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Search Engines Increases Risk from Dangerous Sites: Study

"Search engine users are at risk of clicking through to Web sites that can compromise their online safety," said McAfee in a research conducted on safety of Internet search engines.

The investigation, which studied the 5 major search engines such as Google, Yahoo!, MSN, AOL, Ask was initiated in January and concluded in April, found that even common search terms can lead users to risky sites.

The research found that most search engines popular keywords returned risky sites. In key words such as 'free screensavers', 'digital music', 'popular software' and 'singers', 72 percent of the returned results contained some kind of dangerous site and "singers."

"Search engines clearly play a critical role in Internet use: As a convenient starting point for online browsing, they're estimated to account for about half of all site visits," said Chris Dixon, who heads the McAfee SiteAdvisor product team. "But economically motivated purveyors of spam, adware and other online problems quickly follow where consumers go online, in this case directly to search engine results. Today, based on browsing trends, we estimate that U.S. Internet users make 285 million clicks to hostile sites every month through search queries."

The study also finds that "sponsored" results - those paid for by advertisers - are more dangerous than non-sponsored results. On average, 8.5 percent of sponsored links were found to be dangerous versus 3.1 percent of non-sponsored links.

"Search engines are too important to become just another online activity dominated by the worst elements on the Internet," Ben Edelman, author of the researh noted. "Users need and deserve a way to search safely, and the security community can help."


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