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

Re:google is the culprit..

[just_another_sean]

I don't really want to argue one way or the other whether it is google's responsibility to do what you suggest but think of it from a logistics standpoint. Essentially your asking them to get into the AntiSpyware/AntiVirus game. They would need to setup a database of malware signatures, keep it up to date and then deal with the flack from users when they happen to miss something. Not to mention the whole "We're suing you for calling us spyware!" from the companies that deal in borderline, questionable software. I'm sure they would come out of the woodwork to sue someone with pockets like google's.

If anyone has the resources to do something like this on a massive scale it's Google; but I can understand why they don't. To me this is akin to the argument that ISPs should cut off users with obviously infected boxes. Hell, ISPs could block sites using the same method you want Google to employ. Sure it would be helpful to the public at large but dealing with the customer service issues and false positives would be a real headache! Try explaining to Aunt Tillie why she can't get to knitting.com anymore because there is a trojan on her box spamming thousands of people everyday.