Google’s main source of income (but not the only one), as we all know, is the advertising. Thanks to advertising, it can offer, completely free of charge, most of the platforms that it makes available to us such as Gmail, the search engine, YouTube, Google Maps to name the most popular. The same happens with the Meta group (Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp), although this is their only source of monetization. Since advertising is so important to Google, it should take much more care in its operation to prevent our PC from getting infected with viruses.
Google’s advertising business is designed so that don’t interrupt the experience of the users since they have the same appearance as the search results that are shown when we do any type of search (forgive the redundancy). In this way, the uninformed user only looks at the first result that is displayed, without stopping to look at the description, whether it is available or whether it is an ad.
When it comes to advertising, Google, just like any other platform, is forced to indicate so as not to mislead users. This same problem is also found when we search on Amazon, where, always, the first results are ads that the seller of the product we are looking for pays for so that it appears in the first results and has a better chance of being purchased.
Google misleading ads
Google’s platform, Adwords, allows anyone, company or person, to create advertising campaigns. These campaigns are created based on the words that we previously establish, It doesn’t matter if it’s a registered trademark. or not. This is where the Adwords problem is and it poses a danger to all users who are looking for applications to download from their official sources through Google.
When a fraudulently motivated advertising campaign is created in Google Adword using well-known brand names, any user searching for those brands or a combination of the brand name with other words, such as “download VLC”, the first result that The ad will always be displayed, which in 99% of cases is the first result where most users click.
Continuing with this example, we see how the first result that is displayed is a advertisement, an ad whose URL has nothing to do with the app. If we click on it, a website identical to the download section of the VLC application will be displayed and from where we can download, supposedly the application, an application that, of course, includes malicious software. The solution to this problem is very simple.
How to prevent our PC from being filled with viruses
Once we know how the Google ad platform works, it is very easy to prevent us from getting an unpleasant surprise when downloading any application, since we just have to avoid clicking on any result that shows the word Advertisement. Large companies do not have the need to advertise through Google to promote your download pagesince, due to the operation of the search engine, Google considers them referents in this field and always places them in the first position.
This does not mean that we cannot find ads for their products that do not involve downloading software that can infect our computer, so it is not difficult to find ads for Manzana, Microsoft either Adobe without going further.
