The Safety of Links in Internet Search Engine Results: MSN rated safest

[mandy]

Interesting new study from SiteAdvisor compares the safety of the different search engines' search results:

Abstract

We compare safety of leading search engines, using SiteAdvisor's automated Web site ratings. We find most leading search engines similar in the safety of the sites they link to, though MSN is the safest and Ask lags noticeably behind. Across search engines, we find sponsored results significantly less safe than search engines' organic results. We find heightened risks for certain keywords, including those frequently searched by kids and novice users. We began this project in January 2006, and our analysis uses search engine results and SiteAdvisor safety data from April 2006.

Key Findings

    * All the major search engines returned risky sites in their search results for popular keywords.
    * Overall, MSN search results had the lowest percentage (3.9%) of dangerous sites while Ask search results had the highest percentage (6.1%). Google was in between (5.3%).
    * Sponsored results contained two to four times as many dangerous sites as organic results.
    * There was little correlation between search result placement and safety. Page 1 results were only moderately safer than results for pages 2-5.
    * Dangerous sites soared to as much as 72% of results for certain risky keywords. Particularly dangerous keywords include "free screensavers", "bearshare", "kazaa", "download music", and "free games."
    * We estimate that US consumers make 285 million clicks to hostile sites every month as a result of search engine results.

full study: http://www.siteadvisor.com/studies/searc...y2006.html

[Kristijntje]

A related followup study shows a slight improvement:

Security researcher Ben Edelman has revisited his May 2006 report on the relative risk of search engine results. In the original report, Edelman found that 5 percent of the results provided by search engines were marked as either "red" or "yellow" by SiteAdvisor, indicating that they presented some risk to the user. Now, Edelman says that his new study has shown that only 4.4 percent of such sites are risky, representing a drop of 12 percent since May...

The study found that not only can regular links found by search engines be dangerous, the sponsored links that appear in prominent positions in the results pages can also be harmful. In fact, in the May study, sponsored links were more than twice as likely to be linked to malware than non-sponsored links (8.5 vs. 3.1 percent).

What this data indicates is that search engine companies are not doing a very good job of filtering out the types of companies they are willing to sell advertising to...

full article: http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20061213-8417.html