Google Runs Offense on Bad Ads - 0 views
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Tracy Tuten on 22 Jan 14"SAN FRANCISCO - Google yanked 59% more "bad" advertisements from its online systems last year as the world's largest Internet search provider stepped up a battle against a barrage of counterfeiters, suspect downloads and other malicious activity on the Web. Google removed more than 350 million bad ads in 2013, up from about 220 million the year before. That's almost 1 million suspect ads a day. The increase was partly driven by the overall surge in online advertising, most of which is legitimate. But as Google introduces new products, scammers adapt and develop new ways to game the system. "It's a challenge," says Mike Hochberg, ads engineering director who oversees hundreds of engineers and policy experts focused on this at the company. "Google continues to add new types of ads and formats all the time, and that creates new work to track down new ways of creating bad ads." Google's online ad business has become so lucrative, generating billions of dollars a year in profit for itself and its partners, that the company's platforms, such as AdWords and AdSense, are a huge draw for what it calls "bad actors" looking to grab some of this money. In 2011, Google agreed to pay $500 million to settle allegations by the U.S. Department of Justice that ads for Canadian online pharmacies contributed to the illegal importation of prescription drugs. Last year, Mississippi Attorney General Jim Hood said Google was still allowing ads for illegal online pharmacies that sell dangerous or counterfeit drugs without a prescription. Google published a scorecard on its constant battle against such activity for the first time in early 2013, and the company is releasing the second report now. Hochberg says the reports and Google's increased efforts to limit bad ads and online scams were not related to the counterfeiting settlement. "Ensuring that we are serving good ads for users has been part of our ad programs from day one," he says. "Last year, we decided to put out a pseudo