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Google ads themselves serve plenty of dodgey ads, go search "$popular_software download" for instance.
by throwaway2048 11y ago
Google ads themselves serve plenty of dodgey ads, go search "$popular_software download" for instance.
- neotek 11y agoAbsolutely, but those ads aren't usually pointing at outright malicious software, just shitty adware like download accelerators or whatever. Google's algorithms and manual approval processes have been pretty good at filtering out anything explicitly malicious, at least in my experience.
- return0 11y agoEven malware makes it into adsense , and if i remember correctly it took a few hours after reporting the ad for it to be removed. It's been a while since i ve had these reports though.
- timothya 11y agoCould you give a real example for $popular_software which is showing a dodgey ad?
- JohnTHaller 11y agoSearching for firefox on Google always returned a paid ad for a download of Firefox with 10 separate bundleware offers included.
- benologist 11y agoThey recently changed the rules for download sites doing that - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9502026 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9502026
- timothya 11y agoI don't think that sort of ad is permitted anymore. Here's what I see when I do that search: http://i.imgur.com/505yzNW.png http://i.imgur.com/505yzNW.png
- paulirish 11y agoGoogle Search recently put a lot of time into this area and as of a few months ago, you should rarely see these malicious ads and results.