A settlement to be finalized in federal court in California will bar AdultFriendFinder from showing its ads to people unless they are actively looking for sexual content, or have consented to seeing such ads. The terms extend to the affiliates too, which means AdultFriendFinder has to make sure they don’t violate the FTC’s demand.

Terms of the settlement impose recordkeeping requirements on the company regarding its advertising, but unlike other settlements, there was no mention of a fine against AdultFriendFinder. That likely resulted from the site being a first time offender of FTC rules

Commentary about AdultFriendFinder on the McAfee SiteAdvisor website featured complaints about spam as well as popups resulting from visiting or signing up for the site’s services.

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Thanks to an updated report from McAfee’s SiteAdvisor, we now know that, for the most part, Internet search is a much safer activity than it was in the past. However, that doesn’t mean search engines won’t occasional include a less-than-reputable site in their results.

McAfee’s report reveals a great deal about safe search results, but before that, I should probably explain the legend. SiteAdvisor ranks malicious sites as being either red or yellow. Red sites are the most dangerous while yellow sites are seen as cautionary. The report reveals more:

Concerning the search engines, AOL has the safest results, with only 3.6% of their results containing sites that are marked by SiteAdvisor as being red or yellow. On the other hand, Yahoo replaced Ask.com as having the “most dangerous results” with 5.1% of their organic SERPs containing these types of sites.

Speaking of organic results, only 4.4% of organic results list these types of sites. However, McAfee also tested the percentage of paid results featuring sites deemed as dangerous and much to my surprise, 8% of sponsored results will lead to a red or yellow coded site. This indicates malicious site owners are willing to pay in order to capture visitors. It also means the search engines supplying the advertising are willing to take money from these site owners.

The paid search advertising model presenting the most risk? That honor goes to MSN’s sponsored results with 10.7%. Ask.com’s are the safest at 6.5%.

Other revelations from McAfee’s report:

Focusing on first page results is no guarantee of safety either. McAfee reveals:

While these numbers may scare some users, it is important to remember the bottom line – only 4.4% of organic listings are considered dangerous by McAfee’s standards. This means while there is some risk involved with organic search, it doesn’t appear to be a haven for site owners with bad intentions.

However, these numbers can quickly change against your favor depending on what keywords you search. The main lesson from the SiteAdvisor report is to be aware.

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Chris Richardson is a search engine writer and editor for WebProNews. Visit WebProNews for the latest search news.

Scandoo supports Google and MSN Search currently, with Yahoo and Ask.com support coming soon. The site developed by security firm ScanSafe automatically scans search results to alert users to sites that contain malware, viruses, or potentially offensive content.

Unlike SiteAdvisor, Scandoo requires no software downloads. Instead a high-speed server infrastructure performs the scanning of each link in the search results. Next to each result, a Scandoo “security light” will appear.

A green check next to a result means the link is safe, while a red X indicates unsafe content. A yellow question mark indicates the link has not been defined. Each marker can be moused over to see Scandoo’s scanning results, including the URL of the domain linked from the result, Scandoo’s site definition by category, and the site rating.

Some search results may return a black spider with a red X. That marker represents what Scandoo considers a dangerous web threat, one that may deliver spyware, adware, or viruses to a visiting machine.

Users of Scandoo can modify the default security policy in place when they use Scandoo. A page of Security Preferences defaults to automatically tagging search results categorized as Hate and discrimination, Illegal activities, Sex/Nudity, and Weapons with the red X.

Clicking the Family Guardian button adds Dating and Gambling categories to that list. Users can save their settings for continued use, or switch back to the default settings by hitting another button.

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David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.

Search engines may process as many as 285 million clicks to unsafe sites every month, a study by Ben Edelman and SiteAdvisor reported. Sponsored sites were from two to four times as dangerous as organic results, meaning that malicious site owners are paying to attack unprotected visitors.

“To compare the safety of search engines’ listings, we compiled 1394 popular keywords using lists of common searches from Google Zeitgeist, Yahoo!, AOL, Lycos, Wordtracker, and other industry sources,” the study said.

“Some lists included adult search terms, which we excluded to maintain consistent keyword content. We considered the first five pages of results for each keyword from each of the five biggest search engines: Google, Yahoo!, AOL, MSN, and Ask.”

Out of those search engines, MSN proved the safest with only 3.9 percent of results proving unsafe or risky. Yahoo followed at 4.3 percent, and there was a tie between AOL and Google, 5.3 percent; that duplication is likely due to AOL using Google search results. Ask proved the least safe of the group, with 6.1 percent results in the test being unsafe.

“We recommend extra caution when searching at Ask,” the study said.

The paid search dangers prove unsettling. Search advertising sellers should be able to impose safety requirements when it comes to who buys ads from them. Apparently adware and spam purveyors can purchase ads with impunity, so the guidelines in place for those major ad sellers may not be strong enough.

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David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.