By Web18

One year after releasing its inaugural study of the safety of search engines, McAfee Inc. has now published an update to "The State of Search Engine Safety."

The update shows that while the overall safety risk to search engine users declined by about 1 percentage point, sponsored results those paid for by advertisers remain significantly more risky than non-sponsored results.

Overall, McAfee estimates United States consumers make approximately 276 million monthly searches that lead to Web sites that could compromise online safety.

McAfee studied the five major United States search engines – Google, Yahoo!, MSN, AOL, Ask which account for 93 percent of all search engine use. To conduct the study, McAfee analyzed the first 50 search results returned by each search engine for 2,300 popular keywords.

The keywords were selected from lists like Google Zeitgeist and Yahoo! Buzz, among other industry sources. Each result was compared to McAfee SiteAdvisor's Web safety database of 8.2 million site safety ratings. Red ratings are assigned to sites found to offer adware, spyware, viruses, exploits, spammy e-mail, excessive pop-ups or strong affiliations with other red sites.

Yellow ratings are given to sites which merit some caution before use. The data for the study was analyzed in May 2007. The study was co-authored by Ben Edelman, noted spyware researcher and an advisor to McAfee SiteAdvisor.

The key findings of the study have shown that 4.0 percent of all search results link to risky Web sites. AOL returns the safest results with 2.9 percent rated red or yellow, down from 5.3 percent in May 2006. Yahoo returned the most red or yellow results, 5.4 percent.

Sponsored results contain 2.4 times as many risky sites as organic sites; in fact, 6.9 percent of all sponsored results are rated red or yellow.

This represents an improvement from 8.5 percent last year, primarily due to Google's improvements in paid search safety. Google's sponsored listings are featured on its own search engine, and also partially power ads on AOL and Ask.