Ads are impersonating government websites in Google results, despite ban
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Re: Ads are impersonating government websites in Google results, despite ban
#2> Muldoon didn’t respond to a question about why the ads were able to violate Google’s policy.
I thought it was obvious by now that Google is a money train, and no one is watching the tracks. Their main distinctions as a Fortune 500 company are avoiding human contact and abandoning projects.
Re: Ads are impersonating government websites in Google results, despite ban
#3Even more reason to switch to other search engines such as DuckDuckGo.
Re: Ads are impersonating government websites in Google results, despite ban
#4The one that got me was USPS mail forwarding. I am very privy to these things but I must have just misread the URL.
1. Googled “mail forwarding” 2. Must have clicked one of the ads like: https://www.unitedaddressupdate.com 3. Quickly used the autocomplete to fill out all the forms including my credit card information
The brilliant part of this scam is that mail forwarding for a year in the US costs $0.99 so the expectation is you have to pay the USPS so nothing seemed odd… the websites even look almost identical. The show was over when I received a notification from my Chase that they charged $70 instead.
Chase appears to have caught on before Google though because the charge didn’t go through
Re: Ads are impersonating government websites in Google results, despite ban
#5I teach everyone in my family to never trust the first few sponsored results now matter how convincing they may be. As far as I’m concerned Google know exactly what they’re doing and are actively complicit in perpetuating online scams against one family and friends. Are we seriously supposed to believe a company of their size, with their talent pool, and their money, can’t filter out such blatantly obvious crap? Sure.
Re: Ads are impersonating government websites in Google results, despite ban
#6Even more reason to switch to other search engines such as DuckDuckGo.
Is DuckDuckGo better at this or just a smaller target people ignore? A couple quick searches didn’t turn up anything, but sure seems like they’re vulnerable to the same attack vector.
Re: Ads are impersonating government websites in Google results, despite ban
#7And at the same time that Google supposedly can’t catch these guys, they randomly suspend my ads account without even an explanation. And of course no recourse or way of getting in touch with a human.
Re: Ads are impersonating government websites in Google results, despite ban
#8>centralizes everything
>is still useless
>basically centralizes everything so it can become useless
Re: Ads are impersonating government websites in Google results, despite ban
#9I teach everyone in my family to never trust the first few sponsored results now matter how convincing they may be. As far as I’m concerned Google know exactly what they’re doing and are actively complicit in perpetuating online scams against one family and friends. Are we seriously supposed to believe a company of their size, with their talent pool, and their money, can’t filter out such blatantly obvious crap? Sure…
Just so we're clear, there are no "sponsored results" on Google. There are results, and there are ads. It matters because if you lose the distinction you will lose the ability to remember what "sponsored results" were. On Yahoo! search, all of the results were paid. You paid more for a higher position. This dubious service was provided by Overture, and every search engine except Google was a customer of Overture's technology. The service that Google provides is specifically not paid results placement.
Re: Ads are impersonating government websites in Google results, despite ban
#10I teach everyone in my family to never trust the first few sponsored results now matter how convincing they may be. As far as I’m concerned Google know exactly what they’re doing and are actively complicit in perpetuating online scams against one family and friends. Are we seriously supposed to believe a company of their size, with their talent pool, and their money, can’t filter out such blatantly obvious crap? Sure…
This being a democracy, and this sort of thing going on for well over a decade, it must be "the will of the people".