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by woogley 3718 days ago
Like the other peer comments, this does not show up for me. I'm afraid there's a good chance you already have some malware (or at least a rogue extension) that is inserting ads into your pages.
2 comments

I've been testing these kinds of searches every now and again for a few years now (and complaining about it on HN regularly). The malware ads are generally intermittent and won't show all of the time. That doesn't mean they don't exist.

I can assure you that for many years Google has been serving ads that link to malware for search terms like "firefox". I've seen them across different machines, different browsers, different ISPs, different OSs.

The situation with firefox seems better now but only because Mozilla is seemingly buying up all the ads for searches with "firefox" in.

Here's a post about it from a year and a half ago that also links to several earlier posts along the same lines: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8879229

Curious thought experiment:

Wouldn't malicious actors always be able to profitably bid more than legitimate companies for AdWords?

Assumptions: - Illegitimate business models are more profitable than legitimate ones

I recently read that AdWords charges much less if your site is already at the top of the organic search results, or something similar that.
That is a very big assumption that may hold for Browsers but not many other products. And even if illegitimate models are more efficient, a big business can afford a money sink for PR.
How would you know? The results are different for everyone, aren't they?
There's some conjecture involved but I would be very surprised if Google actually sold AdWords for their own browser.
They certainly have done in the past: http://i.imgur.com/yVIMYKO.png

Taken from a comment I wrote a couple of years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7335401

Deliberately? No, of course not.

They can't just ban the word "Chrome" from AdWords, though. Spammers/malware authors are very good at figuring out what's needed to slip through the automated systems.

They've done this for Skype too. And the funnier thing is when I reported it to Skype, they claimed it was "OK" because it said TOM in the description (Skype's Chinese sponsor). Except the link did not have anything to do with Skype or TOM.
Also important tools like PuTTY.
For this search, there is exactly one ad. It's from Google and goes to the official site.