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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

#41

Post by aikinai »

RussianCow wrote: post #35
bambax wrote: post #18

Having used some kind of adblocking, on all devices, for as long as I can remember, I realize I live in an alternate universe where all these scams don't exist [0]. If at some point adblocking is defeated I'm up for a very difficult crash landing into reality. [0]: almost; top results can be scams of course; but it's rare.

I had quite a rude awakening when I switched to an iPhone recently. I had to adopt NextDNS for its domain-level ad blocking, but it’s amazing how many ads still come through. I don’t know how people browse the web without any sort of ad blocking these days.

iPhone has supported ad-blocking for six years.

Re: Ads are impersonating government websites in Google results, despite ban

#42

Post by Ayesh »

Vietnam government is also impersonated in organic results.

Google "Vietnam visa government website", and you will see a result from "govt.vn" as the too result. That is not the official web site, but neither Vietnamese NIC nor google didn't find a problem with it.

Re: Ads are impersonating government websites in Google results, despite ban

#43

Post by ollybee »

This does not seem be a problem in the UK, searches topics that might be prone to this all seem to give the correct .gov.uk site as the first result with no ads that could be described as misleading. I wonder if the UK government, advertising standards agencies and trading standards authorities have put more pressure on google? Or perhaps the legal landscape here makes it untenable to operate such a scam business.

Re: Ads are impersonating government websites in Google results, despite ban

#44

Post by knodi123 »

sen wrote: post #5

I 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…

One of my older relatives searched google for the name of his bank, clicked the first link which was an ad for a phishing site, and 5 minutes later he was on the phone with some indian guy who was using remote desktop to install packages through some janky DOS interface. It was probably cleanable, but I just wound up formatting his hard drive and reinstalling with some really cranked-up adblockers. It was an hours-long hassle, and thank god he managed to change his banking passwords and put a fraud notice on his credit card, because he had handed all that info over.

I couldn't help thinking that that Ad was a lot like a locksmith accepting a few bucks to let some burglar into my house no questions asked, and then explaining to the cops that he's just as much a victim as I am.

Re: Ads are impersonating government websites in Google results, despite ban

#45

Post by eloisius »

melomal wrote: post #33
sen wrote: post #5

I 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…

So this is interesting because right now the search rankings are a steaming heap of crud because of what seems like daily algo changes. It's gotten to the point where spam sites with out of date articles are now ranking number 1. Yet everyone else is being thrown around page 2+. Google is inevitably only concerned about Ad spend so this instability of rankings forces you into their ad spending machine. Organic result…

Lately I’ve been wondering if a niche search engine popular with hackers and not the general public could run circles around Google search results just because scammers and content farms wouldn’t be incentivized to game it like they are Google.

It frustrates me a lot. I don’t even know how to find useful information online anymore for everyday things like “how hot is too hot outside for a cat?” I invariably land on a garbage page with paragraph after paragraph of unintelligible keyword fluff. I keep thinking that one of the paragraphs will have a the content I’m looking for, but more and more I get to the end and realized I just scanned a whole page of referral links and content that was clearly farmed out to be written by someone who either doesn’t know English or GPT2 or something.

Re: Ads are impersonating government websites in Google results, despite ban

#46

Post by gundmc »

eloisius wrote: post #45
melomal wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So this is interesting because right now the search rankings are a steaming heap of crud because of what seems like daily algo changes. It's gotten to the point where spam sites with out of date articles are now ranking number 1. Yet everyone else is being thrown around page 2+. Google is inevitably only concerned about Ad spend so this instability of rankings forces you into their ad spending machine. Organic result…

Lately I’ve been wondering if a niche search engine popular with hackers and not the general public could run circles around Google search results just because scammers and content farms wouldn’t be incentivized to game it like they are Google. It frustrates me a lot. I don’t even know how to find useful information online anymore for everyday things like “how hot is too hot outside for a cat?” I invariably land on a…

> I don’t even know how to find useful information online anymore for everyday things like “how hot is too hot outside for a cat?”

Maybe this wasn't a real example, but searching exactly this (quotes not included) returned the answer in a knowledge box at the top of the page and the first several organic results had the answer very clearly in the text.

Re: Ads are impersonating government websites in Google results, despite ban

#47

Post by eloisius »

ollybee wrote: post #43

This does not seem be a problem in the UK, searches topics that might be prone to this all seem to give the correct .gov.uk site as the first result with no ads that could be described as misleading. I wonder if the UK government, advertising standards agencies and trading standards authorities have put more pressure on google? Or perhaps the legal landscape here makes it untenable to operate such a scam business.

Probably not as lucrative as targeting Americans. I’ve noticed a nice side affect of living in Taiwan to be that there is generally less trash to sift through when looking for this kind of stuff. Spammers just don’t target us as much.

Re: Ads are impersonating government websites in Google results, despite ban

#48

Post by bobbylarrybobby »

zuppy wrote: post #38
RussianCow wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had quite a rude awakening when I switched to an iPhone recently. I had to adopt NextDNS for its domain-level ad blocking, but it’s amazing how many ads still come through. I don’t know how people browse the web without any sort of ad blocking these days.

there are adblockers for ios too, for example here's a good one: https://1blocker.com

Safari only though

Re: Ads are impersonating government websites in Google results, despite ban

#49

Post by stephen_g »

zuppy wrote: post #38
RussianCow wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had quite a rude awakening when I switched to an iPhone recently. I had to adopt NextDNS for its domain-level ad blocking, but it’s amazing how many ads still come through. I don’t know how people browse the web without any sort of ad blocking these days.

there are adblockers for ios too, for example here's a good one: https://1blocker.com

Yeah, I use 1blocker too, it's fairly good but annoying they only give you monthly rule updates (unless a major site breaks) unless you pay a subscription. Even when I bought the 'Pro' version, and then they changed to a subscription model...

Still, it works pretty well. But how I wish it was possible to have uBlock Origin running in mobile Safari (and desktop Safari for that matter)...

Re: Ads are impersonating government websites in Google results, despite ban

#50

Post by bozzcl »

RussianCow wrote: post #35
bambax wrote: post #18

Having used some kind of adblocking, on all devices, for as long as I can remember, I realize I live in an alternate universe where all these scams don't exist [0]. If at some point adblocking is defeated I'm up for a very difficult crash landing into reality. [0]: almost; top results can be scams of course; but it's rare.

I had quite a rude awakening when I switched to an iPhone recently. I had to adopt NextDNS for its domain-level ad blocking, but it’s amazing how many ads still come through. I don’t know how people browse the web without any sort of ad blocking these days.

I'm using a combo of AdGuard and MalwareBytes on Safari, and Pi-Hole via Wireguard and my browsing experience has been pretty smooth.
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