Until further notice, think twice before using Google to download software
1–10 of 242 posts
Re: Until further notice, think twice before using Google to download software
#2Google's search product has become a shadow of its former self. Every year it seems harder to find what I'm looking for. The top half of the first search result page is now (potentially malicious) ads, and what follows is likely SEO spam. I need to add "reddit" or "stackoverflow" to half my searches these days so I'm not served nearly useless results. It's a sad decline from 10+ years ago when I'd type a half-formed thought into the search box and I'd get the answer.
Re: Until further notice, think twice before using Google to download software
#3All the more reason to use an adblocker. Online ads are the most common way that malware gets injected into otherwise trustworthy websites.
Re: Until further notice, think twice before using Google to download software
#4Google's search product has become a shadow of its former self. Every year it seems harder to find what I'm looking for. The top half of the first search result page is now (potentially malicious) ads, and what follows is likely SEO spam. I need to add "reddit" or "stackoverflow" to half my searches these days so I'm not served nearly useless results. It's a sad decline from 10+ years ago when I'd type a half-formed…
They pretty much lost the war against content farms already. I'm not sure the content indexing & crawling model they have is even adapted to the current web.
Re: Until further notice, think twice before using Google to download software
#5Took me a while to understand what "using Google to download software" means. Was there a hidden functionality I wasn't aware of? Turns out, what they mean is "don't use Google to search for software you wish to download".
Re: Until further notice, think twice before using Google to download software
#6Google's search product has become a shadow of its former self. Every year it seems harder to find what I'm looking for. The top half of the first search result page is now (potentially malicious) ads, and what follows is likely SEO spam. I need to add "reddit" or "stackoverflow" to half my searches these days so I'm not served nearly useless results. It's a sad decline from 10+ years ago when I'd type a half-formed…
I was looking for info about an online acquaintance that I used to game with 20+ years ago. His handle is pretty unique but google would not return anything. Bing on the other hand had me finding all of his old post leading to his real name and now I am back in email contact. I get the feeling that google is just filtering out anything over a certain age and below a certain level of popularity.
Re: Until further notice, think twice before using Google to download software
#7The malvertisement thing has become real bad. The other day I had a problem so I used chrome, where I unfortunately hadn't installed an add blocker yet. I searched for my bank (I know, I should have put the URL in directly, but I was being lazy since it was a new chrome install and I didn't have the url in my history yet). I hit the first link, logged in (my password manager would have saved me here, but again it wasn't installed), and realized that it was a fake website.
Fortunately I changed my password again before it was an issue- and then my bank locked my account when they saw the suspicious activity. So nothing bad really happened to me other than some inconvenience. However I'm still amazed that Google would let their search results get poisoned with these ads for phishing sites.
Re: Until further notice, think twice before using Google to download software
#8Google's search product has become a shadow of its former self. Every year it seems harder to find what I'm looking for. The top half of the first search result page is now (potentially malicious) ads, and what follows is likely SEO spam. I need to add "reddit" or "stackoverflow" to half my searches these days so I'm not served nearly useless results. It's a sad decline from 10+ years ago when I'd type a half-formed…
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Re: Until further notice, think twice before using Google to download software
#9The malvertisement thing has become real bad. The other day I had a problem so I used chrome, where I unfortunately hadn't installed an add blocker yet. I searched for my bank (I know, I should have put the URL in directly, but I was being lazy since it was a new chrome install and I didn't have the url in my history yet). I hit the first link, logged in (my password manager would have saved me here, but again it was…
This is why the appeal-to-ethics argument against adblocking holds no weight with me. Yes, maybe I stole $0.0001 from the publisher by not looking at an advert. But I also didn't have my bank password stolen and my files cryptolockered. It's a small price to pay for security.
Re: Until further notice, think twice before using Google to download software
#10Google's search product has become a shadow of its former self. Every year it seems harder to find what I'm looking for. The top half of the first search result page is now (potentially malicious) ads, and what follows is likely SEO spam. I need to add "reddit" or "stackoverflow" to half my searches these days so I'm not served nearly useless results. It's a sad decline from 10+ years ago when I'd type a half-formed…
And some small pages seem to have gone missing entirely – some "humorous" typos that I distinctly remember used to return a small handful of pages now return nothing on Google, even though the page(s) in question still exist(s) and is/are still indexed by Bing.