Online tunes are more risky than Web porn

Yahoo came out best with 2.7% that were red or yellow, and IAC/InterActiveCorp's Ask.com was the worst at 3.3%.

The range was larger when it came to advertised results: from a low of 4.1% problematic results at Ask to 9% at Yahoo.

Google Inc. has toughened its checks on advertisers and made its paid results safer in the last year, McAfee said, while Yahoo has gotten worse.

Yahoo declined an interview request. In a statement Saturday, Vice President of Marketplace Quality Reggie Davis wrote that the unpaid search results "represent the vast majority of clicked links."

"We will continue to improve our performance in this area by investing in technology," Davis said.

An Ask.com spokeswoman pointed to the company's sharp improvement in paid results, which boosted its overall safety performance from worst to the middle of the pack.

Many of the advertised sites that McAfee flagged are obvious scams pointed out by SiteAdvisor users, including those that make impossible claims about obtaining green cards for immigrants and repairing damaged credit.

"We are struck by search engines' failure to block even the most notorious and widespread of scam ads -- a decision we suspect arises out of search engines' business objectives," the study's authors wrote.

In better news, the number of the very worst sites -- those that use known vulnerabilities in software to automatically install keystroke loggers and other malicious programs -- remained quite small. McAfee turned up less than one in a thousand among the top search engine results.

Google has begun to warn users before they go to one of those sites, and a spokeswoman said that the effort would remain the priority over fighting such lesser threats as adware and spam.

"Google concentrates on Web pages that pose real danger to our users, and we are confident that we are protecting searchers from these threats," company spokeswoman Katie Watson said.

joseph.menn@latimes.com