The results pages of some of the Web's biggest search engines are littered with so-called search engine spam. Link farms, click fraud in sponsored listings, and links to sites harboring viruses and
spyware are among the many concerns facing search engines today. A new study from SiteAdvisor, a unit of anti-virus giant McAfee, says that roughly 5 percent of the results found on the first five
pages at major engines like Google and Yahoo exposed users to viruses and spyware. That includes 3 percent of normal Web search results and 9 percent of paid advertisements. As
The Wall Street
Journal points out, it's in SiteAdvisor's interest to play this stuff up, because the company makes money rating site-safety and distributing clean-up software. That said, it's still a bit
alarming to hear that a consumer will click through to an unsafe site from a search engine about once every two weeks. For certain popular queries, like "free screensavers" or "free ringtones," over
50 percent of results bring users to risky pages.
Read the whole story at Wall Street Journal »
