U.S. pundits: Yandex is six times more effective than Google

Yandex is six times more effective than Google in detecting malicious sites, according to U.S. internet security company Sucuri.

According to the report from the Californian company Sucuri, Yandex is about six times better than Google in detecting malicious sites. Security experts reached this conclusion after researching the one million most visited sites on the Internet as compiled by Alexa Internet, Inc. web traffic resource in August 2013.

To be labeled malicious, the site must meet one of the following criteria: be on the black list of search engines or anti-virus companies, infect computers with spam trojans or other malicious software, or operate with outdated software.

In total, nearly 108,781 sites fit one of these criteria, or more than 10 percent of Alexa's top million. After the test, 18,557 of them, or nearly 2 percent, were blacklisted.

After comparing the databases of anti-virus companies and results of search engines with the list of the 18,557 sites that did not pass the safety test, experts at Sucuri found the list of McAfee antivirus company had the best overall match. Its database contains 11,000 dangerous sites that are on Sucuri's list.

In third place overall (and best among all the search engines in the world) was the Russian site Yandex. The search engine had identified 2154 sites from Sucuri's black list. This is a better than Google, which identified only 357 sites.

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Getting on the black list of a search engine is one of the worst things that can happen to a web site, because it leads to a decrease in traffic, says Sucuri expert Daniel Cid in his company's blog.

For example, if a site is on Google's black list, then Chrome and Firefox users will see a red page warning of the danger when they try to enter it. Yandex usually indicates the danger of visiting a site in its search results.

Founded in 2010 in California, Sucuri develops and markets services that help secure websites. It gained attention as a result of an article describing the tools used in the massive attacks on the site hosting and domain registrar GoDaddy and other hosting companies.

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