Saturday, May 13, 2006

The Dark Side of the Search Engine Business

A new study by McAfee's SiteAdvisor Web ratings finds that sponsored results from some of the biggest names in the search engine business contain spyware, spam, scams and other Internet menaces.

The study, which was conducted by anti-spyware activist Ben Edelman and SiteAdvisor research analyst Hannah Rosenbaum, found that all the major search engines—Google, Yahoo, Microsoft's MSN, AOL and Ask.com—returned risky sites in results for popular keywords.

Even worse, sponsored results contained two to four times as many dangerous sites as organic results, according to the survey, which combined data from SiteAdvisor's automated Web crawlers and new searches using popular keywords culled from the Google Zeitgeist and other industry sources.

During the survey, which began in January 2006, the researchers used 1,394 popular keywords to extract top organic and sponsored search engine results and evaluated the site safety against SiteAdvisor's color-coded safety assessments.

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