Lesser clicking on risky sites reported
Are people actually clicking less on risky online sites or is it the search engines themselves taking them out of the list?
The investigation, conducted by McAfee(R) SiteAdvisor(TM), studied the five major U.S. search engines (Google, Yahoo!, MSN, AOL, Ask) and found that the overall chance of clicking through to a risky site declined by 12.0%. Still, McAfee estimates that consumers click through to risky sites more than 268 million times each month.
“It’s good to see that clicking on search engine results has gotten modestly safer,” said Chris Dixon, director of strategy, McAfee SiteAdvisor. “But when almost one of 12 sponsored links still clicks through to a risky site, there remains significant room for continued improvement.”
Whatever the reason for the declining percentage, whether it be the user being more vigilant or the search engines taking care of what they list, we hope it will even get smaller next year.