McAfee Study Finds AOL Has Safest Search Results
A recent study conducted by McAfee’s SiteAdvisor group titled "The State of Search Engine Safety" concluded that of the five largest search engines, AOL had the safest search results while Yahoo! had the most unsafe results.
Utilizing automated techniques the study found that 4% of search results from the five major search engines led to potentially dangerous Web sites. Of all sponsored results, 7% were found to be potentially dangerous.
These numbers show an improvement of about 20% from May 2006.
Though glad to see the progress, vice president of Consumer Growth Initiatives at McAfee SiteAdvisor, Tim Dowling, still sees a very tangible risk for Web users.
He said that "with four out of five Web site visits starting with a search engine query, consumers are still exposed to hundreds of millions of risky searches per month." Dowling also added that "an active search engine user, one that performs more than 10 searches per day, is likely to visit a dangerous site at least once a day."
After amassing a list of 2,300 search terms, the McAfee team ran queries with the terms in Google, Yahoo!, MSN, AOL, and Ask. The first five results pages were analyzed for their safety.
McAfee ran a number of tests on each site they surveyed, which included signing up for newsletters to track any increases in spam e-mails, evaluating any downloads from the site for malicious software, examining each site to see if there were any security abuses, and inspecting any outgoing links for similar possibilities.
Over eight million sites have been analyzed in this fashion by McAfee, which says that this stable of sites represents 90% of all Web traffic.
AOL had the safest results according to the study, while Google finished second. Yahoo! had the most dangerous results, with over 5% of its results linking to risky sites. Yahoo! was also the only search engine to show an increase in potentially dangerous search results since the last study was conducted by the McAfee SiteAdvisor group.
An interesting finding from the study was that search queries for digital music were more dangerous than queries for sexually explicit content. According to the study, 19.1% of searches for the "digital music" category led to potentially harmful sites. Only 9.1% of the results for adult search term queries were risky.
Regardless, the survey made it clear that the risk of coming across a risky site while searching for nonadult content is about half of what it is when searching for adult content.
A relatively major source of concern should be the prevalence of risky sites being shown in the sponsored links sections on search engines. It seems that more attention should be paid to the submissions that search engines receive for sponsored spots. Again, it boils down to the entities that make spamming, malware attacks, and the like profitable and appealing in the first place. Much of the burden for stopping these practices must lie on those who inadvertently fund them.
Source:
http://www.newsfactor.com/story.xhtml?story_id=010000CEUEQO
