The State of Search Engine Safety was released by Site Advisor today. In this report, we learned that search results are now safer then they were a year ago.

• 4% of the search results are link to risky sites, down from 5.0% reported last year.
• Sponsored results are 2.4 times more likely to have links to risky sites compared to the natural results. Today, 6.9% of sponsored results link to risky sites, down from 8.5% reported last year.
• AOL returns the safest results and Yahoo returns the most risky sites, by percentage.
• Ask.com has seen the largest increase safety than the other search engines, but Google, AOL have also seen an increase in safety. Yahoo and MSN have seen a decline in the safe sites they link to.

More coverage at Techmeme.

Related Topics: Legal: Security

About The Author: Barry Schwartz is Search Engine Land's News Editor and owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry's personal blog is named Cartoon Barry and he can be followed on Twitter here. For more background information on Barry, see his full bio over here. See more articles by Barry Schwartz