McAfee SiteAdvisor Blog

In 2006, you know you’re famous when your face has been immortalized as a screensaver and is cascading across the screens of millions of PCs worldwide. The extensive selection of screensavers celebrating the wildly popular reality show American Idol exemplifies the celebrity status of the top ranked contestants.

With the aid of a search engine, doting fans can easily find and download screensavers of their favorite Idol hopefuls. But searchers beware. Indulging your desire to create a desktop shrine to your Idol obsession could be extremely detrimental to your PC. Screensaver downloads are notorious for bundling intrusive spyware and adware programs that clutter your PC, slow your system’s functionality, invade your privacy, and serve annoying pop-up advertisements.

Not all searches for American Idol screensavers are created equally, however. Some contestant screensaver searches pose much more risk than others. So who’s the most dangerous American Idol hottie to search for?

Avid American Idol watchers ourselves, we had to find out. We searched Google for the names of top twelve American Idol contestants plus the word screensaver and calculated the percentage of dangerous site links returned on the first page of search results.

And the most dangerous Idol is…

Searching for screensavers for quirky gray-haired Taylor Hicks, still in the running, produced the riskiest results: 46% of first page search results came back red. Recently booted Colorado stud Ace Young came in next with 36% red search results and Bucky, Kellie, and Lisa all followed at 27%.

Percentage of red screensaver search results for American Idol’s top 12 contestants

The safest search was for Melissa McGhee, yielding 0 unsafe results. Her popularity plummeted in mid-March when she was voted off after forgetting the words to Stevie Wonder’s “Lately.” She may have been the first of the top 12 to be sent packing, but she won our screensaver safety contest. Her parents must be so proud.

The most frequent offending link was screensavers.com, which appeared in search results for 8 out of the 12 contestants. Just read our user comments for the site and you will want to stay far away. One user’s one-word summary of the site: “Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.” Ezthemes.com and starpulse.com, two other sites with risky downloads, each showed up in one third of the contestant searches.

Parental Advisory: Explicit Web Sites

Our search for hunky Ace was particularly colorful. The second search results took us to azter.com, a site offering risky downloads galore and some rather sexually explicit content (perhaps inappropriate for Ace’s younger audience?). In addition to red rated spyware sites, Ace’s searches also yielded spammy ohmygoodies.com (coincidently another adult-themed site) as the fourth result. After entering our e-mail address on this site, we ended up with a whopping 1401 e-mails per week! We love you Ace, but we’re not about to venture onto these sites for you.

The Dangers of Idol Worship

A Google search for Taylor Hicks Screensaver returned 46% red sites.

American Idol has certainly become a national phenomenon. Each week over 30 million addicted viewers tune in to watch aspiring rock stars and divas sing their hearts out in the hopes of achieving the American dream. Unfortunately the purity of contestants’ passion and ambition is tainted by the greed of sketchy businesses who swiftly hop on the bandwagon to take advantage of the show’s success. Malicious activity finds a way to exploit any popular craze, and even wholesome entertainment is ripe for rip-offs.

But unlike scavenging paparazzi that plague celebrities with never-ending scrutiny, unscrupulous Web sites victimize the fans too. Fans are especially vital to an American Idol contestant’s success, so it’s rather unfortunate that adoring viewers get punished with spyware and spam after innocently searching for their favorite performer. But rather than shy away from your search completely, let SiteAdvisor’s ratings steer you away from the Web’s dark alleys and guide you to safe venues where you can Idol worship without fear.