Can You Trust Your Internet Search Results?

You've just searched for the PlayStation 3. Google spit back 128 million hits; Yahoo! gave you 91 million. How many of those are going to potentially get you in trouble when you click on them? About 4 percent, says a new study that looks at the risks associated with using the five major search engines.

The study, co-authored by Ben Edelman, a well-known Harvard doctoral candidate and researcher of Internet fraud and deception, and McAfee Associates, makers of SiteAdvisor, a tool that displays web site ratings based on safety, looked at the percentage of risky sites that come up when you search for common terms.

It investigated Google, Yahoo!, AOL, MSN, and Ask. The methodology involved taking the most popular search terms from places like Google Zeitgeist and Yahoo! Buzz that track the top searches and using them to conduct a search on each of the five engines. (By the way, for the week of December 9, these included Augusto Pinochet, Taco Bell, and Pearl Harbor.)

Then they did an analysis of the first five pages of returned results to see how many of them garnered yellow and red warning flags from SiteAdvisor. Warning flags mean there's a likely presence of something nasty: spyware, adware, spam, drive-by downloads, or links to "bad" sites, for example.

What did they learn?

All of the search engines returned some percentage of risky sites, on average 4.4 percent. Though the differences weren't enormous, Yahoo! and MSN faired worse than average, AOL better than average. And both Yahoo! and MSN had more risky sites crop up in this second version of the study than when it was first conducted last May.

Sponsored sites (the sites that are paid for by advertisers and are separate from the main results) are 8 percent more likely to lead you to a risky click. Sponsored sites are more likely to contain scams, too. (Makes sense to me—and a good reason for us all to teach those less savvy the difference between the sponsored and main search results.)

In the "this may not surprise you" category, adult search terms yielded more risky results than non-adult search terms.

On the main site's page, safety by page and position (that is, if it is the number one search returned on the list or number 30) did not have much effect on whether the site was risky.

The overall riskiness of sites in a search declined by 12 percent since the study was first done in May. So, from a longitudinal perspective, searches are getting safer.

I asked the McAfee folks to expand on the study a bit, and they had this advice based on their findings:

Watch out for "free": The word "free" can turn up many risky sites. Particularly dangerous were words like "free screensavers" and "free ringtones."

Toys, celebs, and music: Searching for popular technology like PlayStation, Wii, and iPod turns up a large number of risky sites. So does searching for popular singers like Usher and Nelly and popular celebrities like Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan. Dangerous results were also found in sports queries and, sadly, childhood favorites like Winnie the Pooh and Tweety.

Related:

Read the full report.

Read about how Ben Edelman and SiteAdvisor have raised the ire of some.

Read more on How to Avoid Risky Sites.

Disclosure: Yahoo! Tech is an online service owned and offered by Yahoo!, Inc.