AOL Delivers Most Trustworthy Results Says Survey
A new McAfee survey has found that AOL has the most trustworthy search results, not listing sites that might be unsafe for searchers. Testing 2,500 results McAfee found that only 3.6% of those sites returned in the top 5 pages for the queries were unsafe or risky.
These figures show that the engines seem to be winning the war against unsafe spammy sites, with the vast majority of results being safe. The red results above are dangerous sites (i.e. giving out adware, sending spam if you give an email address) and yellow sites, which are classified as those which deserve caution (tries to change browser settings, pop-up ads).
Interestingly it was the paid results that were found to be the most risky across all search engines, as seen below.
This survey was first carried out in May, with the update information being added two days ago. Changes over the past 6 months show that since the release of the first study in May 2006, the percentage of red and yellow sites in search results decreased from 5.0% to 4. 4%. But while Google, AOL, and Ask now return safer results than they did in May, while Yahoo! and MSN return riskier results.
