Beware Of Browser Hijacks & Fake Google Ads
Every now and then I see people post screen shots of Google search ads that look suspicious because (a) they are irrelevant to the query and (b) kind of hidden and hard to see. More recently, I’ve been seeing more and more examples of these in the forums and on social media.
They most often come because there is malware or some sort of extension on your browser, hijacking the Google search results, to show forms of adware or malware instead of Google’s real ads.
John Mueller from Google responded to one of these recently on Twitter saying “Yeah, that looks more like a plugin or other kind of browser hijacker than a normal search result….”
Here is a screen shot of what it looks like (click to enlarge):
so if you see this, it does look very similar to normal Google search results, but they are off and someone who has experience, will pick up on it.
