Is Google safe? opinions??

Jazajay

Active Member
Hay as some of you know I haven't used Google outside of SEO purposes for years. Bing now brings better results, featured, more relevant etc...

However came across this and thought I would share.

The top search on April 2nd was “tri energy”. I am not sure why it became so popular, but don’t google it: more than 90% of the first 100 links are malicious! Here is what I found for this search on April 4th:


  • 86 links were sending users directly to a malicious, fake antivirus page that tries to install malware. This is the same issue, with the same domain name (xorg.pl) involved in most of the redirections that I detailed in a previous post.
  • 4 malicious links were down or Google displayed a warning page
  • The first 5 links on the first page of results were legitimate
For Yahoo! and Bing:
Same search on Bing and Yahoo


For the same search, Bing did not show any malicious links. Yahoo! displayed 4 malicious links on pages 2, 6 and 7. At this point, I’m not sure if Bing and Yahoo! do a better job at cleaning up their search results, or if they are simply slower at picking up new pages.



8 hours later


I have re-scanned the Google results 8 hours later and things are a bit better. There are still only 10 legitimate links in the first 100 results, but Google displays a warning for 87 links. Only 3 malicious links redirect to a harmful site.
Zscaler Research: Google search: more links are malicious than you realize

So opinions? :)
 
The question you have to ask is which search engine is used the most.. Bing and Yahoo aren't used anywhere near as much as Google. I agree that they can bring up malicious links, but give Bing and Yahoo a few million more users of their search functionalities and submitters of sites and that will probably change.

Just my thoughts :)
 
The most popular device/engine/platform will always be the biggest target.

There are millions and millions of virus's aimed at windows.
Not quite as many aimed at mac. Because there are more windows computers being used (in large organisations especially) than macs. So more destruction can be caused aiming at windows.

Long may windows be more popular I say. :p
But you see my point. More people use Google than any other search site, so more people will target Google for malicious purposes to cause the most damage.
 
Well thats kinda missing the point slightly to be honest. :)
The question you have to ask is which search engine is used the most..
Well no it's not because at the end of the day they are not targeting one engine it's down to how the engines index pages and then search their database when it is queried, if they where targeting just Google then they would block the other search engines from indexing the page, thats how you target one engine.

The fact that Google returns, and this is the key point Google's chosing to show as Google thinks they are relevant the others do not, is down to Google's idea of relevance. Clearly in this example it really does show you how far the others have come and IMO how much Google is living on its name.

A bit like Hoover in the vacum cleaner industry.

Now Bing indexes then completely differantly hence why in this example none turned up in the results and by the looks of it Yahoo!'s spam filter works a lot, lot better than Google's.

But they are not targeting one engine, the results are based on that engines idea of relevance and in this example Google reckons 90 out of 100 results that spam is relevant to the users query. Yahoo reckons 4 out of 100 that spam is relevant to the users query and Bing reckons 0 of 100 that spam is relevant. So......:)
 
Ah well when you put it like that. Best course of action I wonder? A change of everyones favourite search engine may be on the cards but that'll only happen if google get enough bad press.
 
How do you know before hand that a link is to a malicious site? I use Google, but for doing image searches, I'm often too scared to actually click many of the links except for when its to some place I know is okay like pics on CNN or Telegraph, etc. If there is a better one to use, thats overall safer I would love to use that instead.
 
The best way I find is to use an external tool. For example the AVG antivirus engine, which has a free version, lets you put the AVG toolbar on which scans websites against a known list of bad sites. If it is "safe" then it provides a green tick next to i, if it is not a red cross.

I use it and can't fault it so far.

Interesting read but Google's search share is down for the forth consecutive month in a row, surprisingly who's taking the traffic off them as well.
 
Back
Top