91–100 of 227 posts
These kinds of articles always boil down to how Google are not doing their job properly anymore, be it by presenting results that do not include scams, content farms and the like, or by systematically pushing ads (including dubious ones) over organic results, all in the interest of their ad business. I'm probably not technical enough, but I'm always left wondering how no one created a 'bettergoogle.com' that makes a…
And its also not that simple to weed out bad actors when normally the government sites that should rank are probably hopeless and the senior civil servants in charge knowledge of the web is “in need of some improvement”
Google and Bing could turn up the YMYL (“your money or your life” ) knob but they would also need to employ higher paid local people to vet these sorts of ads.
Stricter KYC (Know Your Customer) could be required to run online adverts is another solution.
Pre covid I got pitched a grade 7/6 (v senior O-6 /GS15 ) job for the DWP to sort out the technical seo side. Looking at these scam sites in search would have been a priority had that gone anywhere – maybe set up some meetings with Matt Cutts and discuss a joint us / uk approach.
Maybe I should follow that job up.
I have a hard time trying to understand why governments don’t address these scams more proactively. There is a related issue when you register a new company here in Germany: As soon as the new entity is added to the company house (called “Handelsregister”), you will start to receive fake invoices from scam companies. These invoice look very similar to official ones and some even use the official seal of the state (se…
There's a certain threshold of complaints, unfortunately. The FTC only has the resources to go after big fish. But, one thing I did learn from reading the FTC complaint is that credit card chargebacks do work, after a fashion; the company was getting repeatedly booted off of merchant accounts for accruing lots of chargebacks. I bet if people aggressively charged back the EIN scammers it'd end up hurting them too.
I fell prey to this. Might have been the exact same website, too. Had had a drink with dinner, thought heck why not file for my EIN for an independent consulting LLC I was creating? Was using a fresh OS install where I hadn't yet installed Firefox with an adblocker. Usual defenses were weakened. Boom, $250 down the drain before I really thought it all through. Fortunately I was able to get it refunded by initiating a…
People think I'm paranoid checking domains, certificates, and bank numbers but it's a small price to pay as you found out. You lost $250, some lose thousands. This stuff needs to be regulated, companies like Google need to be held accountable for what they serve up to users. No more hiding behind this shield of "we're just a platform" when they damn well know they're the platform. It's all fun and games until your (g…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
People think I'm paranoid checking domains, certificates, and bank numbers but it's a small price to pay as you found out. You lost $250, some lose thousands. This stuff needs to be regulated, companies like Google need to be held accountable for what they serve up to users. No more hiding behind this shield of "we're just a platform" when they damn well know they're the platform. It's all fun and games until your (g…
Some lost millions .
I fell prey to this. Might have been the exact same website, too. Had had a drink with dinner, thought heck why not file for my EIN for an independent consulting LLC I was creating? Was using a fresh OS install where I hadn't yet installed Firefox with an adblocker. Usual defenses were weakened. Boom, $250 down the drain before I really thought it all through. Fortunately I was able to get it refunded by initiating a…
It’s rough out there. Was helping a friend of a friend last night who had been scammed into giving out her Instagram password. They’ve change the email / phone / pw on the account. In her case the account is actually a substantial business (art) portfolio with a lot of followers. Naturally, after a little digging, I discovered that her email was using the same pw and had also been compromised (hackers deleted the ema…
I can't believe they act as they don't know what's going on and have no means to deter this. They SHOULD BE LIABLE!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
She googled something like 'mail new social security card' - clicked the first result and started entering information.
About 4 screens in she asked me to look at it - and we could both tell that it was likely not an official gov site at that point.
was first result in google so she trusted it - it looked similar enough to a gov site to go with the easy onboarding flow.. a few details like name and addy - then submit - next screen a few more bits of info.. submit next screen - real gold like maiden name, name of dog, - they already captured the social on the first screen..
some months later the irs is telling her she needs a pin code and that her identity appears to be hacked or whatever.. no surprise.
I long for the day when the faint piss-yellow box surrounded paid listings.. the engineers that came up with that perfect yellow that may show on a good desktop monitor / and in a presentation to the ftc/cpb/congress - whatever.. yet faded out on a laptop screen - and when the sun hits.. and yet as great as that was at being essentially invisible to most users - they still did away it - lets assume because it caused more clicks.. a/b testing and all the s valley bs.
I had forgotten about that incident until I saw this headline - might be time enough to still ad a note about this on a reply to a different HN article a week ago - where someone said "I've never seen any evidence of anyone hurt by the large scale collection of personal data by Google and FB." - ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27064382 )
( Part of the discussion in regards to the article Why I Work on Ads - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27060898 )
This is indeed another good example of damage done by the ad selling overlords.
Now remembering stopping people from clicking the 'first result' for "flash player" - on so many devices, so many times - that ad was a two click malware install - of course it was a paid ad - sigh - people just don't know and google's been exploiting that for a long time.