SANTA CLARA, CALIFORNIA , USA - IF YOU are using a search engine to research screensavers - or, for that matter, key in the search term, "lyrics" - you are taking a grave risk.

But search for "Viagra" and you are relatively safe.

A new study has catalogued which Internet searches are most likely to attract crooks who want to infect your computer with malware, spyware, adware and the like.

Leading computer security company McAfee did a survey of over 2,600 leading keywords, as defined by five top search engines like Google and Yahoo, then examined the first five pages of results.

Overall, the average risk level of all results pages was a mere 1.7 per cent.

That is to say, on a given list of 250 results thrown up by a search engine, just over four were risky.

However, for the riskiest set of keyword variations - "screensavers" - there was an average risk of just over 34 per cent for results in the United States.

That meant one in three results would be risky.

The "maximum risk" - the riskiest single page - came in at a whopping 59 per cent, meaning more than half of the results were risky.

A page might be risky because cybercriminals might go there to "snare victims" by getting them "to download a computer file or program that comes with a malicious payload", McAfee said.

One of the riskiest single search terms in the US is "lyrics", with a maximum risk of one in two and an average risk factor of just over 14.8 per cent.

Surprisingly, searches using the word Viagra yielded the fewest risky sites, McAfee said.

Overall, health-related search terms and those about the economic crisis turned out to be the safest.

The maximum risk on a single page of US queries on the economy was 3.5 per cent and the risk across all results was a minuscule 0.5 per cent.

Similarly, only 4 per cent of the sites listed on the worst results page for health queries were risky, with just 0.4 per cent risk overall.

To compile the report, The Web's Most Dangerous Search Terms, McAfee examined over 413,000 unique websites.

It also zeroed in on - and sounded a warning regarding - a popular trend in the current economic downturn: Working from home.

"Work-from-home searches can be as much as four times more risky than the average for all popular terms," McAfee stated. --The Statesman/Asia News Network