Clicking on search engine results can be hazardous to your computer’s health, leading Web surfers into some risky online behavior, including spyware downloads, computer viruses, phishing scams and spamming.
That’s the conclusion of a survey published Friday by security software vendor McAfee, which found that all the top search engines returned dangerous sites in their search results for popular keywords. Risky sites were particularly prevalent in results for popular keywords, with searches on terms such as “free screensavers”, “digital music”, “popular software”, “games”, “movies” and “singers” returning dangerous sites at a rate of as much as 72%.
The study found that sponsored results and pay-per-click ads contained two to four times as many dangerous sites as organic results. On average, 8.5% of paid results by advertisers were judged to be “dangerous”, compared to 3.1% of natural search links.
Conducted by McAfee subsidiary SiteAdvisor, the study compiled almost 1400 popular keywords and examined the first five pages of results for each keyword from searches on Google, Yahoo!, MSN, AOL Search and Ask.com. The sponsored links and organic results from each search were the compared to SiteAdvisor’s database of unsafe sites that conduct browser exploits, download spyware, adware or other unwanted programs, serve pop-ups, link to dangerous sites or misuse e-mail addresses.
SiteAdvisor found that Ask.com results had the highest danger level at 6.1% for both organic and paid results, while MSN search results were judged the safest, with only a 3.9% average danger level. Dangerous sites made up 5.3% and 4.3% of the results at Google and Yahoo! respectively.
Overall, the McAfee study concluded that search engine results lead U.S. consumers to make 285 million clicks on risky sites every month.
“Users are at especially high risk when visiting search engine advertisers—even though search engines are well equipped to impose strict guidelines on sites buying prominent placement,” the study said.
