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Not entirely, unfortunately, at least on my experience. Putting the keyword "download" after the name of software, ebooks, or music will lead into weird websit
by whstl 4y ago
Not entirely, unfortunately, at least on my experience.
Putting the keyword "download" after the name of software, ebooks, or music will lead into weird websites that distribute malware, and they rank very high.
I just tried searching for an old Game Programming book I happen to have. There's two piracy sites, then one site with a "Download" button that gives me a DMG with an executable. Those are above Archive.org, the official github repo of the book and the official website.
For music download, I searched some Bowie. There's Amazon... plus a few pages of of weird websites that I have no idea what they are, but look like "paid piracy", they either ask for credit card or give me a DMG which supposedly has a downloader.
For software I searched the one I made by the company I work at. There's stuff like Filehorse, Softonic (I don't even know if they're legit), then there's a few which look like those aggregators but end up giving you malware when downloading.
That's with ads blocked, and subscription to several lists.
In the end IMO this is terrible for small businesses, people will end up distrusting anything that's not Amazon or anything that they try to search organically, or they'll get malware.
- dvngnt_ 4y agothat's slightly different. piracy is a known vector for distributing malware. this is more for general searches or software with no paid option. google should deindex scam sites, but this is easier said than done. however they should NEVER have paid ads for malware as they're directly profiting from malware