Battleangel

If I didn’t know better I’d say this was a concerted effort to run search engines and the free and open content system of the Internet into the ground. One day it’s paedophilia, the next it’s bogus terrorism and viruses. And when that isn’t getting the job done they turn to something else. Now they’re setting the bar so low that even the most ill-informed of our species must be able to put in any idiotic terms in a search engine and click away mindlessly. I applaud the persistence through. The solution? Well, McAfee doesn’t present one but I imagine it has something to do with censorship and bringing the Wired world back under the corporate / government jackboot.

PromotionWorld:
McAfee® SiteAdvisorTM team, today released a groundbreaking study co-authored by Ben Edelman, noted spyware researcher and an advisor to McAfee, of the safety of the Internet search engines that shows search engine users are at risk of clicking through to Web sites that can compromise their online safety. The investigation, which studied the 5 major search engines (Google, Yahoo!, MSN, AOL, Ask) was initiated in January and concluded in April, found that even common search terms can lead users to risky sites.
Among the study’s top-line findings:

* All of the major search engines returned risky sites in their search results for popular keywords.
* Dangerous sites soared to as much as 72% of results for certain popular keywords, such as “free screensavers,” “digital music,” “popular software,” and “singers.”

MSNBC:
SiteAdvisor’s survey isn’t entirely altruistic; it’s part of the company’s pitch for its own red-yellow-green system for evaluating websites’ riskiness.

Give it a rest already.