Dangers Lurk in Search Engines

We all use search engines when surfing the Web. It is a fact of life. Most of us probably use Google. But, no matter which of the major search engines you use, a new report by McAfee's SiteAdvisor finds that sponsored results from some of the biggest names in the search engine business contain spyware, spam, scams and other Internet menaces.

The study, which was conducted by anti-spyware activist Ben Edelman and SiteAdvisor research analyst Hannah Rosenbaum, found that all the major search engines, Google, Yahoo, Microsoft's MSN, AOL and Ask.com, all returned risky sites in results for popular keywords.

Even worse, sponsored results contained two to four times as many dangerous sites as organic results, according to the survey, which combined data from SiteAdvisor's automated Web crawlers and new searches using popular keywords culled from the Google Zeitgeist and other industry sources. During the survey, which began in January 2006, the researchers used 1,394 popular keywords to extract top organic and sponsored search engine results and evaluated the site safety against SiteAdvisor's color-coded safety assessments.

The most dangerous keywords include "free screensavers," "bearshare," "kazaa," "download music" and "free games." Based on the findings, the researchers estimate that Web surfers in the United States make 285 million clicks to hostile sites every month as a result of search engine results.

SiteAdvisor, which I wrote about a couple of months ago, is a free plugin available for Firefox or Internet Explorer Web Browsers. It analyzes and rates each site so that when you do a search, the rating pops up next to each listing that the search engine returns. I use it and heartily recommend that you do the same. SiteAdvisor was recently acquired by McAfee.