McAfee Study Finds 4 Percent of Search Results Malicious

"The State of Search Engine Safety," a recent study by McAfee's SiteAdvisor group, has some classic good news and bad news for Internet surfers. Using several automated techniques, the SiteAdvisor study determined that 4 percent of the query results offered by the major search engines lead to potentially dangerous Web sites, and the total for sponsored links is nearly twice as high at 7 percent. The good news, however, is that the number of potentially dangerous search engine links has declined by roughly 20 percent from May 2006, when the SiteAdvisor group released its initial survey.
"We're encouraged to see some improvement in search engine safety this year. But 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," said Tim Dowling, vice president, Consumer Growth Initiatives, McAfee SiteAdvisor. "In fact, 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."
Internet analyst Greg Sterling of Sterling Market Intelligence said that the threat of hitting a risky site, particularly if it is a sponsored link, could become a problem for search engines. "It's definitely a potential concern," he said. "It's a question of how widespread the problem is in reality, and second, [whether it rises] to a level of publicity that makes it something that has to be addressed head-on."
Evaluating Search Engines
The "Search Engine Safety" study was compiled by testing the links offered by the Internet's five largest search engines: Google, Yahoo, MSN, AOL, and Ask. Using several sources, McAfee compiled a list of 2,300 search terms and ran them through the various search engines. The company then assessed the relative safety of the links produced on the first five results pages of each search engine.
For each site, McAfee ran several tests: signing up for newsletters to check for an increase in spam; inspecting available downloads for malware, including spyware, Trojan horses, and viruses; testing each linked site for possible security exploits; and testing outgoing links for similar problems. McAfee said in its report that it has examined over eight million sites for potential problems, a total that represents more than 90 percent of all Web traffic.
The study concluded that AOL currently offers the safest search results, with Google second. Yahoo, with more than 5 percent of its links rated "red" or "yellow," offered the highest number of potentially risky sites and also was the only search engine to show an increase in link risk since the SiteAdvisor group's last survey.
Surprising Results
One of the more surprising results in the survey was the fact that it can be more dangerous to search for online music than it is for sexually explicit materials. The SiteAdvisor team found that 19.1 percent of the searches in the category of "digital music" led to risky sites, compared to just 9.4 percent for adult search terms.
In fact, the category of "adult search terms" did not even make the top 10 most dangerous categories, unless one includes the No. 10 entry, "popular brunettes."
However, it is worth pointing out that, unlike many other categories, the risk of stumbling across a dangerous Web site while searching for adult content has increased over the past six months. The risk is growing particularly quickly in the category of sponsored links, where the percentage of dangerous sites rose from 13.3 percent to 22.9 percent.
The survey's authors took pains to point out that while some categories pose greater risk than adult searches, the risk of hitting a dangerous site while searching for nonadult content is roughly half what it is when searching for adult material.