The Dark Side of Paid Search

Tough Lefty writes "A new study by McAfee's SiteAdvisor Web ratings finds that sponsored results from some of the biggest names in the search engine business contain spyware, spam, scams and other Internet menaces. The key findings were that major search engines returned risky sites in their search results for popular keywords and sponsored results contained two to four times as many dangerous sites as organic results. Overall, MSN search results had the lowest percentage (3.9%) of dangerous sites while Ask search results had the highest percentage (6.1%). Google was in between (5.3%). Check the comprehensive study for all the data."

Comments

Re:Paradox

[Rob T Firefly]

What kind of an argument is that?

Not mine, certainly. I'm just playing devil's advocate, and that's the sort of uproar I believe some outside agency declaring their sites blocked would cause in that industry. (And it is an industry.)

Consider how much crapware is actively installed by users who click through the EULA without a second thought, completely missing the fact that they just provided some entity permission to screw their machine and/or privacy, of the sort that might actually stand up in court. The crapware companies don't have a license agreement expertly crafted by Lawful/Evil characters for nothing, they're passing the blame onto the fool who clicks "OK," and they would probably stand by that fact.