• recklessengagement@lemmy.world
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    20 hours ago

    This is so stupid. God forbid they actually police their ads for malware. No, instead let’s push the responsibility onto the individual, by adding get another “Papers, Please”-esque stamp that very few people will know about and even less will actually use.

    Hard pass. The day I saw them promoting malware above legitimate search results is the day I turned on ad blocking for my entire org, and a stupid little pay-to-verify badge isn’t going to change that.

    /end rant

    • xenoclast@lemmy.world
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      19 hours ago

      One way they make money. One way they’d need to spend it. It’s against capitalism to do the latter.

      • MrSoup@lemmy.zip
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        1 day ago

        It’s the best example in my opinion, because it is full of fake versions of popular piracy sites because Google hides the originals.
        And it is the only site I know ddg shows certification every time.

  • TheLugal@lemmy.world
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    1 day ago

    We regularly experiment with features that help shoppers identify trustworthy businesses online[…]

    I like that Google calls their users “shoppers” /s

    • toynbee@lemmy.world
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      1 day ago

      To be fair, I think there is a “shopping” tab when you perform a search through them.

      • bandwidthcrisis@lemmy.world
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        22 hours ago

        I don’t even mean browsing! Just trying to install something.

        I search for “NordVPN” (because all the cool YouTubers use it!) and the first result is “Norton 360” with an install button.

        It’s a “sponsored result” and it’s easy to install the wrong thing if you’re used to it actually finding the thing you just typed in.

        If I put Firefox. I get duckduckgo. Okay, maybe not so bad and pretty obvious. But I’ve had these things for apps that almost look like the legitimate one.

  • PrivacyDingus@lemmy.world
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    1 day ago

    that might be useful i guess if google hadn’t shredded every tiny piece of trust we had in them

      • chakan2@lemmy.world
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        1 day ago

        Getting 4 sponsored links and an AI overview before I get to the search results.

        It’s basically all the shit Yahoo did to lose their search dominance.

        • wizardbeard@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          1 day ago

          Fun Fact: the current head of Google’s search is the same guy that was in charge of Yahoo’s search right before they folded their own search and just started licensing Bing.

        • Sakychu@lemmy.world
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          1 day ago

          I can’t see how a checkmark is supposed to fixes these Problems. Aren’t the sponsored links not already marked as such?

        • JohnEdwa@sopuli.xyz
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          1 day ago

          You can disable the AI stuff and other nonsense if you do a “web” search, it’s in the list with images, videos etc. Theres also a thing you can add to a search url to do it - &udm=14.

      • jonne@infosec.pub
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        1 day ago

        I assume SEO spam/misleading ads?

        Stuff that could probably be better done by vetting advertisers and improving the search algorithm.

      • ichbinjasokreativ@lemmy.world
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        1 day ago

        Malware disguised as legitimate software getting served as ads.

        Just a few months ago people were shown faked websites for obs studio when searching for the original. They should vet whose ads they’re serving instead of just certifying certain corporations.

    • RubberDuck@lemmy.world
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      16 hours ago

      Why? Google should just police their results. Offering a fake Microsoft in your results means you failed providing the service you claimed to offer.

      This is either pay to play… and that means google will earn money from fraudsters. Or it will look at certificates… just aite matches certificate… must be good.

      Decades worth of whack a mole could have been used to train an AI to actually help here… but we made a glorified word guesser instead.