According to a recently published study conducted by McAfee SiteAdvisor, 8.5% of sponsored links on major search engines led users to “risky” sites, as opposed to 3.1% of natural results. The study tested results of popular keyword searches on Google, Yahoo!, MSN, AOL, and Ask.com. About 1,400 keywords were taken from Google Zeitgeist and Yahoo! Top Searches for the study.
Ask.com had the largest number of risky results with 6.1%, which includes both sponsored and organic links. Google and AOL followed behind with 5.3%, while Yahoo! had 4.3% and MSN had 3.9% of their links and results dubbed as risky.
In response to the study, Yahoo! issued a statement that said that they are “continually enhancing the search experience it delivers to users.” Yahoo! also pointed out that they have anti-spy tools readily available to its users.
Microsoft is currently in the process of solving this problem with its Strider HoneyMonkey Project, which hopes to enable Microsoft to weed out the sites that could harm a user’s computer by installing malware without the user knowing.
Yahoo! and Google also require pharmaceutical advertisers to be a member of the SquareTrade Pharmacy Program to ensure that they can be trusted.
Despite all the measures that search engines are taking to battle this issue, many experts maintain that defeating the foe is impossible. Andrew Jaquith said, “It’s kind of an intractable problem. It’s not easy to police each and every applicant for malware.” Jaquith is an analyst with Yankee Group, a research firm based in Boston.
Another analyst at Yankee Group, Jennifer Simpson, said that “This is the first thing that can affect trust, and trust in the results is the first thing that will drive people towards or away from a search engine.”
Shane Keats, market strategist at SiteAdvisor, said, “One takeaway that I hope comes out of this study is that search engines do more to protect consumers.”
Source:
http://www.internetnews.com/ent-news/
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