8 ms·

If you are wondering why searching for "firefox" leads people to install malware the main reason is that most of the ads Google shows for that term, and which a

If you are wondering why searching for "firefox" leads people to install malware the main reason is that most of the ads Google shows for that term, and which appear at the very top of the results, take you to sites with malware downloads. I've mentioned it a few times on here before[1], even directly to Google employees[2] and they don't seem to give a shit at all. I've even noticed searches for Chrome sometimes show links to (what appear to be) malware sites now[3]. Maybe that will motivate them to sort this out but I'm not hopeful. Putting my conspiracy hat on; it seems like there isn't much motivation for Google to sort out the problem because every new malware loaded PC is another potential convert to a locked down cloud based platform like ChromeOS. There isn't really much downside for them in making Windows as horrendously unsafe for non-experts to use as possible. Why Mozilla aren't screaming about it constantly is more of a mystery to me. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7101939 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7101939 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7089727 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7089727 [3] http://i.imgur.com/yVIMYKO.png http://i.imgur.com/yVIMYKO.png

elliotz 13y ago
I wonder why Mozilla doesn't go after these sites for trademark infringement. Mozilla made Debian change the name of their Firefox package to Iceweasel because they made modifications; surely bundling in adware also violates Mozilla's trademark policy?
- RyanZAG 13y ago
  It does. Google goes after them as well. However, there is generally a large delay before they manage to take them down and verification is always done post-display and not pre-display. You can report bad adverts at https://support.google.com/adwords/contact/feedback?hl=en https://support.google.com/adwords/contact/feedback?hl=en and Google will eventually get to them, usually after their account balances have run down a bit. There's definitely no sign of any urgency on that front.
- gcp 13y ago
  It turns out Debian is much more responsive to Mozilla requests than adware providers, and going through court takes a long time.
  - anon1385 13y ago
    Why not complain to Google though? They have policies about the use of trademarks in ad text. https://support.google.com/adwordspolicy/answer/6118?hl=en https://support.google.com/adwordspolicy/answer/6118?hl=en
    - gcp 13y ago
      I've done so dozens of times, without result. Maybe those sites walk the thin line of that policy, or maybe Google just doesn't give a fk.
- sliverstorm 13y ago
  Iceweasel actually modified Firefox, this sounds more like bundling Firefox with other stuff in the same installer package. Vaguely reminiscent of distributing a Linux ISO that installs Firefox, along with other stuff...
  - elliotz 13y ago
    Except that the Linux ISO is not called "Firefox." It would be OK for the Linux distribution to use the Firefox trademark descriptively to say that it includes Firefox, but that's not what these adware vendors are doing. They're calling their "Firefox bundled with some adware" Firefox.
    - cma 13y ago
      Exactly--if you top off the air gap in a coke bottle with piss you can't go around selling it as Coca Cola.
RyanZAG 13y ago
It's like that on purpose though. You can't be rude to your customer after all. In this case, advertisers are paying Google a lot of money so they don't have to go through things they wouldn't like, such as harsh verification. Users of Google search aren't really important in the same way. If you lose a couple search users to malware, who cares? At least you got the advert money up front.
- bad_user 13y ago
  I don't think this is their mentality, I think this is more like a myth that gets perpetuated ad nauseaum. The problem with a search engine is that there's no lock-in other than brand recognition. Google won over AltaVista and Yahoo by being superior. I still remember the first time I tried it, it was so much better that it made an instant convert out of me, even though typing "altavista.com" was rooted in my nervous system and this was in the days before they were big, before AdSense/AdWords/AdX. And I could see it at Internet Cafes catching like fire, within mixtures of technically oriented and unsophisticated users alike. And it can happen again. What pains do normal users have when using Google lately? Malware, content farms, "aggregators", too many ads. The only reason for why Google is still number 1 with a near monopoly is because there is no better alternative. DuckDuck Go is awful for me. Bing too. You may not notice how awful they are, unless you're living outside the US. And I'm pretty sure they know that they can lose users fast. And once a significant chunk of users are gone, advertisers will be gone too. That's why Android exists in the first place, though distributing Bing as the default doesn't really help Microsoft, so having your own platform only protects you against walled gardens. And there's even a bigger danger therein. Google doesn't even have to lose users for advertisers to leave - Google already knows that the majority of clicks on all served ads are done by a minority and advertisers are increasingly aware of this fact too, as quality conversions are going down. This is because targeting is not so good after all and because users are increasingly fed up with spamy results and annoying ads that aren't targeted well. I think their problem is that they are trying to solve this through algorithms only. The problem with algorithms is that algorithms can be gamed, you only need to find the ranking formula, which can of course be done through trial and error. It's a whac-a-mole game basically. But for popular searches, like Firefox, they could have exceptions in there to propel those as first results. Is it not obvious that users searching for Firefox actually want Firefox, the browser from Mozilla.com, in spite of Mozilla.com's ranking? Is this against their policy or something? And now that they have Google+ accounts, why don't they add a "Report Result" button? If flagging email as Spam in GMail works so well, why didn't they do the same thing for their search engine?
brudgers 13y ago
Absofuckinglutely. These sites thrive solely because Google ranks them at the top. Crapware sites appear so consistently at the top of searches for software that excludes the term "linux" that coincidence is many sigma less likely than intent. Considering that what most Windows crapware installers do is mercilessly track users for the purposes of marketing and that Google's main business is tracking users mercilessly for the purpose of marketing, it is hard to see how this is some random event. Google's definition of "best search results" is related to their bottom line, and the goal is to be as intrusive as possible without driving searches away. This is why the Google ad network laden "weather.com" is returned before the ad free and purely scientific "weather.gov" from a US search for "weather." For real fun, search for "pdf to html" and "pdf to html linux" to compare the degree to which Google promotes solutions that collect data on users. A Windows user would never know that a free quick private and powerful alternative is just one VM away.
- eli 13y ago
  You are confusing search results and paid search ads. Google will happily put whoever bids the highest in the ads, but they don't force weather.com to rank above weather.gov in the organic results. That's a totally baseless conspiracy theory.
  - gcp 13y ago
    Google decides who can run ads with them and who doesn't. They're running malware ads, and those appear above the legitimate search results.
  - brudgers 13y ago
    Explain how Google's corporate officers better meet their fidudiary duty to maximize shareholder value by not structuring search results to optimize revenue than they meet that fiduciary duty by structuring search results to maximize returns. This isn't a conspiracy. It's basic business and doing otherwise would be the basis for a tort.
    - benched 13y ago
thaumaturgy 13y ago
This is also a problem for search queries like, "yahoo phone support" or "apple phone support", both of which have bitten some of our customers in the past, directing them to call-in scams: "oh no ma'am, according to Microsoft your computer is infected with viruses, I need remote access to your system right now, we can clean it up for $89..." Google's malicious advertising is the number one reason that we're able to justify installing AdBlock Plus on every client's system (we talk to them about it first) and disabling ABP's new "feature" to "allow non-intrusive advertising". Sites that depend on ad revenue should be screaming at Google to fix this.
- ori_b 13y ago
  Please, when you see any malware, go to http://www.google.com/safebrowsing/report_badware/ http://www.google.com/safebrowsing/report_badware/ and report it. Google does care, and will take action to disable malicious advertising. For many of these sites, there is no obvious badness on either the ad or the landing page, so a manual report will help us fix malicious advertising. I work on some small portion of Google's systems related to automatic malware scanning (albeit, not anything that would show up on the search results page), and I want to make sure that we don't direct people to malicious advertising.
  - thaumaturgy 13y ago
    Thanks! I've bookmarked this and will try it in the future. But: as an experiment, I just turned off ABP and Google'd (heh) "yahoo support". One of the ads at the top was for http://www.aurasupport.com/email_service; http://www.aurasupport.com/email_service; at a quick glance, I see a website template from http://pixel-industry.com/website/ http://pixel-industry.com/website/, lots of broken English, and a domain that was registered just last Summer to a house address in a suburban development in Texas. Not exactly a smoking gun, but also probably not what somebody's looking for when they search for "Yahoo support"... And, farther down the first page of the actual search results is http://www.yahoosupport.org/ http://www.yahoosupport.org/, which has a toll-free phone number in the title, 1-888-551-2881. Googling that phone number takes you down a rabbit hole of lots of dirty SEO (e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AEO5-2RpYvo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AEO5-2RpYvo), no actual customer reviews anywhere, and offers for support for lots of services -- including, uhm, Gmail (http://www.password-recovery.us/contact-us http://www.password-recovery.us/contact-us, look at the page title). So, I'll be happy to use the link you gave, but this seems to be a fairly serious problem, and I'm a little surprised that Google doesn't have a better handle on this.
wetafur 13y ago
Many people, especially older ones and people with bad or old monitors don't even realize they are ads. There's purposefully no border and a light background is used to confuse people into clicking ads. http://blog.dynamoo.com/2013/10/google-ads-and-fff7ed-whats-wrong-with.html http://blog.dynamoo.com/2013/10/google-ads-and-fff7ed-whats-...
- kevingadd 13y ago
  On my shitty laptop's screen they literally are indistinguishable.
- epochwolf 13y ago
  I'm pretty sure this isn't intentional. No one at Google is going to be using a crap monitor. I've used similar colors in business software before. It wasn't until I was at a conference and saw our software on a crappy screen that I realized the required field color was white on some monitors.
  - ben0x539 13y ago
    Sorry, but you can't tell me that any aspect on the Google search results page, of all the pages on the internet, isn't fully intentional.
wetafur 13y ago
Many people, especially older ones and people with bad or old monitors don't even realize they are ads. There's purposefully no border and a light background is used to confuse people into clicking ads. http://blog.dynamoo.com/2013/10/google-ads-and-fff7ed-whats-wrong-with.html http://blog.dynamoo.com/2013/10/google-ads-and-fff7ed-whats-...

elliotz 13y ago

I wonder why Mozilla doesn't go after these sites for trademark infringement. Mozilla made Debian change the name of their Firefox package to Iceweasel because they made modifications; surely bundling in adware also violates Mozilla's trademark policy?

RyanZAG 13y ago
It does. Google goes after them as well. However, there is generally a large delay before they manage to take them down and verification is always done post-display and not pre-display. You can report bad adverts at https://support.google.com/adwords/contact/feedback?hl=en https://support.google.com/adwords/contact/feedback?hl=en and Google will eventually get to them, usually after their account balances have run down a bit. There's definitely no sign of any urgency on that front.
gcp 13y ago
It turns out Debian is much more responsive to Mozilla requests than adware providers, and going through court takes a long time.
- anon1385 13y ago
  Why not complain to Google though? They have policies about the use of trademarks in ad text. https://support.google.com/adwordspolicy/answer/6118?hl=en https://support.google.com/adwordspolicy/answer/6118?hl=en
  - gcp 13y ago
    I've done so dozens of times, without result. Maybe those sites walk the thin line of that policy, or maybe Google just doesn't give a fk.
sliverstorm 13y ago
Iceweasel actually modified Firefox, this sounds more like bundling Firefox with other stuff in the same installer package. Vaguely reminiscent of distributing a Linux ISO that installs Firefox, along with other stuff...
- elliotz 13y ago
  Except that the Linux ISO is not called "Firefox." It would be OK for the Linux distribution to use the Firefox trademark descriptively to say that it includes Firefox, but that's not what these adware vendors are doing. They're calling their "Firefox bundled with some adware" Firefox.
  - cma 13y ago
    Exactly--if you top off the air gap in a coke bottle with piss you can't go around selling it as Coca Cola.

RyanZAG 13y ago

It's like that on purpose though. You can't be rude to your customer after all. In this case, advertisers are paying Google a lot of money so they don't have to go through things they wouldn't like, such as harsh verification. Users of Google search aren't really important in the same way. If you lose a couple search users to malware, who cares? At least you got the advert money up front.

bad_user 13y ago
I don't think this is their mentality, I think this is more like a myth that gets perpetuated ad nauseaum. The problem with a search engine is that there's no lock-in other than brand recognition. Google won over AltaVista and Yahoo by being superior. I still remember the first time I tried it, it was so much better that it made an instant convert out of me, even though typing "altavista.com" was rooted in my nervous system and this was in the days before they were big, before AdSense/AdWords/AdX. And I could see it at Internet Cafes catching like fire, within mixtures of technically oriented and unsophisticated users alike. And it can happen again. What pains do normal users have when using Google lately? Malware, content farms, "aggregators", too many ads. The only reason for why Google is still number 1 with a near monopoly is because there is no better alternative. DuckDuck Go is awful for me. Bing too. You may not notice how awful they are, unless you're living outside the US. And I'm pretty sure they know that they can lose users fast. And once a significant chunk of users are gone, advertisers will be gone too. That's why Android exists in the first place, though distributing Bing as the default doesn't really help Microsoft, so having your own platform only protects you against walled gardens. And there's even a bigger danger therein. Google doesn't even have to lose users for advertisers to leave - Google already knows that the majority of clicks on all served ads are done by a minority and advertisers are increasingly aware of this fact too, as quality conversions are going down. This is because targeting is not so good after all and because users are increasingly fed up with spamy results and annoying ads that aren't targeted well. I think their problem is that they are trying to solve this through algorithms only. The problem with algorithms is that algorithms can be gamed, you only need to find the ranking formula, which can of course be done through trial and error. It's a whac-a-mole game basically. But for popular searches, like Firefox, they could have exceptions in there to propel those as first results. Is it not obvious that users searching for Firefox actually want Firefox, the browser from Mozilla.com, in spite of Mozilla.com's ranking? Is this against their policy or something? And now that they have Google+ accounts, why don't they add a "Report Result" button? If flagging email as Spam in GMail works so well, why didn't they do the same thing for their search engine?

brudgers 13y ago

Absofuckinglutely. These sites thrive solely because Google ranks them at the top. Crapware sites appear so consistently at the top of searches for software that excludes the term "linux" that coincidence is many sigma less likely than intent. Considering that what most Windows crapware installers do is mercilessly track users for the purposes of marketing and that Google's main business is tracking users mercilessly for the purpose of marketing, it is hard to see how this is some random event. Google's definition of "best search results" is related to their bottom line, and the goal is to be as intrusive as possible without driving searches away. This is why the Google ad network laden "weather.com" is returned before the ad free and purely scientific "weather.gov" from a US search for "weather." For real fun, search for "pdf to html" and "pdf to html linux" to compare the degree to which Google promotes solutions that collect data on users. A Windows user would never know that a free quick private and powerful alternative is just one VM away.

eli 13y ago
You are confusing search results and paid search ads. Google will happily put whoever bids the highest in the ads, but they don't force weather.com to rank above weather.gov in the organic results. That's a totally baseless conspiracy theory.
- gcp 13y ago
  Google decides who can run ads with them and who doesn't. They're running malware ads, and those appear above the legitimate search results.
- brudgers 13y ago
  Explain how Google's corporate officers better meet their fidudiary duty to maximize shareholder value by not structuring search results to optimize revenue than they meet that fiduciary duty by structuring search results to maximize returns. This isn't a conspiracy. It's basic business and doing otherwise would be the basis for a tort.
  - benched 13y ago

thaumaturgy 13y ago

This is also a problem for search queries like, "yahoo phone support" or "apple phone support", both of which have bitten some of our customers in the past, directing them to call-in scams: "oh no ma'am, according to Microsoft your computer is infected with viruses, I need remote access to your system right now, we can clean it up for $89..." Google's malicious advertising is the number one reason that we're able to justify installing AdBlock Plus on every client's system (we talk to them about it first) and disabling ABP's new "feature" to "allow non-intrusive advertising". Sites that depend on ad revenue should be screaming at Google to fix this.

ori_b 13y ago
Please, when you see any malware, go to http://www.google.com/safebrowsing/report_badware/ http://www.google.com/safebrowsing/report_badware/ and report it. Google does care, and will take action to disable malicious advertising. For many of these sites, there is no obvious badness on either the ad or the landing page, so a manual report will help us fix malicious advertising. I work on some small portion of Google's systems related to automatic malware scanning (albeit, not anything that would show up on the search results page), and I want to make sure that we don't direct people to malicious advertising.
- thaumaturgy 13y ago
  Thanks! I've bookmarked this and will try it in the future. But: as an experiment, I just turned off ABP and Google'd (heh) "yahoo support". One of the ads at the top was for http://www.aurasupport.com/email_service; http://www.aurasupport.com/email_service; at a quick glance, I see a website template from http://pixel-industry.com/website/ http://pixel-industry.com/website/, lots of broken English, and a domain that was registered just last Summer to a house address in a suburban development in Texas. Not exactly a smoking gun, but also probably not what somebody's looking for when they search for "Yahoo support"... And, farther down the first page of the actual search results is http://www.yahoosupport.org/ http://www.yahoosupport.org/, which has a toll-free phone number in the title, 1-888-551-2881. Googling that phone number takes you down a rabbit hole of lots of dirty SEO (e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AEO5-2RpYvo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AEO5-2RpYvo), no actual customer reviews anywhere, and offers for support for lots of services -- including, uhm, Gmail (http://www.password-recovery.us/contact-us http://www.password-recovery.us/contact-us, look at the page title). So, I'll be happy to use the link you gave, but this seems to be a fairly serious problem, and I'm a little surprised that Google doesn't have a better handle on this.

wetafur 13y ago

Many people, especially older ones and people with bad or old monitors don't even realize they are ads. There's purposefully no border and a light background is used to confuse people into clicking ads. http://blog.dynamoo.com/2013/10/google-ads-and-fff7ed-whats-wrong-with.html http://blog.dynamoo.com/2013/10/google-ads-and-fff7ed-whats-...

kevingadd 13y ago
On my shitty laptop's screen they literally are indistinguishable.
epochwolf 13y ago
I'm pretty sure this isn't intentional. No one at Google is going to be using a crap monitor. I've used similar colors in business software before. It wasn't until I was at a conference and saw our software on a crappy screen that I realized the required field color was white on some monitors.
- ben0x539 13y ago
  Sorry, but you can't tell me that any aspect on the Google search results page, of all the pages on the internet, isn't fully intentional.

wetafur 13y ago