Just how safe is the search engine you normally use? Most people probably don’t care all that much, simply because most people always use Google, and if you can’t trust them to keep you safe, who the hell can you trust?

Well, most definitely not Bing, and absolutely not the Russian search engine Yandex, if you believe the results of a new study from security firm AV Test.

Microsoft’s Bing has been trying to eat away at Google’s share of the search market for some time now, and in many cases one could argue that it does a better job than its rival, like in image search for example. But unfortunately for Bing, it turns out it’s also quite a bit better at turning up something that searchers won’t desire – web pages infected with malware.

The findings come from an 18-month study (PDF via PC Mag), which shows that Google is well ahead of its rivals when it comes to search safety. AV Test’s results show that Bing is actually five times more likely to deliver malicious results than Google is, while poor old Yandex is even more risky, showing malware-infected pages ten times more often. Surprisingly (or perhaps not, seeing as its results are all vetted by humans), Blekko ranks as the second-safest search engine out of the four tested.

It’s hard to argue with these findings, given how comprehensive the study was. AV Test scanned more than 40 million search engine results from August 2011 to February 2013 in its research, with over half of these searches being carried out on the “big two” of Google and Bing. Yandex, Blekko, Baidu, Faroo and Teoma’s results were also looked at in the study, the results of which are presented here:

AV Test’s chart is a bit tricky to follow, but a quick calculation tells us that Google’s results showed up malware 0.0025% of the time, compared to 0.012% of the time in Bing’s results. Yandex meanwhile, showed up malware 0.024% of the time, while Blekko’s score was pretty decent, with just 0.0067% of its results being infected.

Now, these numbers probably don’t seem that high. After all, all four search engines show up malware less than 1% of the time. But then again, when we consider that Google handles some 2-3 billion searches a day, it’s clear that lots of users are going to stumble across infected pages. According to PC Mag, the chances of hitting malware on Google is something like one in 40,118.

Here’s what AV Test had to say:

“The infected websites mostly use malware that exploits existing security vulnerabilities in users’ software. These vulnerabilities normally involve outdated browsers, old add-ons or extensions and out-of-date versions of PDF readers. Users can drastically reduce the likelihood of infection by keeping the software on their systems up to date. They can also guarantee that they have the best possible protection by additionally using high-quality security software that is constantly updated.”

Of course, search engines aren’t the only factor in a comparison of Google and Microsoft’s online safety records. Web browsers and their ability to detect and warn users against phishing and malware-infected sites are just as important.

Google Chrome, plus Firefox and Safari, all benefit from Google’s Safe Browsing Tool. Meanwhile, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer has had its own SmartScreen Application Reputation tool embedded into it since 2009. Both of these services attempt to identify and warn users of potential risks by using reputation-based methods to determine the presence of malware on websites.

According to NSS Labs, which regularly carries out tests of the performance of the top browsers against known hosts of malware and phishing scams, Mozilla Firefox has the best record for alerting users to “zero hour” phishing sites.