Bing Turns Up 5X More Malware Than Google: Report

Not sure which Internet search engine to use? Maybe this will affect your decision: according to a new report, Bing search results produce five times more malware-ridden sites than Google search results.

The findings come from German antivirus firm AV-Test, which says it recently evaluated several search engines, including Google, Bing, Yandex, Blekko, Faroo, Ask Jeeves' Teoma, and Baidu.

The security company carried out its tests over a year-and-a-half period and wrapped things up this past February.

Popular Twitter, News Topics Used As Search Terms

AV-Test used topics found on Twitter, Google Trends, and BBC News when creating its search terms.

"One example from 2013-04-01 was 'Baseball Tonight' which we got from the Worldwide Twitter Trend," noted AV-Test chief technology officer, Maik Morgenstern. (Source: zdnet.com)

"Other examples from 2013-04-02 are 'Everybody Loves Chadwick' (Worldwide Twitter Trends) and 'Javier Prado' (Peru Twitter Trends) or from 2013-04-03 'Malaysia PM set for general election' (BBC News). In most cases we only have one or two hits per search words."

Overall, AV-Test's experiment turned up approximately 40 million websites. According to AV-Test researcher Markus Selinger, about 5,000 contained "potential pieces of malware."

To test if a website was malicious, AV-Test says it used three methods:

First, it employed 36 unique antivirus products to see if the site was flagged as malware.

Second, the firm checked the site for suspicious attributes. Third, it used a database of known malware URLs to see if the domain address had been flagged in the past.

Google Weeds Out Malware-Ridden Websites

So, which search engine pointed users to the lowest number of malicious sites?

The answer: Google. Of the 10.9 million queries carried out using the search engine, just 272 malware-infected websites were delivered via search results.

In second place: Microsoft's Bing. In roughly the same number of searches, almost 1,300 malware-laced sites were turned up.

If the AV-Test numbers are to be believed, Internet users may want to avoid Russian search engine Yandex, which turned up more than 3,300 malware-infected sites. (Source: av-test.org)