Bing Answers Critics, Says It Blocks “94% Of Clicks To Malicious Sites”
Bing has responded to the malware study conducted by AV-TEST earlier this week, claiming that Bing search results led to five times more malware than Google.
To that Bing said, “the conclusions many have drawn from the study are wrong.”
A blog post by Bing said :
AV-TEST didn’t actually do any searching on bing.com. Rather they used a Bing API to execute a number of queries and downloaded the result to their system for further analysis. By using the API instead of the user interface, AV-TEST bypassed our warning system designed to keep customers from being harmed by malware. Bing actually does prevent customers from clicking on malware infected sites by disabling the link on the results page and showing the below message to stop people from going to the site.
Overall, Bing says it shows results with malware warnings for about 0.04 percent of searches. Microsoft’s senior program manager for Bing David Felstead also claims that Bing’s warning system blocks “94% of clicks to malicious sites.”
We show results with warnings for about 0.04% of all searches, meaning about 1 in 2,500 search result pages will have a result with a malware warning on it. Of those, only a small proportion of malicious links ever get clicked and the warning therefore triggered, so a user will see the warning only 1 in every 10,000 searches. In any case, the overall scale of the problem is very small.
Felstead later points out a search term that can be entered into Google that results in malicious results.
[SearchEngineLand, TechCrunch, Bing]
