McAfee just released a report regarding search engine safety, and the results are pretty interesting. One thing that caught my eye was the fact that Google, which serves about 35% of the search population (making it the most popular engine to perform searches on), does not have the highest percentage of returning risky results. Yahoo is the engine that returns the most risky results. While that is probably due to the fact that Yahoo is the most popular site on the Internet, I would have thought Google would have the most risky results. This really has some interesting information and is definitely worth the read.

One year after releasing The Safety of Search Engines in May 2006, we reassess the state of search engine safety and evaluate changes in search engine safety levels over time. This report also follows our second study, The Safety of Search Engines - Revisited, released in December 2006.

In this study, we compare the safety of leading search engines, using McAfee SiteAdvisor’s automated Web site ratings. We find that AOL returns the safest search results, while Yahoo! returns the greatest percentage of risky results. Since May 2006, search engine results have become safer, primarily due to improved safety of sponsored results on Google, AOL, and Ask. Despite this improvement, dangerous sites are found in search results of all of the top five search engines, and sponsored results continue to be significantly less safe than search engines’ organic results.[more]

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