Back in July 2010 a study was conducted measuring the amount of pages returned by a search engine that contained malware. Google had over twice the malware results of Twitter, Bing and Yahoo combined.

This must have hurt Google to the very core because another study has been published and three years on, Google isn’t at the top of the pile for free malware, they’re now languishing at the bottom enjoying the fact that they now provide the least amount of Malware.

This study discovered the following results:

Google performed best in these results returning only 0.0025% results with malware in them
Blekko search engine came second best with a 0.0067 percent return
Bing returned nearly 5 times as many malicious results as Google with a 0.012% return.
Standing atop the group, lord of free malware was the yandex search engine with 0.024% of results containing malware

As you can see that’s quite a turnaround with Google performing admirably especially when you consider that Google’s nearest rival Bing had nearly 5 times as many malicious results.

The study went further with this and even reported on what results are most likely to bring back malicious pages. The most likely was searching for current affairs. Malicious pages take advantage of user’s thirst for breaking news and as there is a rush on to learn, people are a bit more careless when clicking links.

Another previous study also found that searching for “Free Downloads” or “Free Music” or quite a lot of things that are free that people don’t pay for 100% of the time.

So my advice would be to check and double check all pages you’re accessing and if you get a malware warning, turn tail and run. Only get your breaking news sources from trusted news websites.

Posted by Greg McVey.