. What on earth will this silly search engine do next?

In a post on Google's official blog, security engineer Damian Menscher explained that the company recently noticed "some unusual search traffic" while performing routine maintenance on its servers. Further investigation revealed that this odd traffic is the work of computers infected by a type of malicious software.

Since they realized that they could detect and identify the malware infection, the folks at Google decided to start warning people about it by displaying a "prominent notification" on top of search results viewed on affected computers. The simple warning will lead users to a page which explains why the notification is appearing and how to rid a computer of this particular piece of malicious software.

Now before you decide to stop regularly scanning your computer for viruses and malware, allow me to emphasize that Google's new feature only detects a particular type of infection:

This particular malware causes infected computers to send traffic to Google through a small number of intermediary servers called “proxies.” We hope that by taking steps to notify users whose traffic is coming through these proxies, we can help them update their antivirus software and remove the infections.

Got that? Let me repeat it: Google only checks for one particular type of malware right now. You should still keep your guard up and practice safe browsing and computing.

And don't let flashy ads on some other sites trick you into believing that your computer is infected — Google's only checking for malware when you're using its site.

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Rosa Golijan writes about tech here and there. She's obsessed with Twitter and loves to be liked on Facebook. Oh, and she can be found on Google+, too

Rosa Golijan