Bing Tops Google At Finding Malware

adeelarshad82 writes "According to an 18-month study from German independent testing lab AV-Test, searches on Bing returned five times more links to malicious websites than Google searches. The study looked at nearly 40 million websites provided by seven different search engines. About 10 million results came from Bing and another 10 million from Google. 13 million sites were provided by the Russian service Yandex, with the rest coming from Blekko, Faroo, Teoma and Baidu respectively. Of these 40 million sites, AV-Test found 5,000 pieces of malware—and admittedly small percentage of websites."

Comments

Well to be fair

[binarylarry]

Microsoft has much more experience with malware than Google does.

Re:Well to be fair

[Capt.DrumkenBum]

If I think about it logically.
If I were the type of scum sucking vermin who would produce malware, I would tend to target the less technically savvy computer users. What search engine would such a person be likely to use? Whatever one IE points to by default.
Bing.

My apologies to any scum sucking vermin who might be reading this. I am truly sorry for comparing you to malware writers.

Re:Well to be fair

[Spy Handler]

Bing's servers run on Windows

Google's servers run on *Nix

Of course Bing is going to find more malware!

Re:Well to be fair

[hairyfeet]

Meh if you are using a browser in low rights mode with sandboxing who fricking cares. To me that is the bigger take from this, as even Google wasn't right 100% of the time, none of them are, so its better not to have the browser running with the same rights as the user so you don't have to depend on some search engine saving your ass.

Personally I use Bing simply because I've made $20 in gift cards from doing the same searches at the shop i would have done anyway. if these companies are gonna be making money off the data I generate why shouldn't I get a cut? At least with bing I do get a cut, don't get jack shit from google.

Re:Well to be fair

[Archangel Michael]

Bing
Is
Not
Google

Re:Well to be fair

[__aaltlg1547]

More likely Google's indexing engine identifies many of the malware sites and tosses them from the index because they think users don't want to find them. Bing is probably doing the same thing, but not as well.

So Google's better, right?

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't want my searches returning malware links.
Especially since they're incompatible with my OS.

Re:So Google's better, right?

[BrokenHalo]

So Google's better, right?

No, Bing is better. At finding malicious sites.

I always knew it must be good for something...

Re:So Google's better, right?

[Anonymous Coward]

No, Bing is better. At finding malicious sites.

And if you're running Windows, Bing and Desktop Search show the same results.

Deception

[Anonymous Coward]

This is kind of a deceptive title, the article is about how Google results contain less malware sites, because Bing misses them when scanning.

Microsoft marketing responds

[Anonymous Coward]

We're number one!!! We're number one!!!

Re:Microsoft marketing responds

[GrumpySteen]

Except they aren't. Yandex returned twice as much malware as Bing.

Re:I just Topped Bing At Finding Malware!

[Capt.DrumkenBum]

I am pretty sure my IT department already installed your software.

Misleading Title

[Bobfrankly1]

This isn't about successfully searching for malware, this is about failing to filter compromised or hostile websites out of your search results. It's about Google topping Bing at that filtering.

Also:

...and admittedly small percentage of websites."

editing plz?

Re:Misleading Title

[ancientt]

I was irritated by that too, but it is a direct quote from the article. I'm not sure if it is fair, but it immediately made me doubt the reliability of the information in the article.

The title is wrong.

[khasim]

From TFA:

Google the Safest
The study concluded that while all the search engines the lab evaluated delivered malware, Google delivered the least. It was followed by Bing, which returned a disconcerting five times as much malware as Google.

Re:At least they are leading in something

[Bobfrankly1]

How soon until they join the ranks of Digital, Wang, Novell, etc.

Wait, you released a Digital Novel about my Wang?

Technically it was a "short story".


Darth Vader voice: All too easy...

Easy to achieve

[robmv]

Easy to achieve, I have found a lot of website malware that only manifest if your user agent is Internet Explorer, those infected sites have code that try to hide injected HTML/JS code to Google Bot. Unless Google start violating the robots.txt convention and crawl the net as Internet Explorer, those sites will be never detected by them.

I have not found an infected site that include code to hide from Bing, so this could help MS, and MS could be using information obtained by the users that browse with Internet Explorer and use their Antivirus Software

Re:Easy to achieve

[afidel]

LOL, way to not even read the summary, Bing returned 500% more results containing links to infected sites, quite the opposite of what you are saying.

Google has a lot of experience..

[Anonymous Coward]

Google's been in the search game for a while now. They're quite used to being scammed, SEOd, manipulated, and probably have whole departments and armies of programmers/scientists just devoted to keeping their search results malware and scam free (As much as possible at least)

Google often goes out of their way to point out that their main purpose is to simply categorize and index the information available on the internet.

Re:At least they are leading in something

[hairyfeet]

If they stay on the current course? I'm personally predicting 5 years, as it seems like everyone is looking at exit strategies. I mean you have the OEMs starting to sell Chromebooks which selling PCs without Windows would have been the kiss of death not even 5 years ago, Ballmer refuses to listen to the consumers which have made it clear their Apple ripoff strategy is a DO NOT WANT, and finally if rumors are true the X720 is gonna be torpedoed not by bad hardware but by bad management.

Just on inertia they could go another 3-5 but after that they are fucked, its obvious business alone isn't gonna be enough to keep them at their current bloated size and its even more obvious that they suck balls when it comes to consumers, so I give it 5 if Ballmer stays in charge.

MS should get into the malware game

[The Grim Reefer]

I'd like to see Microsoft create virus and malware programs. With their track record, they could make one really great version and then the next release will be total shit. They can then shut down this department and malware will be dead forever. I suggest they create this new malware division with people from the following past projects: Windows 8, Vista, ME, Clippy, Bob, and a few others. Of course they'd probably get in trouble for some antitrust issues if they did this..

Re:At least they are leading in something

[peragrin]

MSFT is still worth billions. that adds 5 years by itself. Just look at Dell. Just trying to go private(smart move long term) has the investor sharks circling to get a piece of the pie, This is going to extend dell going Private by at least a year, and if they manage to stop it the sharks will bleed Dell dry.

No MSFT going down won't be quiet or quick. It will be a mob of investors trying to force all the cash and other holdings to be sold and/or given to them while things get even worse. Personally I expect Ballmer to try and save the sinking ship not realizing all the other rats have left him behind.

With friends like that...

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

The title is wrong. A more useful one would be "Bing shoves 5x as many malware links at you at the top of your searches, without realizing it."