A new study claims to have found out that it is rather safer to make use of search engines nowadays, as almost four per cent of search results made by the users on the web lead to sites, which are supposed to be risky. Ben Edelman, a security professional who works as an adviser to security software purveyor McAfee, revealed that though in general riskiness of search engines came down to twelve per cent since May, a few 4.4 per cent of results even then lead to sites flagged with a “red” warning or a cautionary “yellow” by McAfee’s SiteAdvisor service.
McAfee’s SiteAdvisor service rates sites based on if they result in viruses, spyware, junk e-mail, unnecessary pop-up ads or other threats. The research was done by running almost 2,500 much used keywords via the top five search engines such as: Google, Microsoft’s MSN, Time Warner’s AOL, Yahoo and IAC/InterActive’s Ask. Risks are approximately three times greater while clicking on keyword ads that brings about much of these companies’ revenues, and adult-related search terms are twice as risky as non-adult terms, found by the study. Queries having the terms like “free” are also increasingly potential to generate risky sites.
