According to the August threat forecast from MX Logic, spammers and scammers are increasingly using Google to identify topics to determine new social engineering tactics, reports InformationWeek.

Google Hot Trends offers a list of the top 100 search queries, which cyber criminals can use to create links on various Web sites that point back to their malicious sites.

"Because Google's PageRank algorithm treats links as votes for higher prominence in search results lists, malicious sites can be promoted to the top of search results pages by gaming Google's system."

For its part, Google says it makes every effort to remove malicious pages from its index.