McAfee analysed the first 50 search results returned by search engines Google, AOL, Yahoo, MSN and Ask for 2,300 popular keywords.

According to the company, more than 276 million searches per month lead to risky websites which are found to offer adware, spyware, viruses, exploits, spam email or excessive pop-ups.

However, it said that since May 2006 search engine results have become safer, primarily due to improved safety of sponsored results on Google, AOL, and Ask. Its findings showed AOL returns the safest search results, while Yahoo returns the greatest percentage of risky results.