While the report found that the ratio of “risky” sites returned by adult keyword searches has risen since a similar study was conducted in December of last year, risky sites still comprised only 9.4 percent of overall adult search results, compared to 19.1 percent for digital music searches.
Overall, the safety risk to search engine users fell by 1 percentage point, with 4 percent of all search results being linked to sites assessed as “risky” by McAfee.
“We’re encouraged to see some improvement in search engine safety this year,” said Tom Dowling, vice president of Consumer Growth Initiatives for McAfee SiteAdvisor. “But with four out of five website visits starting with a search-engine query, consumers are still exposed to hundreds of millions of risky searches per month. In fact, an active search engine user, one that performs more than 10 searches per day, is likely to visit a dangerous site at least once a day.”
Among the more surprising results of the McAfee study is the fact that sponsored search results are significantly riskier than “organic” search results. It’s a result that noted expert on spyware and consultant to McAfee SiteAdvisor Ben Edelman told XBIZ surprises even some experts in the field.
“Overture founder Bill Gross once said that ‘the best way to clean up search results is to use money as a filter,’” Edelman said, noting that McAfee’s empirical research appears to suggest otherwise.
Observing the heavy presence of keywords that involve the descriptor “free” in the search string, Edelman said “a lot of this does come down to gullibility.”
“When you see a link offering ‘free ringtones’ or ‘free wallpaper,’ do you believe them?” Edelman said. “Many surfers just accept it as truth; they think ‘why would it appear in a Google ad if isn’t true?’”
In researching search-engine safety, McAfee looked at the results returned by the five major U.S. search engines — Google, Yahoo, MSN, AOL and Ask.com — which combine to account for 93 percent of all search engine use, according to McAfee. Taking a list of 2,300 popular search terms, McAfee researches analyzed the first 50 results returned by each search engine for those terms.
The search terms used in the study were selected from sources like Google Zeitgeist and Yahoo! Buzz, among other industry sources, according to the McAfee report.
Each search result was compared to McAfee SiteAdvisor’s web safety database of more than 8 million site safety ratings. A red rating was assigned to sites that were determined to offer “adware, spyware, viruses, exploits, spammy email, excessive pop-ups or strong affiliations with other red sites,” according to the McAfee report, while yellow ratings were assigned to sites “which merit some caution before use.”
Among the riskiest sites were file-sharing programs; searches for “Bearshare” (45.9 percent risky results), “Limewire” (37.1 percent) and "Kazaa" (34.9 percent) topped the list of riskiest p2p searches.
While adult search-terms did not rank as the highest risk set of terms in the aggregate sense, adult terms are well-represented at the top of the list of risky search terms for Google, specifically.
“AdultFriendFinder.com” ranked fourth on the list of high-risk terms to Google, although most of the risky sites associated with the term were rated yellow and not red. Topping the list of risky Google search terms in the report overall were “Excite.com” (76.22 percent red) “Rotten.com” (55.15) and Bearshare (35.41 percent red, 10.48 percent yellow).
Other high-risk search terms associated with the adult industry were “hentai,” “cartoon porn,” “lesbian porn,” “hardcore porn,” Britney Spears nude” and “free porn.”
The full McAfee SiteAdvisor search engine safety report is available on the McAfee website here