Four per cent of all results served up by major search engines are leading
users to websites offering deceptive or unwanted downloads,
McAfee
warns in a new study.
The study, authored by independent researcher
Ben
Edelman, found that the number of malware results fell one percentage point
compared with last year.
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Edelman evaluated the first 50 results from the 2,300 most popular keywords
on Google,
Yahoo,
AOL,
MSN and
Ask.com.
"Four out of five website visits start with a search engine query, and
consumers are still exposed to hundreds of millions of risky searches per month,
" said Tim Dowling, vice president of consumer growth initiatives at McAfee
SiteAdvisor.
Sponsored search results, which are purchased by site owners and placed at
the top or right border of the results page, were especially likely to contain
dangerous websites.
The study found that 6.9 per cent of all sponsored results link to risky
sites. This marks a 1.6 percentage point decrease from last year's 8.5 per cent,
which the study credits to Google's efforts to reduce fraudulent or misleading
sponsored listings.
Edelman, who is an assistant professor at
Harvard
Business School, said that the search engines are accepting advertising fees
from websites which sometimes push questionable wares.
"The search engines could do more," he told
vnunet.com.
"These advertisers rely completely on search engines, so the search engines are
uniquely positioned to kill these businesses."
This is not the first time that search engines, and Google in particular,
have come under fire for enabling online criminals to target web users.
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