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We deserve better internet search!
The world needs ad-free search. As the founder of a company developing an ad-free search engine, I would say that wouldn’t I? So, let’s look at it another way. Why did I decide to establish an ad-free search engine company? It is because I believe ads are bad for search and I want to change this with an alternative model.
I can explain the ‘how’ in later posts, but I want to tell you ‘why’ I am writing this post today. I was prompted by a really bad ‘ad’ I saw today which made me angry and reinforced why I established the company Better Internet Search Ltd.
This morning I was using a competitor’s search engines (which I do regularly for ongoing research). I needed to access my business bank account, I was using the search engine called 'Duck Duck Go' and didn’t have a bookmark so I typed in the acronym of my bank “rbs” into the search bar and this is what appeared.
Note that the top right and top left both show ads. Neither are actually ads for the real RBS (Royal Bank of Scotland) but they look like they could be, especially the one on the left as it is offering you all of the bank services you would expect. This ad is not just ‘bad’ it is evil, insidious (other adjectives apply) and what hides behind it is clearly fraudulent and illegal. And yet, this was the top ad served to me by Duck Duck Go (DDG) – a search engine believed to be one of the better, more ethical ones. While there is no accusation that DDG would serve an ad they knew to be fraudulent, the fact is that there is very little screening and the ads most likely to generate high click revenues are selected. Here is a more detailed image of the offending ad.
Let me now show you what happens when you clicking on this ad. First it presents you with an RBS digital banking login screen which will be familiar to most RBS customer (clicking on any link actually takes you this same login screen).
If you fill in the customer ID (I did this with some random digits) it then takes you to the screen asking for 3 out of the 4 numbers from your PIN and some of the characters from your password. After, I completed this (with some random data) I was then presented with the following screen saying I had entered the numbers incorrectly and asking for different numbers from my PIN and this time asking for my “FULL password”!
While not everyone will fall for this and reveal their online banking details, clearly many do, and become the victims of cyber criminals.
It is very frustrating that main stream search engines serve this type of advertising content, and it is our clicks on all of the ads (the good, bad and the ugly) that generates their revenues. This does allow them to provide services to us ‘free’, but what we are being served contains content with evil intent and it is clearly not free from fraud, or commercial and political bias. I believe that we deserve better internet search!
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