Slashdot Mirror
The Dark Side of Paid Search
Tough Lefty writes "A new study by McAfee's SiteAdvisor Web ratings finds that sponsored results from some of the biggest names in the search engine business contain spyware, spam, scams and other Internet menaces. The key findings were that major search engines returned risky sites in their search results for popular keywords and sponsored results contained two to four times as many dangerous sites as organic results. Overall, MSN search results had the lowest percentage (3.9%) of dangerous sites while Ask search results had the highest percentage (6.1%). Google was in between (5.3%). Check the comprehensive study for all the data."
And if the spam breaks open many years too soon (whoa-ho-ho)
and if there is no room on my hard drive (whoa-hoa-hooooo)
and if your head explodes with scam site search results too,
I'll see you on the dark side of Paid Search (whooooaaaooo - hoooo whooaaaa-oh!)
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
...get something you didn't bargain for.
Really, is this even remotely news?
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
I guess all these years of automatically ignoring and scrolling past the "sponsored" results has paid off.
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
"Users can't count on search engines to protect them; to the contrary, we find that search result rankings often do not reflect site safety" Are users really depending on search engines to protect them? Even foolish users?
Please don't use "umm" or "err" or "erm".
As a libertarian, you shouldn't care if someone's selling rat poison as viagra.
Yea, who needs a centralized protection. It's all natural. See AIDS for example. It's not as if having no immune system affects your life or anything.
That appears to be an innocuous "download Firefox with Google Toolbar" site. Perhaps you meant the typosquatter parked next door?
That seems to be dead. Ironically, it has a typosquatter parked next door as well.
1: Virus
2: Attempted AdWare installs
3: Attempted Spyware installs
4: ActiveX controls
5: Java required
6: Anything else that it attempts to install when you visit
7: Sites that disable, or attempt to, your browser features like Right Click.
8: Sites that are only redirection sites.
and most of all
are you ready?
9: Sites that make themselves anywhere from hard to impossible to exit from afterwards without, at minimum, killing your browser process.
Flagging questionable, along with outright bad, sites would protect users, while likely reducing their traffic - which is what they deserve to have happen to them. More than twice I've used the Google cache to read a site's static content rather than risk visiting them directly.
And while they're at it, add an easily clickable link to tell Google that this site appears gone, or substantially changed from the search result summary and ought to be re-spidered ASAP would be nice too. Enlist your users in identifying bad search results.
Someone who does all this would have a strong hold on my search business.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
sponsored results
OK, it can cost a bit of money to get placed in sponsored results. So where does this money come from, when the sites paying for this high visibilty purportedly offer content for free?
We all knew the answer to that, before this article.
So how financially naive do you have be to click on a sponsored link with 'free' in the description - and not assume there is a hidden string attached?
That is like giving a $20 bill to the guy selling gum on the street in mexico and expecting change. In fact, I knew someone who did something similar to that in thailand. He didn't understand the language or the currency system, so he gave the peddler on the street his entire wad of bills and asked him to take what he owed him. The peddler took the money and ran off. That was his entire budget for the trip.
If clicking sponsored links is commonplace on the internet, common sense has degenerated to moronic levels.
-- "Common sense is for common people." - Dr. Piche