So how many people click on bad search results

Recently, I wrote about the massive amount of crap comment spam pages in Live Italy, directing users to potential malware sites.

Fellow blogger Didier Stevens pointed out something really interesting to me: He did an analysis last fall on how many people actually click on these sites. How? He used the infamous AOL data, a veritable fount of fascinating information for researchers.

And he found that about 1% of AOL users were landing on these sites. Link here, with another related story here.

So…multiply 1% against the universe of computer users… that’s a lot of people hitting illegitimate sites (these sites may be pushing snake oil, cell phones — whatever — or malware).

Alex Eckelberry