Beware the ides of search

Online security firm Mcafee has released a report about the most dangerous search terms online — terms that, once sought, may lead users to unsafe malware websites.

Of the 50 riskiest expressions to search across sites like Google, Yahoo, Live, AOL and Ask, "word unscrambler," "lyrics," "myspace" and "free music downloads" topped all others:

"Maximum Risk" denotes the percentage of pages on a single search results page that are dangerous. For example, in a search for "lyrics," there was one search results page whereupon 50% of the ranked pages were risky.

"Average Risk" is the overall risk from all five pages of search results for each term, according to Search Engine Land.

Scammers that take advantage of careless searchers also keep track of popular trends when deciding which keywords to populate with venom. The following chart highlights some of the riskiest terms related to the current economic climate:

Last year was more celebrity-oriented than financially so. In a study released in September, McAfee determined that users seeking Brad Pitt-oriented themes, including photos, screensavers or desktop wallpaper, have an 18 percent chance of encountering malware.

Certain keyword categories are also more dangerous than others — for example, searches related to "lyrics" and "free" touted both the highest average risk and highest maximum risk.

McAfee also questioned how well search engines themselves keep users apprised of risky websites, Search Engine Land wrote. Yahoo uses SearchScan (a McAfee product) and Ask uses Symantic; Microsoft's Live Search, Bing and Google use proprietary tools.

To compile the study, McAfee analyzed the first five search results pages across 2600 popular keywords across the above-mentioned search engines. Both organic and paid listings were incorporated into the analysis, and over 413,000 unique URLs checked for potential risk.