It is bad enough, for someone with no great interest in the monarchy, that the engagement of Prince William and Kate Middleton has now dominated TV, print and online news outlets for the past 24 hours solid. I know I risk being verbally scolded by the twin-pronged pro-Royalty army that is the combined forces of the blue-rinsed brigade and readers of Heat magazine, but I think I can safely say that the forthcoming Royal wedding is now officially bad news. I can also say that you would be safer searching for porn than searching for news about the Royal nuptials.

Security researchers at the Websense labs have uncovered the first wave of poisoned search engine results to wash onto Google and Yahoo alike, using everything from promises of ‘Prince William Wedding Photos’ through to the much more generic, and likely all the more successful as a result, ‘Prince William Wedding’ as lures to sites which will hit the unsuspecting and unprotected visitor with the latest drive-by download attacks.

This should come as no great surprise, of course, as poisoned search results remain a popular method of driving traffic to infected sites. In fact, the recently published Websense Security Labs Threat Report suggests that a whopping 22.4% of all searches for current news actually lead to malicious results in some form or other. Can I say arse biscuits here? Too late, and I’m going to say it again, but louder: ARSE BISCUITS!

If the Websense figures are accurate, then that’s almost a quarter of all searches for a current news story end up with toxic results that could take you into dangerous online territory.

To put that figure into some perspective, it means that searching for current news stories is now more dangerous an activity than searching for porn, which could leads to malicious sites 21.8% of the time. It’s all the more worrying when you also take into account the fact that, according to the same report, some 79.9% of websites that contain malicious code are actually legitimate sites that have been compromised.

The answer is obvious (no, not search for porn instead of celebrity gossip and Royal news) and involves only visiting known and trusted sources when feeding your news habit. Although you can never say for sure that the likes of the BBC, The Guardian, The Sun or even PC Pro for that matter will never get compromised by some clever hacker, the chances of that happening are far, far less than the bad guys targeting an unpatched small business site server and pointing at that.

It seems several “publishers” have taken Apple at its word. At the top of the iBooks paid-for chart right now is Hot and Steamy: Sizzling Sex Stories, with Hot and Steamy: Sexual Fantasies at number 12 and Erotic Threesomes at number 27.

The free books chart, meanwhile, has the none-too-subtle A Taste Of Things To Cum at number two, nestled rather conspicuously between Winnie-the-Pooh and The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes.

It seems, therefore, that Apple iPads and iPhones are people’s preferred medium for a titillating read. Certainly if you look at the Amazon bestsellers or the Waterstones chart, there’s nothing in the top ten you’d be embarrassed about reading on the bus (with the possible exception of Tony Blair’s autobiography).

It was Steve Jobs, remember, who once defended the Apple walled garden by claiming that the iPad delivered “freedom from porn”. How much longer, I wonder, is he going to put up with A Taste Of Things To Cum sullying his charts?

In May, the company decided to have one last attempt at persuading the people on Firefox 2 to move up to Firefox 3, by hitting users of the old version with a pop-up that prompted them to upgrade. Those who declined were invited to fill out a questionnaire, asking them to reveal why they didn’t want the latest software.

The number one reason for not upgrading was the new location bar, and the fact that it delved into people’s bookmark collections to suggest sites as they typed. No fewer than 25% of Firefox 3 refuseniks cited this as the reason they wouldn’t upgrade. In fact, almost all of the people who provided feedback had tried Firefox 3, didn’t like what they saw, and headed back to Firefox 2.

“When we expanded the capabilities of the location bar to search against all history and bookmarks in Firefox 3, a lot of people contacted us to say that they had certain bookmarks they didn’t really want to have displayed,” Firefox’s principal designer, Alex Faaborg, tactfully explains on the Mozilla Blog of Metrics.

“In some cases users had intentionally hidden these bookmarks in deep hierarchies of folders, somewhat similar to how one might hide a physical object. Having something from your previous browsing displayed to someone else who is using your computer (or even worse) to a large audience of people as you are giving a presentation, is really one of the most embarrassing things that Firefox can do to you.”

There’s little doubt, then, that Firefox 3 had caused more than its fair share of domestic showdowns, as unsuspecting partners accidentally stumbled across sites that were previously buried in a folder called something like “Dave’s really boring bookmarks, nothing to see here”.

No wonder Mozilla hastily introduce a Private Browsing mode in Firefox 3.5…

A new search engine launched this week, prompting a surprisingly huge response online. To be honest, I was just as guilty of getting excited as anyone else.

Whether it was the David-versus-Goliath appeal of a tiny startup going up against a company that can boast to be both a household name and a verb, or whether it was the pure controversy – several Cuil engineers have come directly from Google, after all – I don’t know. But one thing looks certain; we want the search monopoly to be toppled.

However, while the same level of attention remains today, the tone is far different from the hopeful news stories surrounding its launch. Now bloggers are complaining, a lot.

Social bookmarking sites are littered with screenshots of empty search result pages, for terms that really should throw up the odd link; “Iraq war” for example (since fixed, for me at least), “Cobol” (ageing, yes, but I’m sure I’ve seen mention of it online somewhere before…) and “student loan” (which sadly do exist, I should know).

It is early days, admittedly, but as soon as you officially launch you open yourself up to analysis and ridicule. The complaints are valid, too; these results certainly don’t seem to be on a par with Google, and for an underdog to succeed it needs to not only match, but surpass the market leader.

Some of the complaints are extremely serious – with pornographic images popping up on search results, out of context, and even with the safe search feature turned on. If you can’t trust the site for use at work, or by your kids, how much will it actually get used?

There are also worrying problems with Cuil as a business. It obviously doesn’t have the same sort of cash behind it that Google does, but how long it will actually hang on to its meagre $25 million investment?

Sarah Carey, The Sunday Times columnist, also works for Cuil, and recently posted on her personal blog about how quickly the company is burning through this VC cash. The post has since been removed, but thanks to Google’s caching feature (not available on Cuil), the post can still be read here.

“I have a secret life. You may know me as a domesticated, rural housewife and while this is true, for the past year I have also tasted the life of an international software executive,” says Carey, before going on to describe day-to-day life at Cuil.

“Lunch is ordered in every single day. Huge fridges burst with snacks and drinks. Bowls of strawberries and muffins lie around the rest area. The company pays for a personal trainer and gym membership for everyone. A doctor calls round each Friday, after the weekly barbeque, to see if everyone’s in good health. Employees drift in an out at times that suit themselves,” she continued, before temporarily expressing worry about the spending.

So she confronted her boss. “This was disastrous! His company would never succeed if he wasted money like this and didn’t crack the whip. He laughed. This is the way it works out here. You have to be nice to people. I summoned up the audacity to ask for business class travel and was granted it without hesitation. Knowing the cost of the ticket was over €2000, which is about $5 million given the current exchange rate,” showing that her problem with the overspending, forgivably, was short-lived.

I’ll watch Cuil with interest, but would I invest? No.

Thanks to riza for the photograph.