AOL Engine Safest, While Yahoo! is Risky

Web security firm, McAfee Inc. has released a report of its study on five major search engines, based on the extent to which they compromise on their users' online safety. According to an investigation, among the five most popular Internet search sites, AOL emerged as the safest engine, with just 4.4 percent of its search results linking users to risky Web sites. AOL is followed by Google and Ask Now, but Yahoo! and MSN are found to return riskier results.

McAfee SiteAdvisor, which was in charge of the investigation, added red, yellow, or green ratings to sites and search results, representing more than 95 percent of the trafficked Web. Red ratings were assigned to risky sites that fail one or more of McAfee's tests for adware, spyware, viruses, exploits, spam e- mail, excessive pop-ups, green rated sites passed each of these tests and yellow ratings were given to sites which pass McAfee's safety tests but still warrant a user advisory.
 

McAfee estimates that internet search engine users click through to risky sites more than 268 million times each month. While 8.0% of sponsored results by the five major search engines are rated red or yellow, McAfee found that adult search terms are twice as likely to lead to unsafe results as non-adult search terms.

McAfee also analyzed a number of popular and risky search words, and found that queries containing the word "free" are particularly likely to lead users to unscrupulous sites. Among the Google Zeitgeist search terms analyzed, the most dangerous category is 'Technology, gadgets and gizmos' which includes terms such as 'ipod nano', 'mp3 music downloads', and 'winmx'. Another dangerous Google Zeitgeist category is 'childhood favorites' (6.7% risky results) with keywords such as 'Winnie the Pooh' and 'Tweety'.

This investigation, which is a follow up to the McAfee study on Internet search engines in May 2006, also shows that overall riskiness of search engines declined by 12.0%, while the percentage of red and yellow sites in sponsored ads decreased by almost 6%, since May. While AOL replaces MSN as the safest engine, Yahoo! replaces Ask as the engine with the most risky results. The study was conducted by compiling a list of approximately 2,500 popular keywords derived from lists of common searches from the search engines themselves and other industry sources.