Google’s search results are five times safer than Bing’s from malware

A German independent testing lab AV-Test conducted an 18-month study on 40 million websites provided by seven different search engines.

10 million websites of the 40 million websites were from Google. 10 million as well from Bing, while Russian search engine Yandex produced 13 million websites and the other 7 million came from Blekko, Faroo, Teoma, and Baidu.

It was reported that out of the 40 million sites tested by AV-Test, only 5,000 websites were found to be with malware. Out of the 5,000 websites, Yandex had 3,330 malicious links out of its 13 million websites.

Microsoft owned Bing had 1,285 malicious results out of its 10 million websites while the biggest search engine Google had only 272 malicious links out of its 10 million websites. This number represent about a fifth of the malicious links being dished out by Bing’s search results.

In comparison with Yandex, Yandex gives about 12 times more malicious links in its search results than Google.

With Google already the dominant search engine, and still manages to issue five times less malware links to users than its closest rival, it means Google has not given users any reason to stop using its already popular search engine.

But despite the low number, Google still give out a notable number of malicious links when the amount of search carried out daily on the website is considered.

AV-Test CEO, Maik Morgenstern while discussing with Digital Trends said: “The number of websites with malicious content compared to the total number of malware is very low for all of the tested search engines, so all of them are putting a lot of effort into filtering malware.”

He also explained a search engine may be targeted more than others. “Even if a search engine serve more malware than another , this doesn’t necessarily mean they are doing a worse job, they might just be targeted more or malware writers optimize their websites more for certain search engines.”

Morgenstern when asked to suggest a solution to Google said: “As malware writers always try to circumvent existing security schemes, one or another malicious website will always make it into the search engine results.

The results indicate that Google, but also the other tested search engine providers, does a very good job already. But it also shows that some risk remains, so users should be careful.”

When asked if he favours Google over Bing, he replied: “No, all of the tested search engines are pretty safe. We primarily wanted to show that despite the good work of them, some attacks can still go through.”

Posted in Google, technology