As of July 2010, Google owns more than 90 percent of the search market share and almost 99 percent of the mobile search market share, according to StatCounter Global Stats. In fact, Google is such a commonly used tool that it has become a verb.
With that popularity comes obstacles. In Google’s case, those obstacles are in the form of malware.
In its 2010 Midyear Security Report, Barracuda Labs conducted a study across Bing, Google, Twitter and Yahoo! and reviewed more than 25,000 trending topics and nearly 5.5 million search results.
Some of the key findings include:
- Overall, Google takes the crown for malware distribution – turning up more than twice the amount of malware as Bing, Twitter and Yahoo! combined when searches on popular trending topics were performed. Google presents at 69 percent; Yahoo! at 18 percent; Bing at 12 percent; and Twitter at one percent.
- Over half of the malware found was between the hours of 4:00 a.m. and 10:00 a.m. GMT.
- The top 10 terms used by malware distributors include the name of a NFL player, three actresses, a Playboy Playmate and a college student who faked his way into Harvard. Google users who clicked on these returned search results found themselves on sites that were not too kind to their computers.
Do you think Google as a brand owes its customers a safe searching environment? Or, is it simply Google’s job to return results and up to the user to decide whether or not to click on a link?
Labels: Barracuda Labs, Google, search engines