Anyone Who Pays the Bills is Good Enough for Google

By Jimmy Daniels
Contributing Writer, RealTechNews

So says Ben Edelman, and many other experts in the security field. To avoid future malware attacks on searchers, such as the one I touched on here, more detail here, Google needs to more thoroughly investigate advertisers and publishers in their Adwords and Adsense programs. In short, malware “distributors” created fraudulent ads in Google Adwords for legitimate organizations, like the Better Business Bureau, to trick users into clicking on the links, once someone clicked a link, the ad would redirect their browser through Smarttracker.org which then attempted to automatically download malware onto their computers before passing them along to the actual sites that were advertised, with them none the wiser.

“We actively work to detect and remove sites that serve malware to our users both in our ad network and in our search results,” the company said in a statement. “We have manual and automatic processes in place to detect and enforce these policies; we also encourage our advertisers to contact Google directly if they have concerns or detect suspicious malware.” Source: Experts: Google AdWords needs policing

But, it shouldn’t be up to advertisers to notify Google about problem advertisers, sure, there are always going to be a few that start out good and turn bad, so there will always be a need for people to be able to report these problems, but, Google needs to change how they do things, maybe have one team that investigates advertisers who are signing up, and, change their guidelines for their employees who approve ads on their network.

“The big problem is that Google sells ads to anyone, without completing any due diligence to determine who they are or that the content they are advertising is legitimate,” Edelman said. “We’ve been writing about this problem for years and nothing has been done about it. Apparently anyone who pays the bills is good enough for Google.”

“People treat sponsored results as safe because they believe that Google has filtered out the bad stuff, which they should, because legitimate publishers such as print or broadcast companies do that,” Edelman said. “It’s highly likely that these malicious ads appear throughout the Google network, including in Gmail, and they may also show up on sites like AOL and Ask.com that are advertising syndicates.”

We Say: As it stands, Google has no incentive to REALLY do anything about their Adwords or Adsense platforms, because they are knocking down the cash from people advertising, if they knockout the made for Adsense sites, and change their guidelines for websites they allow in, they could loose a big chunk of revenue without showing any benefit other than posts like this one will not be created. Once consumers decide with their mice that they are not clicking on any Google ads, they might have some motivation to change how they do things, until then, nothing to see here.