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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

#51

Post by mullingitover »

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

Ehh, I'm a pretty die-hard iOS person but ad blocking on iOS is a steaming pile of BS, to put it mildly. They flat-out don't work for 99% of ads. They're not ad blockers, they're domain filters, nothing more than a big hosts file, and they block absolutely nothing at the page/element level. The ad industry runs circles around 'ad blockers' on iOS.

The lack of functioning ad blocking is by far the biggest downside to iOS, and the same reason that I pity the engineers who put all that work on desktop Safari only to have it rendered worthless by their lack of ad blocking.

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

#52

Post by Larrikin »

Joeri wrote: post #34
raister wrote: post #32

What's ironically is that the ads were paid with scam money, so it's like Google is in fact, part of the 'gang'... Crazy world! Most part of scams register names that looks like something legit, but, of course, no one seems to care who's buying what they're buying when registering domain names.

Google should commit to donating all funds received from ads that are later detected as scams to charity.

In the case described in the article of government impersonation, I'd prefer a 10x fine.

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

#53

Post by ALittleLight »

jeffbee wrote: post #9
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…

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 te…

I just searched for "employee identification number" on my mobile. The first full screen was ads - identified only by the tiny letters "Ad" in the upper left. How is making your ads show up first and look almost indistinguishable from results anything other than sponsored results? Google may not call it that, but I think you'd need to be a current or former Google employee to not understand what it is.

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

#54

Post by kevinventullo »

I saw the same thing recently with renewing TSA PreChek. The top result is not the government website, but some shady middleman which seems to charge 3x to do the same thing (while also siphoning your personal information incl. passport number).

It was a bit jarring, I got very far in the process before realizing something was off. Made me realize how much trust I was implicitly putting into my search engine.

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

#55

Post by mrweasel »

kiwijamo wrote: post #3

Even more reason to switch to other search engines such as DuckDuckGo.

I reported the same scammer ad at least five time over a period of a month on DuckDuckGo. The ad was impersonating a major Danish news site.

This issue isn’t restricted to Google. The only main difference is that Google run their own ad network. In both cases it show how little verification is going on with online ads. If anything I believe the ad networks should be held resonsible for the ads they push to the end user.

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

#57

Post by devwastaken »

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…

U.S. government and friends simply don't care. Sever phone lines from outside western countries where law applies - you've solved the majority of the problem. Same with disinformation campaigns from other countries. Sever their internet. We can never prosecute illigal acts conducted outside the west.

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

#58

Post by matheusmoreira »

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.

Yeah the internet is completely different without blockers. I install uBlock Origin on every browser I come across and I've gotten random comments from other users about how everything just seems better for some reason. Firefox supports uBlock Origin on mobile too, people love it when they try it out and find that there's no idiotic YouTube ads anymore.

Firefox should just ship uBlock Origin by default and make it the default experience. Brave browser is already doing that.

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

#59

Post by harles »

harry8 wrote: post #15
harles wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I know there's a small section of people who will defend big tech under any and all circumstances but really? "I'm unsure if the competition have solved this problem that I tried and verified they don't have." Just seems like a pretty terrible defense of a big tech company that definitely hasn't solved that problem that they absolutely do have and know it will defraud people. Remember the old days when google had the…

DuckDuckGo has this problem as well. I’m not sure what switching to a smaller company that does the same thing - albeit in a more privacy conscious way - helps. It’s not a Google problem, it’s a search industry problem.

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

#60

Post by pbhjpbhj »

grayhatter wrote: post #36
mistermann wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This being a democracy, and this sort of thing going on for well over a decade, it must be "the will of the people".

huh?! are you trying to make sense, or just be confusing?

I'm pretty sure they're saying that such things should be regulated and that is a failure of [USA?] democracy that they're not -- seems right to me.
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