McAfee SiteAdvisor adds intuitive red, yellow, or green ratings to sites and search results based on proprietary tests of sites representing more than 95 percent of the trafficked Web. Red ratings are given to risky sites that fail one or more of McAfee's tests for adware, spyware, viruses, exploits, spam e-mail, excessive pop-ups or strong affiliations with other red rated sites. Green rated sites passed each of these tests. Yellow ratings are given to sites which pass McAfee's safety tests but which still have nuisances warranting a user advisory.
Among the study's key findings:
- All search engines return some risky results. AOL returns the safest results with 3.6 percent of results rated red or yellow by McAfee SiteAdvisor. On average, 4.4 percent of search results link to risky Web sites.
- 8.0 percent of sponsored results are rated red or yellow -- almost three times the 3.0 percent of organic results rated red and yellow.
- Adult search terms are twice as likely to lead to unsafe results as non-adult search terms: 8.0 percent of results for adult terms are red or yellow vs. 4.1 percent for non-adult terms.
- 41.0 percent of risky ratings are due to e-mail signups that result in spam. Risky downloads and scams (such as selling software like the Firefox or Internet Explorer browsers which are free) each account for a quarter of the results. 3.0 percent of red and yellow search results contain browser exploits -- particularly serious threats which can damage a PC once consumers merely browse to a site. Just under one third of risky results are due to sites aggressively linking to other risky sites. Many sites exhibit multiple dangers.
- Overall riskiness of search engines declined by 12.0 percent, while the percentage of red and yellow sites in sponsored ads decreased by almost6 percent.
The study was conducted by compiling a list of approximately 2,500 popular keywords derived from lists of common searches from the search engines themselves and other industry sources. The first five pages of search results for each keyword were then analyzed for each of the five search engines.
Risky Searches
Among a number of popular but risky searches, queries containing the word "free" are particularly likely to lead users to sites with unsavory practices. For searches containing the word "free," 14.5 percent of search results link to sites rated yellow or red. Of the Google Zeitgeist search terms analyzed, the most dangerous category is "tech toys," examples of which include "ipod nano," "mp3 music downloads," and "winmx." 23.3 percent of results for this category are rated red or yellow by McAfee SiteAdvisor. Another dangerous Google Zeitgeist category of note includes "childhood favorites" (6.7 percent risky results) which includes keywords such as "Winnie the Pooh" and "Tweety."
New Findings Since May 2006
McAfee SiteAdvisor's May 2006 study of the safety of search engines was the first comprehensive review of the riskiness of the site results returned by major search engines. The study was made possible by the unique database of site safety tests built by McAfee SiteAdvisor.
The percentage of red and yellow sites in search results decreased overall from 5.0 percent to 4.4 percent, a 12.0 percent decline. In addition, the relative rankings of the search engines changed. Google, AOL, and Ask now return safer results, while Yahoo! and MSN return riskier results. The percentage of red and yellow sites in sponsored ads decreased overall from 8.5 percent to 8.0 percent, a 5.9 percent decline.
"Search engines continue to play vital roles in the consumer's online experience," noted Dixon. "But the risks of clicking on unsafe search results are real, so consumers should make use of tools like McAfee SiteAdvisor to make their searching safer."
