But while search continues to be a matter of preference (with the vast majority of people unsurprisingly choosing Google), one factor that hasn't seemed to garner much discussion is the amount of malicious sites each engine brings up when a user searches. Until now. Yesterday, PC Mag posted an article about an 18 month study conducted by AV-Test regarding this very issue. And while all search engines tested collectively produced a very small number of malicious websites (out of the total of 40 million analyzed), Bing delivered five times as many as Google.
"The study concluded that while all the search engines the lab evaluated delivered malware, Google delivered the least. It was followed by Bing, which returned a disconcerting five times as much malware as Google. Yandex, the Russian website, delivered 10 times as many malicious sites."
Keep in mind that while the chance of you encountering a malicious site in your search are relatively quite low (about one in 40,118 if you use Google), these odds are repeated 'billions of times a day'. So whether you're in the majority and stick to Google for your everyday searches or prefer Bing (or any other search engine), there's always the chance you'll be hit with a malicious site in one of your searches. Aside from being cognizant, I can't encourage users enough to arm their systems with great internet security-always better to be safe than sorry!
