According to an independent study done by the Germany group AV-TEST, is you use Microsoft’s search engine, Bing, then you’re 5x more likely to see a malware infested website in your search results than if you were a Google user.

How was the study done? The company claims to have collected data on over 40 million websites during the course of an 18 month period. They tested not just Bing and Google, but also Yandex and Blekko. If you thought Bing was bad, Yandex delivers 10x as much malware Google. The full results of their testing are in this three page PDF document.

Now I’m not going to lie to you, this study makes for amazing link bait, but let’s think about their claims rationally. The report says that almost all of these malware attacks can be avoided if a user simply keeps their machine up to date. That’s not really asking for much. Chrome updates itself every six weeks, and Microsoft issues security updates every Tuesday. If you’re not keeping your system in check, it’s kind of your fault.

And also, while I originally wanted to ignore this story because I thought AV-TEST was just another random anti-virus software maker, apperently they’re more than that. They’re a group of IT pros that test anti-virus software and provide malware databases for the companies that make said software.

Translation: They’re not selling stuff to everyday people, they just want to ruffle some feathers.