McAfee have recently released a study into some of the most “dangerous” search terms used on the web.
McAfee looked across 5 different search engines, Google, Live (now Bing), Yahoo, Ask and AOL, looking at the first 5 pages of results on all of these for organic and paid listings and cross referenced these pages with tools that their SiteAdvisor tool flagged as dangerous, and the study reports that it looked at more than 400,000 URLs.
Dangerous is defined here as flagged by McAfee’s siteadvisor tool, as potentially deliberately malicious or hacked and therefore risky.
The study looked at over 2,500 popular keywords, and there were a number of assessments made into the average risk of all results, and the maximum risk of the most dangerous pages.
Overall, the risk across the keywords was relatively low (1.7%), but when only considering the phrases that were the greatest risk, discounting some of the lesser risk phrases, the risk percentage increased to 10%.
The most potentially dangerous phrases were ones with users searching for “Lyrics” and “Free”, with both over 20% change of risk from the results for those phrases.
The main focus of this report has been on the US market, but within the report there was a table about the most dangerous UK search terms too:
The search terms from the UK with the greatest level of risk were somewhat different, with prominent social media sites such as Bebo and YouTube and email providers Hotmail and Yahoo Mail. Interestingly there are also a couple of under fire politicians mentioned too, in Alistair Darling and Gordon Brown.
The overall UK risk was relatively low, with a 7.4% maximum risk, whereas the worst performer was Czech Republic with 14.2% risk.
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