See for yourself with the SiteAdvisor or filter searches based on safety using Scandoo.

# All the major search engines returned risky sites in their search results for popular keywords. # Overall, MSN search results had the lowest percentage (3.9%) of dangerous sites while Ask search results had the highest percentage (6.1%). Google was in between (5.3%). # Sponsored results contained two to four times as many dangerous sites as organic results.

SiteAdvisor has a plugin for IE and Firefox. I hope you are not still using IE though … Scandoo is a wrapper for all the major search engines, grading results using a traffic light system so green means the site is considered safe. CR comes up green in SiteAdvisor and Unknown in Scandoo. I submitted CR to Scandoo but arkwardly they didn’t have a weblog category so had to submit it as Leisure/Entertainment. Despite poor categories Scandoo could be a good start page for the less computer literate, I’m going to use both systems on my Firefox install and see how it goes.