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Comment by ocdtrekkie | Hacker News Reader

I have gone so far as to suggest a significant portion of Google's revenue is likely serving malicious content, which leaves them very little incentive to do anything about it.

Almost every senior citizen I've ever had clean up malware for got it from a malicious search ad. And the tech support scams they continue to list take advantage of tons of people as well.

I've pointed out before that Google happily lists phone numbers of tech support scams on search terms for Windows tech support, but doesn't show ads at all if you look for Chromebook support, pointing you straight to their official contact.

As a note, if anyone would like to see examples of this in action, I can go get screenshots and example links and everything, it just takes a little while to put together, as I would prefer to offer evidence of what I see "today" rather than any past examples I might have.

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> I have gone so far as to suggest a significant portion of Google's revenue is likely serving malicious content, which leaves them very little incentive to do anything about it.

That's quite a serious accusation :). One that is not substantiated by the facts:

https://blog.google/topics/ads/how-we-fought-bad-ads-sites-a...

A Google blog post is not "the facts". A Google blog post is, in fact, an ad for Google. Your sources should be independent, and independently verifiable. What Google says they do is useless, because it cannot be verified.

Do you have anything specific that would refute anything in the report? Simply mounting an ad-hominem attack doesn't add anything to the discussion.

It's like somebody saying "Tesla cars suck - they explode". And Elon Musk comes out and says, "No they don't, here's the testing/validation we did". And you say "Oh but...but....you work for Tesla. It must be lies!"

If there's factual inaccuracies - of course, that's a different story. But you seem to be simply saying, "They must be lying, because that suits my narrative, so I'm not going to bother trying to refute it".

Conspiracy theorists never let facts stand in the way of a good conspiracy.

Reply All did a great episode about google assisting in scammers operations inadvertently. It primarily focuses on the barrage of cheap shady lock smith services offered as sponsored ads at the top of google results.

https://gimletmedia.com/episode/78-very-quickly-to-the-drill...

It is quite exaggerated to say that a significant portion of Google's revenue comes from serving malicious content.

But malicious content (even on the SERP) is common enough that one of the most effective steps that you can do to protect senior citizens from malware is to install a good ad blocker. The ironic thing is that the search algorithm does a decent job of filtering out malicious sites from appearing on the first page, but that does no good if there is a malicious ad right above the filtered results.

That's a key point. Google's primary business model relies on convincing you to not click on the "best search result". This is why they have, over time, reduced the visible difference between ads and real results. I've regularly found that lay users are not aware they are clicking on ads when they click on Google's search ads.

Even if Google is removing "x million bad ads", they are merely replacing bad ads with other bad ads. Removing bad ads doesn't significantly impact their revenue. I'd argue that while Google is willing to make gestures like removing some ads, they are unwilling to do what's necessary to protect users: Stop serving ads entirely where malicious ads are particularly prevalent, and clearly highlight the difference between ads and search results.

EDIT: Here's some captures I did this morning of Google results on incognito: https://oasis.sandstorm.io/shared/nTZcQOHrTgnM-90dAfmut0AX_c...

Wow, thanks for this. I've been using an adblocker for a while (and even before, I was "blind" to Google ads), but it's really ridiculous what comes up by searching for e.g. "windows help" or "hp support". Shame on Google!

I've known several people on the abuse teams for ad revenue at Google and I can tell you they work very hard and care deeply at preventing malware. It is, however, an extremely non-trivial task.

Similarly, minesweepers are probably great people that work very hard and care deeply at preventing generations of people from being maimed.

To be clear, I don't really fault those people specifically, I'm sure they do the absolute best at the jobs they are given. But this is a systemic issue with Google and the sort of solution that would actually fix it would cost more profits than they intend to spend on unimportant issues like protecting consumers from fraud.

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