Make your students use...AOL?
McAfee Site Advisor published research on Monday ranking the safety of the major search engines in terms of "risky" results to searches. Site Advisor ranks pages as red, yellow, or green, depending upon the degree of risk the sites may pose to a user's computer (i.e., the likelihood that it may install malware or send spam to users). While so-called sponsored links (the links that companies pay to have appear based on your searches) were generally riskier than the straight search results regardless of search engine, the study found that AOL actually returned the fewest risky hits. Only 2.9% of their results were considered risky on average.
Yahoo, on the other hand, returned almost twice as many risky hits. According to the Site Advisor website, the rankings were
- Yahoo (5.4%)
- MSN (4.2%)
- Ask (3.5%)
- Google (3.4%)
- AOL (2.9%)
McAfee analyst, Greg Day, noted that:
[Yahoo] should employ more rigorous analysis of the content of sites returned by its search. "Google is starting to go away and do analysis of whether [site] content is what it claims to be. Yahoo really has to go down that road."