Search engine safety

Virus and security firm McAffee has released their findings on The Safety of Search Engines today, following up on last year's report. The study finds that overall, 4.0% of search results link to Web sites that can be categorized as "risky."

While this is an improvement over the 5.0% finding of the May 2006 study, it still should be an object of concern for the online community and especially those in the businesses behind major search engines. MacAffee found that sponsored search results continue to be significantly less safe than the organic results and all major search engines produce results with dangerous sites in them.

Basically, most pushers of spyware and browser hijacks buy keywords Google, Yahoo, MSN, AOL and the rest of the big engines to drive traffic to their sites where they hope to hook into unsuspecting users.

This is not just bad for business, it is bad for the growth of the Internet community. Maslow's hierarchy of needs spells it out pretty clearly -- safety lies on the bottom of the pyramid, and people need to feel safe before they can go up the higher levels of belonging, esteem, and self-actualization.

Just as we're pushing lawmakers to can spam and enforce laws against spammers, crackers, and hackers, corporate America needs to police itself by adopting ad standards in their online products to defend their consumers. 90% of U.S. consumers use search engines, and 80% of site visits originate with some kind of search.

Print and broadcast media all have standards for advertising that they will or will not accept. Google, for example, lists their standards in their advertising FAQ, which links to their guidelines and terms and conditions. But the badduns are creeping through a bit more successfully than they do in the mighty mainstream media. Of course, even bastions of journalism have their foibles, as dcfishbowl notes in tracking the hooker ads in the Washington Post.

Things are getting better. Last year, 8.5% of paid links led to dangerous sites. Keep in mind that paid search advertising is a huge business. Those stock prices at Google and Yahoo are being driven by Internet advertising revenues that were $4.2 billion in the third quarter of 2006.

Sure, most people are wise to the late night get rich quick television advertisers and don't call now. Or they know that the little massage parlor ads in the newspaper's sports section more than likely offer "happy endings." But, as P.T. Barnum famously said, there's a sucker born every minute. Unfortunately, with online offering an increasingly thinner wall between contemplation and action, the risk of a sloppy click that may hijack personal data or render your home equipment unusable should be of much higher concern.