Bing has responded to the malware study conducted by AV-TEST earlier this week, claiming that Bing search results led to five times more malware than Google. To that Bing said, “the conclusions many have drawn from the study are wrong.” Why is the study wrong according to Bing? While Bing may show potentially infected search […]
Bing has responded to the malware study conducted by AV-TEST earlier this week, claiming that Bing search results led to five times more malware than Google.
To that Bing said, “the conclusions many have drawn from the study are wrong.”
Why is the study wrong according to Bing?
While Bing may show potentially infected search results, Bing clearly labels results that may be infected and this study did not consider that. Bing said the study’s methodology used the Bing Search API, which does not contain a malware label, like the core search results screen does. Bing said, “AV-TEST didn’t actually do any searching on bing.com.” So when they used the Bing API to execute a number of queries and downloaded the result to their system, they were not able to check to see if Bing labeled the results as malware.
How much malware is in Bing? Bing said:
We show results with warnings for about 0.04% of all searches, meaning about 1 in 2,500 search result pages will have a result with a malware warning on it. Of those, only a small proportion of malicious links ever get clicked and the warning therefore triggered, so a user will see the warning only 1 in every 10,000 searches. In any case, the overall scale of the problem is very small.
