McAfee updates pioneering search engine safety study

4 Jun 2007

Summary

McAfee has updated its Search Engine Safety Research. (See my 11 Dec 2006 blog.) It reports that although the safety of using search engines has improved slightly, searching still presents more risk than it should to consumers. Read the article.

• More than 276 million searches per month lead to risky sites. (That's 4 percent of all search results.)
• Sponsored results (those paid by advertisers to be placed in search results) are still two-and-a-half times more likely to return risky Web sites than non-sponsored results. However, this is better than last year, and the improvement is largely due to Google's efforts to clean up its act.
• AOL remains the safest search engine, followed by Google, Ask, then MSN. Yahoo remains the most likely to return risky results (nearly twice as often as AOL).
• Searching on technology phrases, music, or file sharing continues to return a high percentage of risky sites—for example, "Bearshare" (45.9 percent), and "limewire" (37.1 percent).
• Bucking the trend, the risks of searching on adult keywords have increased by 17.5 percent since December 2006 and 22 percent of sponsored adult searches return risky results.

The McAfee research suggests that people who conduct more than ten searches a day are likely to visit at least one dangerous site a day. This should convince you to make sure that your computer has the best security software possible, including functionality that warns you about possible risks before you click a site. I use McAfee’s Site Advisor for this. (Note: I am not paid by McAfee in any way.)

Search engine companies continue to deliberately place consumers at risk by accepting sponsored results from companies with disreputable and fraudulent practices. They do so because it's in their financial interest. If you don’t like this, YOU have the power to change it. The search engine business is a fiercely competitive 1.6 billion dollar business and YOU are the commodity being sold—advertisers pay search engines for access to your eyes. To increase your safety, switch to a safer search engine or contact the search engine provider you use now and demand higher standards for advertisers and better protection for you.