Google Reveals Extent of Its War Against Bad Advertisements
Search giant reveals the staggering number of suspicious ads it yanked offline.
— -- Yanking bad advertisements off the Internet is like pulling weeds for Google.
The search giant revealed that last year they disabled more than 524 million "bad ads" and blacklisted more than 214,000 advertisers for not complying with Google's set of advertising standards, according to a blog post by Vikaram Gupta, Google's director of ads engineering.
While the ads are a small fraction of the billions that are run through Google's advertising platform, finding them isn't always an easy task. Bad ads are usually flagged through algorithms set up by the engineering team, but even then there is often more than meets the eye.
Gupta wrote that last summer the company's analysis technology noticed several suspicious accounts that were serving advertisements for what appeared to be rental properties. After further investigation, Google discovered the advertisements "turned out to be a scam and the rental properties didn't exist," he said.
Other examples from the past year, according to Gupta, included weight loss scams, counterfeit goods for sale and alarmingly, advertisements pointing to websites with malware that could infect a user's computer.
"This is a constantly evolving fight," he wrote. "Bad actors continually create more sophisticated systems and scams, so we too are continually evolving our practices, technology, and methodology in fighting these bad ads."
Related Stories
ABC News Live