Internet Search Engine Safety

Tuesday, December 19, 2006

McAfee - famous for their antivirus software - compared the safety of five leading search engines earlier this year using their SiteAdvisor to generate website ratings:

"We again find that most leading search engines are similar in the safety of the sites they link to, though AOL replaces MSN as the safest engine and Yahoo! replaces Ask as the engine with the most risky results. Across search engines, we find sponsored results significantly less safe than search engines' organic results. Unsavory e-mail conduct is the dominant security risk although search engine users are also heavily exposed to risky downloads, browser exploits, and scams."

They recently revisited these results to see what had changed - the updated report states that search results from Google, AOL, and Ask.com are less likely to lead to dangerous sites than they did six months ago whilst MSN's and Yahoo's results however, send users to more risky sites than in May.

So should we worry? I don't think so, it's more about being aware - overall less than 5% of sites were considered unsafe and most of these were from sponsored results. It also depends on how well protected your computer is as to how much notice you feel you can take of the results.

See the report summary for more details.

Labels: browsers, searchengines, security

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