Nearly twice as many sites infected with malware appear in Google search results as in Yahoo, Bing and Twitter combined according to a new study from Barrucada Labs.

The data security firm’s 2010 Midyear Security Report reveals that those seeking to spread malware are exploiting the same factors which work beneficially for search engine marketing; trending topics and sheer volume of users. This is one possible reason why, in Barracuda’s words, “Google takes the crown for malware distribution.”

In the Barracuda Labs report some 69% of all malware links in SERPs over 57 days on Google, after looking at 5.492m search results across the three search engines and Twitter. Yahoo was the next greatest target (18%), then Bing (12%) and with Twitter accountable for a paltry 1% of malware distribution incidences.

According to Barracuda Labs, as search engine volumes have reached new highs malware distributors have targeted the services. Their report concludes that “everyday, hundreds of pieces of malware are found by simply searching for popular terms.”

One particular problem identified was how malware sites often exploit blackhat search engine optimisation techniques for temporary rankings. This corroborates with a previous research item from Zscaler this April, which found that malware SEOs were using Google Trends, making it “not uncommon” to find malware links in 15% to 20% of the first 100 results.