Report: Google Better Than Bing At Weeding Out Spam

by Mike on October 9, 2012

Regardless of which search engine you prefer, whether it be Google, Yahoo, Bing or another, the fact is that many users visit their favourite search engine to begin a search for a new topic. In doing so, we rely upon the search engine to present us with the best results while at the same time filtering out malicious websites.

So, the question is what search engine does a better job at filtering malicious websites from their index and the answer appears to be Google. In fact, a study performed by Sophos shows that as a collective, 6 out of every 10 redirects to a malicious website comes from a search performed on the Microsoft search engine. What makes this even worse news for Bing is the fact that compared to Google, Bing has a much lower search volume, yet they are responsible for most of the redirects. By comparisons sake, Google is responsible for 30% of all redirects.

One of the authors of the study, Fraser Howard, mentions that blackhat optimizers are getting even better results through image search then they are through text search. 92% of all redirects are via image search while only 8% of redirects take place through text search. This of course makes sense seeing as the search engines have a much harder time understanding images then they do text.

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