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Comment by TheChaplain | Hacker News Reader

I have family members who use google to navigate.

Instead of writing facebook.com in the URL-bar, they search for facebook and click the first link...

Honestly that is probably safer. Having a typo in the url could Easley give you a phishing link. However, I also have gotten fishing adds when looking websites up so it’s not cut and dry at all.

For a good while if one searched for a (Dutch) gov institution or business google shows you the (free to call) phone number as a clickable link but the anchor has a different link to a paid per minute redirecting service. I know plenty of people who found the weird 15-50 euro entry on their bill.

Google search results and ads have been abused successfully:

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-06-21/scammers-using-text-m...

https://www.channelnewsasia.com/singapore/scam-bank-google-a...

I think the only solution is education.

Oh no, it's not. Google's ads have been used to do phishing a lot. And - at least a few years ago, it was extremely difficult to report such ads.

Perhaps it has improved recently, but it used to be a plague in crypto - people getting ads for phishing sites instead of legitimate ones, losing money, and Google being unresponsive to reports.

Easley, I have to ask, was that a typo or highlighting your point?

Haha just a mistake! Thanks for pointing it out. Sadly I can’t edit it anymore :(

When I see something like that, I tend to assume that some people use speech recognition to write comments. (No idea if that was the case here.)

The second time, they only have to type "f" in the address bar, since they probably don't clear their history...

I do that. Mostly because I never remember if it was .com or .net or .dog or .io or whatever else cute tld

Honestly I think while this seems absurd if you're relatively knowledgeable about the internet, it's really not something that should be surprising or even particularly shameful? Like, why wouldn't they if it works, is easier to remember, and makes sense to them?

The reasons this is actually potentially bad are pretty deep in the internet wonk weeds, where you get into questions of gatekeepers and provinance of information and it shouldn't be surprising most people don't care about those things: those of us who do have failed to provide them with better tools.

On some level it's a little like saying "my dad sent me an email and he didn't use pgp! Can you believe it!??"

I guarantee you that at least 60-70 out of the top 100 queries are navigational queries.

Yep, seen that repeatedly among anyone who's not fully tech savvy (I.e. most people). Just the way Google/MS/Apple like it, I imagine.

I use the ol search-engine-manual-url-finder-technique for my time card every week. If it ain’t broke..

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