14 DAY TRIAL // Security company McAfee conducted a market research to find out the most dangerous search engine and to analyze the evolution of the malicious results since last year. The tests were made with McAfee's SiteAdvisor and targeted the most 5 popular search technologies: Google, Yahoo, MSN, AOL and Ask.com. According to the results, 4 percent of the all search results were dangerous compared with 5 percent recorded last week. The malicious pages were discovered in all 5 search engines that are representing 93 percent of all search use according to McAfee.
And now the shocking numbers: Yahoo hosted the biggest number of malicious results, 3.6 percent of them containing adware and other threats. Google has only 1.9 percent while AOL is the cleanest search engine with 1.4 percent. It seems like the percentage of malicious website is a little bit lower than last year because it dropped from 8.5 percent to 6.9 percent.
"Since May 2006 the safety of search results from Google, AOL, and Ask has improved, while the safety of search results from Yahoo! and MSN has declined. AOL returns the safest results, with 2.9% of results rated red or yellow by McAfee SiteAdvisor. Within the past year, Ask's search results have improved the most, dropping from 6.1% red or yellow results in May 2006 to 3.5% in May 2007. Yahoo! returns the highest percentage of risky sites: 5.4% of results are rated red or yellow by McAfee SiteAdvisor, up from 4.3% in May 2006," McAfee sustained.
As you might know, Google struggled to improve the security of its search results by displaying several malware notifications for the pages flagged as dangerous. At this time, the Mountain View company shows two alerts, one straight on the SERP while the second one appears when the user tries to visit the dangerous page. It seems like these notification are really useful because Google's security tools reduced the number of the malicious results from 5.3 percent in May 2006 to 4.2 percent in December 2006 and to 3.4 percent in May 2007. Yahoo's security tools are not so useful because the Sunnyvale company relegated from a 4.3 percent in May 2006 to a 5.1 percent in December 2006 and to 5.4 percent in May 2007.