Science and technology news blog

A study from security vendor McAfee found that search query results returned by Google, AOL, and Ask.com are less likely to lead viewers to dangerous Web sites than they were six months ago. The study also found that Yahoo and MSN are not following that trend toward safer search results.

McAfee’s study crunched the new numbers over a six-month period as a follow-up to its May 2006 survey. That survey found that nearly 5 percent of all search results served up by Google, Yahoo, MSN, AOL, and Ask.com led Web surfers to malicious sites designed to infect computers with spyware, viruses, pop-up ads, junk e-mail, or other malware.

For the purpose of the study, McAfee’s SiteAdvisor organized a list of 2,500 keywords to evaluate the first five pages of search results for each keyword on each of the five search engines.

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It has been nearly a year since AOL launched its next generation Triton AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) client.

In that time, however, AOL never actually advertised to its AIM 5.9 users directly in their AIM client that an upgrade was available. Instead, users had to go to AOL.com to get Triton.

That situation changes today with the release of AIM 6.0, which is being advertised to all AIM users.

AIM 6.0 builds on the Triton code base, which has also now been exposed via the Open AIM SDK.

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