Search Results Getting Safer

The State of Search Engine Safety was released by Site Advisor today. In this report, we learned that search results are now safer then they were a year ago.

• 4% of the search results are link to risky sites, down from 5.0% reported last year.
• Sponsored results are 2.4 times more likely to have links to risky sites compared to the natural results. Today, 6.9% of sponsored results link to risky sites, down from 8.5% reported last year.
• AOL returns the safest results and Yahoo returns the most risky sites, by percentage.
• Ask.com has seen the largest increase safety than the other search engines, but Google, AOL have also seen an increase in safety. Yahoo and MSN have seen a decline in the safe sites they link to.

More coverage at Techmeme.

About The Author

Barry Schwartz

Barry Schwartz a Contributing Editor to Search Engine Land and a member of the programming team for SMX events. He owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry's personal blog is named Cartoon Barry and he can be followed on Twitter here.