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Bing Tops Google At Finding Malware 111

adeelarshad82 writes "According to an 18-month study from German independent testing lab AV-Test, searches on Bing returned five times more links to malicious websites than Google searches. The study looked at nearly 40 million websites provided by seven different search engines. About 10 million results came from Bing and another 10 million from Google. 13 million sites were provided by the Russian service Yandex, with the rest coming from Blekko, Faroo, Teoma and Baidu respectively. Of these 40 million sites, AV-Test found 5,000 pieces of malware—and admittedly small percentage of websites."
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Bing Tops Google At Finding Malware

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  • Well to be fair (Score:5, Insightful)

    by binarylarry ( 1338699 ) on Thursday April 11, 2013 @04:48PM (#43426631)

    Microsoft has much more experience with malware than Google does.

    • by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 11, 2013 @04:55PM (#43426759)

      I don't want my searches returning malware links.
      Especially since they're incompatible with my OS.

      • Hehe, same for me.
      • by BrokenHalo ( 565198 ) on Thursday April 11, 2013 @07:12PM (#43428175)

        So Google's better, right?

        No, Bing is better. At finding malicious sites.

        I always knew it must be good for something...

        • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

          by Anonymous Coward

          No, Bing is better. At finding malicious sites.

          And if you're running Windows, Bing and Desktop Search show the same results.

        • by dj245 ( 732906 )

          So Google's better, right?

          No, Bing is better. At finding malicious sites. I always knew it must be good for something...

          I have found Bing maps to be far superior to Google maps in many locations. The airplane views especially are usually better, and Bing allows for multiple angles and rotating the view for the airplane photos. In many cases, the satellite photos are higher resolution also.

      • i only use Google for searching
    • Re: (Score:1, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward

      5,000 across all 4 tested search engines vs. 10,000,000 pages searched with just Bing. The real story here is that search engines generally don't return malware pages at all anymore, but lets put that line at the end and make it another corp-war story instead.

      • by ackthpt ( 218170 )

        5,000 across all 4 tested search engines vs. 10,000,000 pages searched with just Bing. The real story here is that search engines generally don't return malware pages at all anymore, but lets put that line at the end and make it another corp-war story instead.

        How about browsers? Google Chrome will attempt to block you from going to a known malicious site.

    • by Capt.DrumkenBum ( 1173011 ) on Thursday April 11, 2013 @05:18PM (#43427111)
      If I think about it logically.
      If I were the type of scum sucking vermin who would produce malware, I would tend to target the less technically savvy computer users. What search engine would such a person be likely to use? Whatever one IE points to by default.
      Bing.

      My apologies to any scum sucking vermin who might be reading this. I am truly sorry for comparing you to malware writers.
      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        Comment removed based on user account deletion
        • I use Bing

          ha ha!

        • don't get jack shit from google

          Yeah, those greedy bastards just take take take. I visit their website and they 'take' my search from me!!!

          I should charge them for the privilage of accepting my search terms and running my e-mail client.

        • by Anonymous Coward

          I'd rather pay $20 than use Bing.

        • Meh if you are using a browser in low rights mode with sandboxing who fricking cares.

          You don't have to do legit system damage to be annoying. I've had plenty of users who have gotten infections consisting of a single executable in a temp folder that managed to somehow get itself to start up often enough to make a mess of people's systems. It helps prevent PERSISTENT damage that requires post-infection tools like Combofix or gMER, but it is still enough to make users upset and think that Super Duper Antivirus 2015 Pro has found kiddiepr0ndownloader.trojan and that they need to pay $29.95 usi

      • More likely Google's indexing engine identifies many of the malware sites and tosses them from the index because they think users don't want to find them. Bing is probably doing the same thing, but not as well.
    • by Spy Handler ( 822350 ) on Thursday April 11, 2013 @05:21PM (#43427147) Homepage Journal

      Bing's servers run on Windows

      Google's servers run on *Nix

      Of course Bing is going to find more malware!

    • The title is wrong. (Score:5, Informative)

      by khasim ( 1285 ) <brandioch.conner@gmail.com> on Thursday April 11, 2013 @05:35PM (#43427327)

      From TFA:

      Google the Safest
      The study concluded that while all the search engines the lab evaluated delivered malware, Google delivered the least. It was followed by Bing, which returned a disconcerting five times as much malware as Google.

      • by Anonymous Coward

        That's what it says: Bing is better than Google for people who want to find malware.

        • The study concluded that while all the search engines the lab evaluated delivered malware, Google delivered the least. It was followed by Bing, which returned a disconcerting five times as much malware as Google.

          That's what it says: Bing is better than Google for people who want to find malware.

          And what's really scary is that "followed by Bing" implies that other engines returned even more, starting from a point 5 times as high!

    • Oh look, another paid MS shill got the first post crowing about how MS is better at google than something. Nice try, Florian Muller. Next you'll tell us that Google is violating MS's patents on having a monopoly.
    • by Archangel Michael ( 180766 ) on Thursday April 11, 2013 @07:04PM (#43428119) Journal

      Bing
      Is
      Not
      Google

    • You call it Bing. We call it Bung.

  • Because it's not guaranteed (to be safe)?

  • Deception (Score:2, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    This is kind of a deceptive title, the article is about how Google results contain less malware sites, because Bing misses them when scanning.
    • Yes. The title is meant to be tongue in cheek, but it allows the reader to think that Bing notices more malware and therefore will not present them to the browser. Its not clear from the title that Bing is actually missing malware on sites and issuing them back to you as valid search results. Also, the article itself is not clear because it seems that the number of malware pages found was roughly the same, but the search size was greater on Google. The article would have been more useful if it offered some
  • My new malware detection strategy is garaunteed to detect 100% of all web based malware.
    The AV solution is so fast and simple, you don't need to install anything, you don't even have to click a single link (I would reccomend you don't): In my AV system Every Page is Considered Malware!

  • How soon until they join the ranks of Digital, Wang, Novell, etc.
    • Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)

      by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Thursday April 11, 2013 @06:01PM (#43427621)
      Comment removed based on user account deletion
      • by peragrin ( 659227 ) on Thursday April 11, 2013 @07:10PM (#43428161)

        MSFT is still worth billions. that adds 5 years by itself. Just look at Dell. Just trying to go private(smart move long term) has the investor sharks circling to get a piece of the pie, This is going to extend dell going Private by at least a year, and if they manage to stop it the sharks will bleed Dell dry.

        No MSFT going down won't be quiet or quick. It will be a mob of investors trying to force all the cash and other holdings to be sold and/or given to them while things get even worse. Personally I expect Ballmer to try and save the sinking ship not realizing all the other rats have left him behind.

      • they suck balls when it comes to consumers

        Not yet, but don't lose all hope. Ballmer will try just about anything.

      • Once businesses start going the way of Munich, [h-online.com], they are done.

  • by Anonymous Coward

    Thanks to all the Microsoft FUD going around, people are going to think that Google is telling their neighbors that they've been looking at furry videos.

  • by Anonymous Coward

    "Bing Tops Google At Finding Malware"

    IMO this is a bullshit article. Why?

    Because...

    https://www.virustotal.com/en/about/ [virustotal.com]

    "What is VirusTotal

    VirusTotal, a subsidiary of Google, is a free online service that analyzes files and URLs enabling the identification of viruses, worms, trojans and other kinds of malicious content detected by antivirus engines and website scanners. At the same time, it may be used as a means to detect false positives, i.e. innocuous resources detected as malicious by one or more scanner

    • by Anonymous Coward

      "Bing Tops Google At Finding Malware"

      IMO this is a bullshit article. Why?

      It's actually a bullshit headline. It's a case of "Finding" malware in your search results means they actually missed the malware and therefor found less malware than Google.

  • by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 11, 2013 @05:17PM (#43427097)

    We're number one!!! We're number one!!!

  • Misleading Title (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Bobfrankly1 ( 1043848 ) on Thursday April 11, 2013 @05:24PM (#43427201)
    This isn't about successfully searching for malware, this is about failing to filter compromised or hostile websites out of your search results. It's about Google topping Bing at that filtering.

    Also:

    ...and admittedly small percentage of websites."

    editing plz?

  • We're Number One!

  • Easy to achieve (Score:5, Interesting)

    by robmv ( 855035 ) on Thursday April 11, 2013 @05:37PM (#43427359)

    Easy to achieve, I have found a lot of website malware that only manifest if your user agent is Internet Explorer, those infected sites have code that try to hide injected HTML/JS code to Google Bot. Unless Google start violating the robots.txt convention and crawl the net as Internet Explorer, those sites will be never detected by them.

    I have not found an infected site that include code to hide from Bing, so this could help MS, and MS could be using information obtained by the users that browse with Internet Explorer and use their Antivirus Software

    • Re:Easy to achieve (Score:5, Informative)

      by afidel ( 530433 ) on Thursday April 11, 2013 @05:46PM (#43427459)

      LOL, way to not even read the summary, Bing returned 500% more results containing links to infected sites, quite the opposite of what you are saying.

      • by robmv ( 855035 )

        haha you got me there, but my experience is true, If Google was allowed to cheat the User Agent when crawling, those websites could be hidden to the users. Those infected sites I found were not listed as malware on Google. So if if you are a malware website author, hide from all Search engine bots and you have more change to not be listed by them

        • If Google was allowed to cheat the User Agent when crawling, those websites could be hidden to the users. Those infected sites I found were not listed as malware on Google.

          Soooo, you're saying that Google was unable to find malware because their indexing agent didn't advertise itself as IE. By that logic, Google would be missing more malware on it's scan, and therefore would be serving MORE malware infested sites as top/high results to search queries? But the article is saying that Bing is serving more malware, and by definition finding and filtering out less of it than Google.

          Logic fail or reading fail? Either way, read and try again...

      • So, they crawled as IE potentially and indexed the malware a lot better, lol.
  • by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 11, 2013 @05:39PM (#43427381)

    Google's been in the search game for a while now. They're quite used to being scammed, SEOd, manipulated, and probably have whole departments and armies of programmers/scientists just devoted to keeping their search results malware and scam free (As much as possible at least)

    Google often goes out of their way to point out that their main purpose is to simply categorize and index the information available on the internet.

  • I'd like to see Microsoft create virus and malware programs. With their track record, they could make one really great version and then the next release will be total shit. They can then shut down this department and malware will be dead forever. I suggest they create this new malware division with people from the following past projects: Windows 8, Vista, ME, Clippy, Bob, and a few others. Of course they'd probably get in trouble for some antitrust issues if they did this..
    • I'm afraid the Internet will beat them in the end.

      Take web browsers. We had this piece of shit called Netscape, that was innovating the hell out of everybody else, and taking over the whole Internet. MS saw that happening, realised it was just wrong, and came with the excellent solution called Internet Explorer. It took them a while to get it right, but by the time they reached version 6 they did it. They had created the one all, end all of browsers, the ultimate web browsing solution, and Netscape was nowh

  • The title is wrong. A more useful one would be "Bing shoves 5x as many malware links at you at the top of your searches, without realizing it."

  • Nice to know Bing is good at finding something !

  • So I just got scroogled on all that mall ware? I demand that you hand it back immediately.
  • Bing finds LESS malware than Google because it offers up 5 times MORE malware to users than an equivalent Google search. The title may lead one to believe that Microsoft is BETTER at finding malware, but in fact, they suck MORE at it...

    If you read the article, the mpm (Malware per Million) is quite low in any case, but because there are billions of searches a day, that makes the odds much more likely to occur than, say winning the Lottery...

  • ...You're infected!

For God's sake, stop researching for a while and begin to think!

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