Bing search results are more affected by poisoning than those of other search engines, according to a study by SophosLabs.
Search engine poisoning attacks are designed to skew results so that dodgy sites - anything from malware infected websites to payday loan sites - appear prominently in the index of sites related to popular search terms. In many cases the tactic is so successful that malware sites appear in the first page of results for popular search terms, in sometimes much higher than legitimate websites. More recently, miscreants have began trying to manipulate image search results.
SophosLabs blocks attempts to "redirect" surfers from search engines to dodgy sites and can therefore monitor the scale of search engine poisoning attacks. Two thirds (65 per cent) of the poisoned search results blocked by Sophos appliances over the last two weeks originated from Bing while 30 per cent came via Google. The other 5 per cent came via alternative search engines. The true state of play is probably even worse than these raw statistics suggest because Google is the most popular search engine, a factor not accounted for in these raw figures.
The vast majority of dodgy redirects (92 per cent) blocked by Sophos related to image searches. Only eight per cent related to text searches.
Read more: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/10/08/bing_worst_search_poisoning/
