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There has been a significant amount of media discussion about search and malware in the past week following the release of AV-TEST’s report on the topic. The study claims that Bing exposed searchers to more malware than Google, meaning when a searcher enters a query, they are more likely to go to a link that could potentially hurt their system. Many have wondered why we have been so quiet over the past week on the topic given the potentially damaging claims being made. In truth, this is a complicated topic and we were doing the research necessary to make sure we understood both the study and the true scale of any reported issue with our search results.
Unfortunately AV-TEST wasn’t able to provide their methodology or many other details until Wednesday, but one thing is clear given the information we have: AV-TEST’s study doesn’t represent the true experience or risk to customers. In other words, the conclusions many have drawn from the study are wrong.
Why? AV-TEST didn’t actually do any searching on bing.com. Rather they used a Bing API to execute a number of queries and downloaded the result to their system for further analysis. By using the API instead of the user interface, AV-TEST bypassed our warning system designed to keep customers from being harmed by malware. Bing actually doesprevent customers from clicking on malware infected sites by disabling the link on the results page and showing the below message to stop people from going to the site.
blogs.bing.com
Unfortunately AV-TEST wasn’t able to provide their methodology or many other details until Wednesday, but one thing is clear given the information we have: AV-TEST’s study doesn’t represent the true experience or risk to customers. In other words, the conclusions many have drawn from the study are wrong.
Why? AV-TEST didn’t actually do any searching on bing.com. Rather they used a Bing API to execute a number of queries and downloaded the result to their system for further analysis. By using the API instead of the user interface, AV-TEST bypassed our warning system designed to keep customers from being harmed by malware. Bing actually doesprevent customers from clicking on malware infected sites by disabling the link on the results page and showing the below message to stop people from going to the site.
Safe Searching with Bing: A Response to AV-TEST's Search Malware Analysis
There has been a significant amount of media discussion about search and malware in the past week following the release of AV-TEST’s report on the topic. The study claims that Bing exposed searchers to more malware than Google, meaning when a searcher enters a query, they are more likely to go...
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A flaw is a flaw
