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Comment by beckthompson | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

Most web-usage is happening on mobile, and ad-blockers are less common there. So, younger generation is pretty much living through the ads constantly.

Yup. For reference, on Android your best bet is to install Firefox + uBlock Origin. On iOS, I believe Kagi's Orion has built-in content blockers but you can also install uBlock Origin [1].

[1] https://help.kagi.com/orion/browser-extensions/ublock-origin...

Brave is excellent on Android. I watch YouTube all the time with literally zero ads ever.

Brave is a series scam company.

You can use ReVanced on Android to block the ads in the YouTube app

On iOS, Safari has some basic ad blocking capabilities, and beyond that there's AdGuard.

As far as alternative browsers go, Vivaldi also has an integrated ad blocker.

Not just the older generation. I can’t get my adult children to care about ad blockers.

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.

Searching for official manufacturer manuals/user guides for appliances is also another goldmine for third-parties.

But they deserve it when the manufacturer has one of those enterprisey sites where you need to go through 10 searches to maybe reach your manual, when the 3rd party site just shows it directly.

Not really, and the third-party sites almost never show the PDF directly without first trying to harvest your email or phone number or subscribe you to spam, sometimes they try to steer you towards unaffiliated 800 numbers tricking you that those are associated with the manufacturer, sometimes they bundle the download of manufacturer's PDF with malware, browser cleaner app installers etc.

Sometimes the third-party sites are helpful and benign, sometimes they are merely spammers trying to upsell you, occasionally they are malicious.

Agreed, the manufacturer site behavior is also annoying.

As my parents get older, I worry more about this.

Are there any good, easy-to-understand resources for spotting and avoiding phishing scams and such things for non-tech audiences?

My parents were highly computer literate and taught me how to use them growing up. These days they can barely even send emails and spend 30-60 minutes looking for files that are either on their desktop, download folder or in Recent Documents menu in Word/Excel. At some point in the aging process computer skills are one of those things that seem to go.

I don't think they go at all, I think software development is just bad all around. Almost all software is really, really bad and we just put up with it or are used to it.

Most software does not value consistency or UX maintenance AT ALL.

What I mean is, a lot of those older programs arguably had much better user interfaces in terms of usability. More contrast, more text instead of glyphs, and often still simpler.

UI is like fashion, it changes because change is good. Not because those particular changes are good.

Compare Windows 11 and 7, or XP, or even in a lot of ways 95. What's the prettier experience? 11, I guess. But which one doesn't make me scream at the computer? Not 11.

But it's not just Microsoft, Apple does it too. We throw away literal YEARS of user understanding and memory for nothing. Users get tired over time. They can't keep up, nobody can, and it gets frustrating when things just get worse and worse over time.

The only real difference that matters between a fake site and a real site is that the information on it is genuine, the form doesn't really factor into it. Which makes this a very tricky problem: You can't tell if the data is genuine before you have the genuine data.

Domain names is how you do this reliably. This is why everyone should use a password manager. It makes phishing much, much harder to do.

There are no best practices for domain names, there's nothing that can differentiate between NPM and a fraudster from hosting "npmjs.help".

It also doesn't help when you have to visit a new domain for the first time, which tends to be the case when looking up novel information.

If you're trying to do something for the first time with a big company, you usually know the domain name. Like Google is google.com. Or for something like your bank, it'll be printed on your credit card.

It already happened to my friend, and they’re not so old. Some people typed WhatsApp to their search bar and was brought to a phishing site instead.

Oh wait it happened to me as well. Fortunately it was phishing a recruitment site and all they got is my CV.

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.

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?

My bank replaced it's banktown.com url with b-twn.com, I thought I was on a phishing site, but it's legitimate.

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.

> people say that but they often come back to Google ;)

It used to be the case.

One of my laptop is setup with default DDG and the rare times I switch back to google I'm disappointed by even worse results.

> people say that but they often come back to Google ;)

The thing is that Google is actively becoming more hostile and difficult to use. Not just Google Search, but really all their products.

They're becoming Facebook, slowly but surely. Something we might be forced to use now and again, but nobody actually likes.

The reality is that Google is such a poorly run company that they will destroy their own products, given enough time. Their competitors need to do nothing. Literally nothing.

I haven't used Google (apart from their as-of-yet undefeated image search, the occasional hard link from a web page, and the two times I tried the Circle to Search feature) for at least five years now and I have zero interest in going back.

I agree about DDG, but I find Kagi worth paying for.

A very valuable service for its price.

Also translate.kagi.com is much better than Google’s one.

For translation, a good one is DeepL.

I used it until I found Kagi one.

For translation, just pick your chatbot of choice. LLMs fail at many things, but as translators they are very good.

there's also bing, which does not cost money to use.

I have been using Kagi for about a month now. Haven't had any desire during that time to go back to Google. Solid search engine!

Can you give some example queries where Kagi performs better than Google? I've tried it a few times and found it to be nothing special.

Unfortunately Kagi partners with Yandex https://kagifeedback.org/d/5445-reconsider-yandex-integratio...

Why do we not like Yandex?

For me personally the issue is that some of my money would go to Yandex, and, by extension, to Russian government. I understand it is only a symbolic amount per user, but still, for me, this is unacceptable (I was a happy Kagi subscriber before I found out about this).

America is nearly as bad as Russia. Dollars paid to American companies are taxed and used to bomb children in Gaza. Are you boycotting all American companies?

From my point of view United States, all things considered, is not nearly as bad as Russia. I do not boycott all American companies but I do boycott some.

Also, funding Russia directly funds their WW3 in Ukraine. (As does Trump, but in a less efficient way.)

> You also should just stop using Google Search. DuckDuckGo is solid

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.

I agree somewhat, but those searches are getting less and less good on Google though.

In my recent experience, I'm far better off asking ChatGPT or just using it through Bing/Copilot than what I used to do a decade ago, which was deep dives through 5 pages of long-tail search results.

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.

Erm, I'm fairly confident Midjourney.com is what you're talking about?

https://www.midjourney.com/explore?tab=video_top

Midjourney.online doesn't show up on either platform for me on the first page.

> I search DDG from the Firefox bar, and that does not let me copy the URL anymore

Yeah, I just noticed too. Go to Settings->Search there's a checkbox just below the default search engine. Uncheck that. Should be something along the lines of "Show search terms in the address bar in search results" (sorry for any errors in the translation, my browser's language is not English).

Duck Duck Go is consistently worse than Google Search in, see https://www.tumblr.com/ddgvsggl

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.

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.

That's not just the US. I've seen that myself with Vietnam and Seychelles, and I'm sure it's a problem with any other country where a visa or other documents are required

Last time i had to get a visa through these kind of channels, it looked almost deliberate. Outright bribing is now frowned upon, so they make the visa process as frustrating and opaque as possible. So that people have to either waste several days at the embassy, or go through one of those visa agencies instead. You pay for a totally legit above-the-table service, but it is effectively a "socially accepted bribe". And the administrative problem magically disappears.

Yes, it's the same everywhere. In any country with byzantine and convoluted visa and immigration procedures (i.e. most of them) there's a thriving industry of people who will eat the turds for you for a fee.

>If you tried middle-manning any for-profit like that,

I think that is called affiliate marketing.

We can absolutely expect Google to be a gatekeeper for advertisements they run on their platform. These aren't just middlemen, they're scams.

We shouldn't just be used to Google being allowed to essentially run infinite scams. Remember, they directly profit off the scams.

Its like if I had a billboard and then let someone put an ad up that said "give me all your money and you'll live forever!"

Am I off the hook? Why, lil ole me? I just run the billboard!

You might then say, well, obviously looking at every ad you accept is far too onerous! Its not like a billboard, because the billboard owner must see all the ads!

Which then I would reply - why is Google entitled to a business model like that? If they can't reasonable run their business in an ethical way... Perhaps they shouldn't run it all.

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.

[1] Notice I said uBlock Origin and NOT uBlock.

https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock

Because the average person looking for an adblocker searches for "adblock". And they're supposed to know the difference between uBlock and UBO?

> unless it gets built-into the browser

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.

The FBI agrees with you: https://www.pcmag.com/news/fbi-recommends-installing-an-ad-b...

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.

[0]: https://web.archive.org/web/20241008235322/https://www.ic3.g...

(at minimum, a search for "ad blocker" on ic3.gov should turn up some authoritative and useful advice page, not a random jumble of articles and press releases)

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.

Let's be more precise about what ads actually are, based on how the ad industry works today: malware

They always were. Remember IE toolbars? Java and Acrobat bundled software?

Yes, we called them adware and lumped them in with email worms.

We should go back to that.

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.

Plus when you click on one, they show you more! So the risk snowballs

Absolutely. I cannot use anything online anymore without pihole + ublock

Adblockers are a safety risk of their own - you’re giving @gorhill admin-level access to your browser.

You can check the source code.

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.

V3 still allows for extensions that have full access to the content of your websites, and obviously adblockers need to be in this category to function at all.

I’ve started asking ChatGPT to give me the right link. I can’t imagine they won’t start embedding ads too but so far, it’s been pretty clean.

That seems risky because of hallucinations. Wouldn't Google+Adblock be a better call?

Having it hallucinate a valid url that is spoofing the site I’m looking for feels less likely than someone managing to game SEO. Eclipse is a good example: the first result in Google is eclipseide.org, not eclipse.org.

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