SANTA CLARA, California: Internet security firm McAfee, Inc. says search engine users are at a considerable risk of visiting unsafe sites as the search engines do not have fool-proof systems to alert the users against such sites.
The firm's McAfee Site Advisor carried out an investigation of five major U.S. search engines -- Google, Yahoo!, MSN, AOL and Ask -- as a follow-up of an earlier study in May and found that though the overall chance of clicking a risk site had declined by 12 per cent, users had clicked through to risky sites more than 268 million times each month.
The investigation, conducted under the supervision of Ben Edelman, noted spyware researcher and an advisor to McAfee, broadly indicated that:
-- all search engines returned some risky results.
-- on average, 4.4 per cent of search results link to risky websites.
-- AOL had the safest rate of 3.6 of results rated risky
-- Yahoo had the worst result of 5.1 per cent of results rated risky
-- adult search terms are twice as likely to lead to unsafe results as non-adult search terms
-- 3 per cent of all risky search results contain browser exploits, particularly serious threats which can damage a PC once consumers merely browse a site.
McAfee SiteAdvisor's director of strategy Chris Dixon said there is significant room for continued improvement as almost one of 12 sponsored links still clicks through to a risky site.
McAfee SiteAdvisor compiled a list of nearly 2,500 popular keywords derived from lists of common searches from the search engines themselves and other industry sources. The first five pages of search results for each keyword were analyzed for each of the five search engines.
The study found that queries containing the word "free" are likely to lead users to sites with malicious content. For searches containing the word "free," 14.5 per cent of results link to sites carrying some form of malicious content.
The 10 riskiest search terms according to the study are "bearshare," "rotten.com," "free screensavers, winmx, screensavers," "limewire," "kazaa," "free ringtones," "ringtones" and "lime wire."
Google's weekly compilation of most popular search categories and the top five search terms for each of them, Google Zeitgeist, had one particularly dangerous category: "tech toys." Of the top five search terms found there, including "ipod nano" and "mp3 music downloads," 23 per cent of the results were risky.
"Adult," or porn-related, search terms, meanwhile, led to results in which 8 per cent of the sites were risky--double the level for "nonadult" search terms.
McAfee SiteAdvisor defines risky sites as those with "unsavory" e-mail practices, dangerous downloads, scam sites, those linking to other risky sites and those containing browser exploits.
