Almost 14% of hot searches on either Google or Yahoo, lead to malware sites, according to a recent report*. And my suspicion is that this will increase as the search engines struggle to balance immediacy with relevancy.
Wherever there is web traffic, you will find spammers and scammers. To them it doesn’t really matter why you are visiting their sites, as long as you do, and consequently get infected by their malicious software or trigger adverts. I’ve previously mentioned the usage of Google Trends and Hot keywords to identify opportunities to gain cheap, relevant, high-volume traffic. Obviously the key to that advice is the word “relevant”, unless you fall into one of the two previously mentioned categories.
At a seminar just a few weeks ago, I presented on the topic of web spam through realtime search as a current and growing issue. As an example I used the case by Rae Hoffman which highlights how relatively easy it is to currently push spammy and fraudulent content towards the top of the Google search results via Twitter.
With the current focus on immediacy, there is a need for new signals to better determine the value and accuracy of the content before presenting it in the search results. In contrast to Google, Bing has taken the safer approach of providing realtime searches on a separate page.
I’m confident both implementations will change over the course of the year as algorithms gets better and user behaviour guides the engines to how we’d like it integrated in regular search (or not).
Another interesting, but scary, finding of the report is that 71% of infected sites, are actually legitimate sites that have been hacked. Thus webmasters need to be wary of this, to avoid infecting their users and hurting their brand.
* Read the Websense report
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