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Ars Technica reports an update to a May 2006 study on the safety of search engine results:

Security researcher Ben Edelman has revisited his May 2006 report on the relative risk of search engine results. In the original report, Edelman found that 5 percent of the results provided by search engines … presented some risk to the user. Now, Edelman says that his new study has shown that only 4.4 percent of such sites are risky, representing a drop of 12 percent since May.

Edelman used McAfee’s SiteAdvisor tool to run 2,500 popular keywords through several search engines. SiteAdvisor evaluates web sites based on their affiliation with spyware, viruses, excessive pop-up advertisements, and spam.