Online tunes are more risky than Web porn

A study scheduled to be released today found that about 9% of adult sites that turned up high in search-engine rankings had such PC-damaging problems or annoyances as spyware, adware and spam associated with them.

Yet searching for digital music was twice as risky -- more than 19% of the sites produced by such queries were risky for computer users, according to the study by McAfee Inc., a Santa Clara, Calif.-based company that makes computer-security software.

Other risky searches included those for electronic gadgets and for background "wallpaper" to decorate computer screens.

Researchers have one idea why looking for porn appears to be safer: The business side of that industry works even without the extra hustling.

Since it's harder to make a living selling digital music, those hawking such items are far more likely to attach programs that spew unwanted ads or worse.

"The tier-one adult sites are doing phenomenally well as businesses, and because of that they very much have their house in order," said McAfee Senior Product Manager Mark Maxwell.

The digital music searches studied include those for such file-sharing programs as BearShare, which often include intrusive advertising programs. BearShare took the honors as the single riskiest search term, returning unsafe sites at a 46% rate.

Other findings from McAfee's database were not included in the study, including the news that Britney Spears is slightly more dangerous to search for than Lindsay Lohan.

The former couple of Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston, meanwhile, are a 36% more hazardous combination than the current pair of Pitt and Angelina Jolie.

The study is the third of its kind from McAfee, which owns a popular free service called SiteAdvisor.

It rates millions of websites as red for risky, yellow for somewhat risky and green for safe, warning Web surfers before they click through.

The latest paper also found that sponsored search results, which are paid for by advertisers, are twice as likely to be risky as regular search results.

It also compared the five most popular search engines, finding that Yahoo Inc. had the safest unpaid results and the riskiest paid results.

For thousands of popular searches, the top 500 unpaid listings were about as safe at one search engine as they were at another.