The Safety of Search Engines – McAfee Report

McAfee SiteAdvisor in conjunction with Ben Edelman has just released a report on “The Safety of Search Engines”.

It’s a very interesting report, here’s an abstract:

We compare safety of leading search engines, using SiteAdvisor’s automated Web site ratings. We find most leading search engines similar in the safety of the sites they link to, though MSN is the safest and Ask lags noticeably behind. Across search engines, we find sponsored results significantly less safe than search engines’ organic results. We find heightened risks for certain keywords, including those frequently searched by kids and novice users. We began this project in January 2006, and our analysis uses search engine results and SiteAdvisor safety data from April 2006.

I’ve encountered many dodgy sites in my wanderings on the Internet, and most have originated from Search Engines. I do think that it’s become a lot better, but then again, I don’t search for free music – I just buy it on iTunes!