Its sad but I think at this point its kind of a safety issue not to use an ad blocker. Those results are not clearly ads and I've clicked on fake links in the past when they were.
It absolutely is. I fear for the older generations and less tech minded people who google their bank, and get some random phishing site. Or similarly google what should be libre software and get some random malware on a site that looks 'close enough'.
Lets call it what it is, a cancer, one that literally enables countless bad actors and purely for a search engine's own profit.
In theory theres a time and place for ads, but maliciously inline and disguised as the actual results people want arent it.
It's already happened to an elderly family member who was trying to troubleshoot a printer problem. The top results were 1-800 hotlines run by scammers looking to get remote access to their machine to "fix" the issue. Google has hordes of these companies padding their pockets and won't lift a finger to remove them.
What's odd is that the search engines, youtube, etc. get to claim the impartiality towards content applies to "impartiality" towards ads. I am younger, and I still almost got scammed trying to find a phone number to call a travel booking site. I called the number shown on Google, and they wanted to "verify my account" and triggered an email verification code. Only at the last minute did I realize it was an account takeover attempt. But that isn't Google perpetuating a crime?
Happened to my father who got routed through ads on his phone while booking flight tickets to some seedy website. He regretted it but thankfully got refunds initiated successfully because of issues with the flights themselves and a lot of back-and-forth. He resolved to only do critical monetary operations on his laptop where I've installed any and every possible adblocker.
The web is so hostile to the inform and the old. It takes one moment of weakness and there's someone ready and waiting with a scam.
You also should just stop using Google Search. DuckDuckGo is solid, or if you don't want to use search results from Bing's index, I've been very happy with Brave Search.
people say that but they often come back to Google ;)
I've just learnt to use ad blockers. the only time I disable it is when I look up the definition of something or the location of a place and the entire page goes blank because of some rules I've added to uBlock.
DuckDuckGo falls hard in quality when it comes to queries which are not in English. The only search engines who are good for those are Google and Kagi, in my opinion.
It's solid, I use it 95% of the time, that 5% Google usually still disappoints.
https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=midjourney&ia=web -> Hmm, midjourney the AI thingy is not even there for me! Just https://www.midjourney.com which is not really clear on what it is. Midjourney is at Midjourney.online, which is not even on the first page. So Argualbly Google is still better. What a world.
Btw, I search DDG from the Firefox bar, and that does not let me copy the URL anymore!!! Wtf. There is just the search term, like there is in the field below it!! Omg, now I have the same thing twice, and a useful thing has been lost.
If you're trying to do anything in terms of official documents, there's a middleman charging more. I searched for "passport application" the other day and it was 4 ads of people offering this service.
My dad was trying to get an ESTA visa a couple years ago and ended up paying twice the actual price, because he can't discern what's the official site or not.
That's down to US Government policies. If you tried middle-manning any for-profit like that, you'd get a cease and desist letter really quickly. But USG doesn't seem to care. We can't reasonably expect Google to be a gatekeeper here.
Strong agree but unless it gets built-into the browser, the average net denizen simply won't do it. The number of times I've seen a friend of the family try to show me an article on their laptop while casually trying to shoot down the pop-up ads like they're playing a marketers version of Missile Command was astonishing.
And EVEN if they do install a blocker, 9 times out of 10 it'll be AdBlock Plus and not uBlock Origin [1]. You know, the one that allows companies to PAY to have their ads whitelisted.
This doesn't even cover browsing on a smartphone which unless you're running Android Firefox which supports browser extensions, you have very few options.
DuckDuckGo is built in to the browser! Google is still unfortunately the default, but it's just Settings -> Search -> Default Search Engine, and DuckDuckGo is already in the list.
No, the previous admin's FBI did [0].
But then that alert page (on ic3.gov, Internet Crime Complaint Center) was taken down almost immediately after the 11/2024 election, before even the director was replaced. I genuinely expected this sort of basic alert should remain non-partisan.
Indeed. I got my credit card phished after buying tickets from an 'official' local museum website, it was the first result on Google. Later on I realized that all five top results were scam sites, the real one was 6th. They eventually fixed it.
All of the ad links are broken by our firewall at work. People complain but eventually they learn to skip the ads. Absolutely a security risk, search ads are second only to phishing emails as a threat vector.
This is the entire argument for manifest V3. So, if we believe this argument, then modern chromium derivatives should be safe with the ad blockers that run on them.
miladyincontrol|5 months ago
Lets call it what it is, a cancer, one that literally enables countless bad actors and purely for a search engine's own profit. In theory theres a time and place for ads, but maliciously inline and disguised as the actual results people want arent it.
rchaud|5 months ago
tokioyoyo|5 months ago
TheJoeMan|5 months ago
aniforprez|5 months ago
The web is so hostile to the inform and the old. It takes one moment of weakness and there's someone ready and waiting with a scam.
Toorkit|5 months ago
onionisafruit|5 months ago
charlieyu1|5 months ago
Oh wait it happened to me as well. Fortunately it was phishing a recruitment site and all they got is my CV.
LorenDB|5 months ago
jeremyjh|5 months ago
behnamoh|5 months ago
I've just learnt to use ad blockers. the only time I disable it is when I look up the definition of something or the location of a place and the entire page goes blank because of some rules I've added to uBlock.
mock-possum|5 months ago
carlosjobim|5 months ago
teekert|5 months ago
https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=midjourney&ia=web -> Hmm, midjourney the AI thingy is not even there for me! Just https://www.midjourney.com which is not really clear on what it is. Midjourney is at Midjourney.online, which is not even on the first page. So Argualbly Google is still better. What a world.
Btw, I search DDG from the Firefox bar, and that does not let me copy the URL anymore!!! Wtf. There is just the search term, like there is in the field below it!! Omg, now I have the same thing twice, and a useful thing has been lost.
aydyn|5 months ago
The only people who would say that are people who would be better off just asking ChatGPT.
Any nuanced search that isnt some encyclopedic fact is terrible on DDG.
inerte|5 months ago
My dad was trying to get an ESTA visa a couple years ago and ended up paying twice the actual price, because he can't discern what's the official site or not.
flyinglizard|5 months ago
vunderba|5 months ago
And EVEN if they do install a blocker, 9 times out of 10 it'll be AdBlock Plus and not uBlock Origin [1]. You know, the one that allows companies to PAY to have their ads whitelisted.
This doesn't even cover browsing on a smartphone which unless you're running Android Firefox which supports browser extensions, you have very few options.
[1] Notice I said uBlock Origin and NOT uBlock.
https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock
chuckadams|5 months ago
jstanley|5 months ago
DuckDuckGo is built in to the browser! Google is still unfortunately the default, but it's just Settings -> Search -> Default Search Engine, and DuckDuckGo is already in the list.
> unless you're running Android Firefox
Yeah, obviously run Android Firefox.
endgame|5 months ago
smcin|5 months ago
[0]: https://web.archive.org/web/20241008235322/https://www.ic3.g...
ricardobeat|5 months ago
tjpnz|5 months ago
oblio|5 months ago
ocdtrekkie|5 months ago
merlinnn|5 months ago
kwar13|5 months ago
symlinkk|5 months ago
array_key_first|5 months ago
xigoi|5 months ago
pitched|5 months ago
adcoleman6|5 months ago