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Comment by a2tech | Hacker News Reader

Google needs to start cleaning up their ad inventory NOW or they're going to lose the whole business to adblocking. If you'd like to see how toxic Google ads are simply do a google search for 'skype' on a fresh Windows machine without Adblock enabled.

Now look at the ads-what are they for? Virus laden websites/fake installers. This is for a major keyword-why is Google allowing their ad pool to be poisoned by such bad/misleading ads?

In the past people's computers would get trashed from popups and malicious web pages, but today most of the junk filled computers I see have the same story 'I was looking for xxx on Google and I clicked the first link and then a bunch of stuff started popping up...'

When Google, the biggest 'best' ad provider in the industry, is polluting computers like this, why shouldn't people run Adblock?

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Not to mention search toolbar (bundled with downloaded software) vendors who buy ads on Google in order to ... show ads from Google:

http://www.benedelman.org/news/012213-1.html

They also need to stop toying around with amateur designs at the expense of the whole AdSense programme:

http://adsense.blogspot.se/2014/05/a-new-look-for-text-ads-o...

I've seen the past works of the designers on the AdSense team and I'm not impressed. Plus it's quite naive to think that one design will fit all websites. Why can't AdSense, like other ad and affiliate networks, just open up an API so publishers themselves can be in charge of how their ads look and behave?

Why do you say amateur designs? Google knows what converts, I would wager that their designs are the antithesis of amateur. You may not find them pretty, but those are different things. AdSense does let you specify all sorts of things about the look of the text ads though (font, colors, etc). They also have a tool for you to automate A/B testing of different combinations.

For instance, here's the guy responsible for their latest text ads: http://adnanvirk.com/ -- now I'm not saying he's bad. He's good. But is he good enough for Google?

> AdSense does let you specify all sorts of things about the look of the text ads though (font, colors, etc).

I'm afraid that's not enough. We need to control margins, paddings, line spacings, as well as media queries. We need to be able to remove the arrows, lines, buttons etc. that don't belong there. Ie. "perfection is achieved, not when there's nothing left to add, but when there's nothing left to take away".

Google has great designers, I'm sure we can all agree on that. Unfortunately, none of them are part of the AdSense team.

For text ads done right, see the ones in Gmail.

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