Often troubled by the bad links that search engines throw up? Breathe easy. There’s some good news that’s coming your way. Online searches have become relatively safer, though not to the extent one might expect, thanks to search companies awareness.
McAfee studied five search engines —Google, Yahoo, MSN, AOL and Ask—since May and found that chances of clicking through risky sites declined 12 per cent. Despite the reduction, McAfee says consumers end up entering bad sites more than 268 million times each month.
McAfee SiteAdvisor gave the most visited sites red, yellow, or green ratings. A company release said red ratings are given to risky sites that fail one or more of McAfee's tests for adware, spyware, viruses, exploits, spam e- mail, excessive pop-ups or strong affiliations with other red rated sites. Green rated sites passed each of these tests. Yellow ratings are given to sites which pass McAfee's safety tests but which still have nuisances warranting a user advisory.
Among the study's key findings were:
1. All search engines return some risky results. AOL returns the safest results with 3.6 per cent of results rated red or yellow by McAfee SiteAdvisor. On average, 4.4 per cent of search results link to risky Web sites.
2. 8 per cent of sponsored results are rated red or yellow, almost three times the 3 per cent of organic results rated red and yellow.
3. Adult search terms are twice as likely to lead to unsafe results as non-adult search terms: 8 per cent of results for adult terms are red or yellow vs. 4.1 per cent for non-adult terms.
4. 41 per cent of risky ratings are due to e-mail signups that result in spam. Risky downloads and scams (such as selling software like the Firefox or Internet Explorer browsers which are free) each account for a quarter of the results. 3 per cent of red and yellow search results contain browser exploits– particularly serious threats that can damage a PC once consumers merely browse to a site. Just under one third of risky results are due to sites aggressively linking to other risky sites. Many sites exhibit multiple dangers.
5. Overall riskiness of search engines declined by 12 per cent, while the percentage of red and yellow sites in sponsored ads decreased by almost 6 per cent.
Chris Dixon, director of strategy, McAfee SiteAdvisor said, "It's good to see that clicking on search engine results has gotten modestly safer. But when almost one of 12 sponsored links still clicks through to a risky site, there remains significant room for continued improvement."
McAfee used a compilation of about 2,500 popular keywords derived from lists of common searches from the search engines. The first five pages of search results for each keyword were then analyzed for each of the five search engines.
According to the study, any search containing free is likely to lead to sites with morally offensive practices. According to McAfee, the word "free’ linked 14.5 per cent of search results to sites rated yellow or red. Of the Google Zeitgeist search terms analysed, the most dangerous category is "tech toys," examples of which include "ipod nano," "mp3 music downloads," and "winmx." 23.3 per cent of results for this category were rated red or yellow by McAfee SiteAdvisor. Another dangerous Google Zeitgeist category of note includes "childhood favorites" (6.7 per cent risky results) which includes keywords such as "Winnie the Pooh" and "Tweety."
Since May, when the study started, the percentage of red and yellow sites in search results decreased overall from 5.0 per cent to 4.4 per cent, a decline of 12 per cent. In addition, the relative rankings of the search engines changed. Google, AOL, and Ask now return safer results, while Yahoo! and MSN return riskier results. The percentage of red and yellow sites in sponsored ads decreased overall from 8.5 per cent to 8.0 per cent, a 5.9 per cent decline. |
