Brook Schaaf crunches the numbers from an extensive siteadvisor study evaluating the safety of search engine results. MSN fared the best in returning safe results while ask.com was the worse (disclaimer: I own stock in Ask, Google and Yahoo) . Google? In the middle of the pack.

Since the end of February I’ve been using the Firefox extension for siteadvisor [hmm siteadvisor review] and like its easy red, gray, yellow and green color scheme for the safety of sites. Whenever I see red (unsafe), yellow (alert) or gray (no results found) I will rethink whether I want to visit the website or not. With the extension you can see the siteadvisor results proactively at the end of each search result. Very handy.

Another interesting part of the siteadvisor unsafe search results study that Brook also highlights: “Sponsored results were two to four times more likely than natural results to return something unsafe.” How’s that for instilling advertiser confidence?

Sterling wisely pointed out that the data is only as good as the submitters. From what I’ve seen after using this service daily for a couple months, the submitters and siteadvisor’s algos are pretty good at sniffing the trash. Siteadvisor is becoming my favorite Firefox browser condom.

Did this post make you go hmm?

 Loading ...