McAfee: Search Engines Are Not Safe
According to a study by computer security company McAfee, Inc. and online security advocate Ben Edelman, Internet users tempt fate every time they use a search engine
The study examined the 5 major search engines–Google, Yahoo!, MSN, AOL, and Ask– and found that their search results could often contain links to sites designed to distribute spyware or collect user information that could lead to spam or identity theft.
Not only did the study find that 72% of results for popular keywords like “free screensavers,” or “digital music” were dangerous, but the sponsored search results, which appear at the top of the search results page, were more than four times as likely to contain tainted links as their organic counterparts.
The study was conducted by McAfee’s SiteAdvisor, which rates website safety and offers warnings about the unsafe ones. “Economically motivated purveyors of spam, adware and other online problems quickly follow where consumers go online, in this case directly to search engine results,” said Chris Dixon, head of SiteAdvisor’s product team in a statement. “Today, based on browsing trends, we estimate that U.S. Internet users make 285 million clicks to hostile sites every month through search queries.”
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