I know that this will be a very controversial post, due to the fact that it goes against everything that has been taught about search at least for the past 15 years. But hear me out on this one. Recently, Google and other search engines have made changes to the layout of the first page of their search results. The changes that are being made is that they are putting more and more paid ads on that first results page.
But before we continue, I want to explain to you how advertisements work on the Internet and how it ties together to this post. Google AdWords is Google’s advertising system in which advertisers bid on certain keywords in order for their clickable ads to appear in Google’s search results. Since advertisers have to pay for these clicks, this is how Google makes money from search. Now, do you see why Google has made the change to show as more advertisements on search results than with their organic website results?
In the past, the paid ads would only show up on the right or the top side of the search results page with the words “Sponsored” next to it. Then the organic non-paid results would show up below the paid stuff. Now it seems like the first page is dedicated to paid advertisements. Especially if the search you entered happens to be a popular topic at the time. The picture below states my point:
As you can see, the majority of the first-page search results are ads. Now, for the most part, most of these ads pose no threat to your computer. But in recent times, the hackers and crackers has been utilizing AdWords to pay to get to the first page of Google in hopes that you would click on the first link, then direct you to their websites where they will try to trick you into enter your personal information or worse, download and install a virus on your computer without your knowledge. The best thing to do is to scroll down on the webpage until you see a link that doesn’t have the words “ad” or “sponsored” next to it as shown in the next picture:
And even then, I would exercise a bit of caution. I would then read the green link below to make sure that the website addresses and the content of the search of results both make some kind of sense. And what I mean by that is that you cannot search for baby dolls and the green website link does not correlate anything closely related to baby dolls.
Another thing that I would do is to have a computer technician perform routine maintenance on your computer every 3 to 6 months. He/She should go through all of the applications that are installed on your computer and make sure that you have proper protection and look over other software on your computer and make sure that you have the latest updates and patches. (If you want assistance with this part and live in the Rochester, NY area, contact us at questions@techconscious.info and we will get back to you) Plus, this will keep your computer running at peak performance at all times. This is not a 100{864a55aebd4892ec15ad8561e67f7c075e6c1d98063b4cfe18e850f7cdf07f32} guarantee that you may one day click on something and install a virus by mistake, but these tips will prevent that from happening about 90{864a55aebd4892ec15ad8561e67f7c075e6c1d98063b4cfe18e850f7cdf07f32} of the time.