Do search engines really protect you from malware?

We make tens, hundreds or maybe thousands  of queries on search engines every day. We want them to be fast and accurate and trust the results it displays back to us.

I believe search engines should be held accountable (in some cases) for the content they link to. The particular instances I am thinking of, are those links that push malware.

I tried a little experiment. I searched for a known malware domain: google-hostcom.ru

This site contains adult content and tries to download a malicious file onto the user’s computer:

Here are the results from the most popular search engines:

Google:

Yahoo!

bing

Ask.com

Conclusion:

Practically all search engines list this malicious domain without any warning of any sort.

AV vendors, such as Paretologic, maintain up-to-date blacklists. I believe Sunbelt Software just started on working with Stopbadware.org, the organism that provides information about the Google warnings.
However, there is clearly a lot of room for improvement as this experiment just proved.

We need to combine our intelligence together in order to make the web safer!

Jerome Segura