Growing number of "Potentially dangerous results"

Tue 29 September 2009 09:30, Bas van den Beld

It was amongst others Jason Calacanis who a couple of years ago started the discussion on the pollution of search results. He claimed that most results in Google were spam. In a presentation he held in Paris he showed several malicious Google results. One of the reasons he pointed this out was his then new searchengine Mahalo which because it was all done by people, wouldn't have any spam results.

Since that time Google has improved a lot when it comes to spam and malicious results in the SERPS. It now seems as if Twitter will be facing that challenge. More and more spammers are using Twitter to get their message across. Still, search engines also struggle with it. The Russian search engine Yandex launched a report on dangerous results last week. I the last four months their database of malicious sites has grown with 2,5 million new sites.

Yandex looked at the searches which are marked as "potentially dangerous results". The report shows that Yandex shows this message no less than 4,5 million times a day (!).

Luckily the number of clickthroughs is a lot less. Only 7% of the users who get this message click through to see the actual results and only 0,5% decides to click on one of the results. That doesn't seem like very much but if you calculate it back to number of users clicking on a potentially dangerous result, thats still 22.500 clicks daily. Just figure out how much money that can make for a spammer...

Yandex says the number of sites marked as "potentially dangerous" has increased significantly over the last four months. The database of 2,5 million sites is now ten times bigger than before.

Most of the malicious domains are .com domains (31,6%) followed by .rue (30,1%) and .org (18,3%). Over 20% of the sites affected remained infected for a period between one and three months. No less than 8% of the sites were infected longer than that.

It seems as if the internet is polluting more and more.

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