One in 25 Search Results Risky

Ant writes "According to Ars Technica, security researcher Ben Edelman revisited his May 2006 report on the relative risk of search engine results. In the original report, Edelman found that 5 percent of the results provided by search engines were marked as either "red" or "yellow" by SiteAdvisor, indicating that they presented some risk to the user. Now, Edelman says that his new study has shown that only 4.4 percent of such sites are risky, representing a drop of 12 percent since May... ... The study found that not only can regular links found by search engines be dangerous, the sponsored links that appear in prominent positions in the results pages can also be harmful. In fact, in the May study, sponsored links were more than twice as likely to be linked to malware than non-sponsored links (8.5 vs. 3.1 percent)."

Comments

Actual study link

[Lord Grey]

The actual study appears to be here.

Re:shutting down malware, virus, spam sites . . .

[Vreejack]

Slap on the wrist? There should be so much justice.

My solution is to use a custom hosts file. http://www.mvps.org/winhelp2002/hosts.htm publishes a nice one. Whenever I click on a lick in a web search list and I immediately get a "link not found" then I can pretty sure I didn't really want to go there in the first place. A lot of advertisements show up as "404's" as well.