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Comment by RGamma | Hacker News Reader

On Google? If I enter "Chrome download" there, I get Google's own page as top result. However if you were to do the same with Bing (such as you probably would if you used Microsoft's browser downloader (Internet Explorer), which has Bing as default) you get the typical spam adverts at the top.

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Just for the record, I quickly tried duckduckgo and bing (using !bang) and the first result I got from both the official chrome webpage.

I get two ads (edit: on duckduckgo) before any search results, one for googlechromeonline.com and one for downloadsem.com, both are spammy.

You have some type of malware or rogue extension on your device. I would look into that...

That only affects DDG and not Google or Bing? That doesn't seem likely. You sure you're not running an adblocker?

(Also it's rogue, not rouge.)

There some type of law that requires malware/extensions that inserts fake results in one's searches to work with all search engines? LOL

Common sense would dictate that Google would NOT be selling AdWords that would replace THEIR own ad for the top search result for their own products.

EDIT: Wait, you are talking about Duck Duck Go? This thread is about Google.com NOT DDG. Regardless, I get Google's official site at the top with DDG.

The one I replied to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11526264 is about Bing and DDG.

My bad... You still have some issue.

Ad for everydownload shows up at the top of ddg for me on Chrome Android. Are you this incredulous, or just trolling?

No, are you trolling? I was hardly the only one on this post who didn't get ads for that search. You are the first person to mention the mobile version of any browser so I did the same search with Chrome on Android using DDG and... Gee, the Google Chrome website is still the first result. The only time I got an ad was with the Canadian version of Bing. Note, I am using the DDG website NOT the app or extension.

I have no malware on this box. Bing gives me 3 ads for Google Chrome. First one is legit, other two are spam (downloadsem.com and downloadbst.com.)

Oops forgot the side ads, I also get an ad from apps-2016.com.

I am searching from Canada.

I get the same results... Wow! I would stop using Bing Canada.

I just repeated your experiment: With my ad blocker disabled, I searched for "google chrome" on DDG. I got two ads above the search results; one was for google.com, and the second was for downloadsem.com, which is distributing a Chrome browser that comes with a lot of browser toolbars. I took screen shots. [1]

Of note is that these ads are powered by, and clicks redirect through, Yahoo.

[1]: Screen shots for the curious: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/jiooo37trog860d/AAAgmpY9SMxcLyIVI...

I tried a bunch of searches, it seemed like both sites had their chrome links cleaned up. (or google bought all the bing adspace)

Bings pretopresult ad for firefox is still malware. Microsoft should be liable for this - http://imgur.com/b2VuRMP.jpg

It should. Though if search engines were actually held liable for every malware link they place above real results, Google would no longer be a profitable business. Just the fake banks Google puts in search ads alone...

microsoft writes the operating system they are infecting. then people with older computers think their hardware is too slow and buy a new one.

how can they not use vm's and heuristics to click all their ads and see if it infects their own operating system, before approving the ads, and then rechecking them every so many clicks?

Most of the time it's a brief look with a VM that the ad approval process goes thru, and honestly that may not show the malware.

A lot of the time the malware is designed to only show up in certain case scenarios such as date/time, specific version of an OS like Windows XP SP1 but not SP2. Designers come up with the most ludicrous ways of circumventing the Ad approval process, and with hundreds to thousands of new ad's per day there simply isn't an easy way to do all that testing for each single new ad being served, on top of discovering new methods used to skip the checks.

Some networks are truly terrible and just have automation systems but those networks aren't as profitable and are beginning to die out.

With deep learning networks becoming so popular I do often ponder if this type of prevention could be automated slightly better!

safety rating of ads should exipry like edge cache

Think about Google's conflict of interest: They ship most of the malware consumers get via malicious ads. And then they advertise about Chromebooks having no malware. Google doubly profits off shipping malware to consumers.

Microsoft, at least, has a good incentive to police their malware.

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