Over the last few days I've noticed several distinct Google results that are simply 'Untitled', that redirect to other sites that are definitely spam and possibly malware (I didn't stay long enough to investigate). I've seen other examples of titles such as 'Oh' redirecting to the same spam sites. From the result preview below the title, the results otherwise seem somewhat relevant to the query, but most often end up loading a fake captcha page.<p>Google deleted a support thread posted 3 days ago about this issue [0]. There are a few comments on a HN thread from yesterday [1] which mention this issue as well. A reddit thread is active on /r/google about this issue [2].<p>Something seems to have gone wrong at Google to allow so many fake results to pollute so many different search queries. There have been many discussions on HN lately about how the quality of Google's search results have gone down, but until now I've never seen them become a massive influx of possibly malicious spam.<p>[0] https://support.google.com/chrome/thread/147896848/i-have-untitled-google-search-results-on-almost-everytging-and-it-redirects-me-to-malware-website?hl=en-GB<p>[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30086059<p>[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/google/comments/seio29/is_anyone_else_getting_these_untitled_google/
For quite some time now (many months, maybe a year or two) I've noticed that when searching for something rather obscure, when there aren't many relevant results, google search nonetheless returns pages full of sort-of relevant looking results which all redirect to some form of spam or malware site. The malicious results are always ranked below any legit results but they are almost always there at the end of page one. For sufficiently obscure search then the crap can fill even the majority of the first page.<p>The commonality is that they seem to keyword stuff obscure keywords and even phrases (possibly by randomly brute forcing or re-combining text fragments into synthesized sentences.) and they all redirect one or more times, prevent the back button from working and land on some kind of suspicious page that is almost certainly hosting some kind of malware. The only way out is to close the tab and start over. I'd imagine things would be much worse without ublock installed.
In the last few months, many Gmail users (including myself) have been receiving some seedy emails in their inbox that were previously being sent to the spam folder. [1]<p>[1] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28635313" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28635313</a><p>Regardless of these issues being related or not, Google definitely don't care as much about the quality of their products as they did 10 years ago.
In gmail I get numerous easy to spot spam a day, McAfee warnings, CVS gift cards, Kohls cache, Costco $500 rewards, Geico insurance etc. Way worse than my personal mail server with a straight forward greylist/SpamAssassin setup.<p>What's worse is recently I searched for home depot, clicked on the top result (an ad), that clearly listed the destination URL as homedepot.com. Ended up with a malware site with multiple pop ups claiming I had a virus and had to install some plugin to fix things.<p>Feels quite a bit like yahoo used to: sketchy ads, malware, spam, payroll loans, etc.
Last year (20/21), Bing was directing people to website which had been hacked and from what I could trace on the offending site, via the bing cache, it was linked to Eastern European located websites. So I dont think its just Google, but Bing have been affected in the past as well.<p>I also dont understand why MS need a system in MS Edge (SmartScreen) which blocks you from accessing a website, yet the link to the website appear in the bing results, you would have thought Bing and SmartScreen would use the same data!?!<p>The only other thing I would check is that your system hasnt been hacked are you are seeing a Man In The Middle attack ie a fake google website and search results directing you to malicious websites via the search results.<p>Lets face it, how do you tell you are on the correct website and not some MITM website? Security certs dont tell you anything if the certificate company has had their root certs stolen or duplicated under a court order.
I mentioned this in a sibling comment, but what also drives me mad is that for about the last year or so, even if I search for something very specific and technical, I get pages upon pages of search results for sites with names that all sound similar to "techgeekhowto", that only contain the most basic (and often badly written) advice on how to reboot your Mac and similar things. Even "Verbatim" mode doesn't help much.
Why are people still using Google for search? I frequently hear complaints that Google's search results have become worse and worse over the past several years. DuckDuckGo isn't perfect, but I generally get good results from it, and they claim to respect your privacy.<p>I've also recently been trying out Kagi (invite-only beta, will eventually be a paid search engine), and I've so far been extremely happy with their search results. I'm a bit uncomfortable with it; since it requires a login, they can easily tie search history to you even if you use private browsing or a VPN. (They claim they don't do this, but I'd rather not have to trust.)
feels like goog has been relatively intentional through the last decade about what types of pages show up in what categories of search, and this has siloed SEO expertise. Now, for any 'type of search', SEO or ad spammers know more about the problem than google<p>sites like newspapers, SO, wikipedia, and even twitter, which have active moderation of all content, can stay ahead of this in a way that platforms can't<p>we all assume that 'only ads above the fold' is intentional by goog to bolster failing margins, but what if it's a problem they can't fix because their tools have outgrown their quality control?<p>in 2012 google thought the indexing algorithm was its immune system, but today it's the site of infection. (maybe it always was)
Based on the reddit thread, this does appear to be a legitimate issue. Conspiracy theories aside, it seems to be a search quality issue. I do wonder why that support thread was deleted though. It's unfortunate that Matt Cutts (former head of web spam team at Google) or someone else from the search quality team isn't communicating as early and often re issues like this anymore. Some transparency would be nice.
I come across these links as well and was able to find some of the source code, which generates these spam pages.<p>Actually, you can go ahead to such a spam page and view the index.html page of the current folder and what you will get is an HTML file with PHP code, which is not interpreted by the PHP interpreter, because the file has a dot HTML extension.<p>In the script, you can see from where the script fetches the displayed data and from which IPs the data is requested and received.<p>I copied such an index.html file into a gist: <a href="https://gist.github.com/devidw/ce2bdb78bb2e30a8e8437acc2c587d4c" rel="nofollow">https://gist.github.com/devidw/ce2bdb78bb2e30a8e8437acc2c587...</a><p>I also wrote a blog post about the details of what is happening in the PHP script: <a href="https://david.wolf.gdn/google-untitled-links-i-found-the-source-of-a-giant-spam-network/" rel="nofollow">https://david.wolf.gdn/google-untitled-links-i-found-the-sou...</a>
My wife recently received, in her inbox, a spoofed email from her own email address on Gmail.<p>I have no idea how you could possibly fubar that up. No idea what is going on with Google's spam handling.
Yep. Noticed that recently in some searches and it was definitely a "wtf" moment. The links seem to be to compromised wordpress sites but that's just a guess. Did not stay long to figure it out.
I thought I was searching weird things. But yes, I've seen this. Often starting from page 1 and every page after that. It seems to be 'normal' CPA links as far as I can tell.<p>Edit:// they are localized! I just checked on my phone which uses German Google and it says 'Ohne Titel' (so without title)
Does anyone have an example of a search title that results in this? I've never noticed it but would like to investigate. E.g. does the site return different results for GoogleBot vs end user (or based on Referrer)?<p>It could also be local malware - cross checking between users would be a good test for this.
There's a natural tension between fresh indexing and malware detection.<p>And speaking of tension, HN is clearly of two minds here. We have this article and we have "Google de-indexed my site [[that I didn't realize was hosting malware]] for no reason!" outrage parties.