It absolutely is. I fear for the older generations and less tech minded people who google their bank, and get some random phishing site. Or similarly google what should be libre software and get some random malware on a site that looks 'close enough'.

Lets call it what it is, a cancer, one that literally enables countless bad actors and purely for a search engine's own profit. In theory theres a time and place for ads, but maliciously inline and disguised as the actual results people want arent it.

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aniforprez 12 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

Happened to my father who got routed through ads on his phone while booking flight tickets to some seedy website. He regretted it but thankfully got refunds initiated successfully because of issues with the flights themselves and a lot of back-and-forth. He resolved to only do critical monetary operations on his laptop where I've installed any and every possible adblocker.

The web is so hostile to the inform and the old. It takes one moment of weakness and there's someone ready and waiting with a scam.

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rchaud 13 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It's already happened to an elderly family member who was trying to troubleshoot a printer problem. The top results were 1-800 hotlines run by scammers looking to get remote access to their machine to "fix" the issue. Google has hordes of these companies padding their pockets and won't lift a finger to remove them.

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smcin 12 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Searching for official manufacturer manuals/user guides for appliances is also another goldmine for third-parties.

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nottorp 6 hours ago | parent [-]

But they deserve it when the manufacturer has one of those enterprisey sites where you need to go through 10 searches to maybe reach your manual, when the 3rd party site just shows it directly.

	▲	smcin 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Not really, and the third-party sites almost never show the PDF directly without first trying to harvest your email or phone number or subscribe you to spam, sometimes they try to steer you towards unaffiliated 800 numbers tricking you that those are associated with the manufacturer, sometimes they bundle the download of manufacturer's PDF with malware, browser cleaner app installers etc. Sometimes the third-party sites are helpful and benign, sometimes they are merely spammers trying to upsell you, occasionally they are malicious. Agreed, the manufacturer site behavior is also annoying.

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squigz 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

As my parents get older, I worry more about this.

Are there any good, easy-to-understand resources for spotting and avoiding phishing scams and such things for non-tech audiences?

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tokioyoyo 13 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Most web-usage is happening on mobile, and ad-blockers are less common there. So, younger generation is pretty much living through the ads constantly.

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vunderba 12 hours ago | parent [-]

Yup. For reference, on Android your best bet is to install Firefox + uBlock Origin. On iOS, I believe Kagi's Orion has built-in content blockers but you can also install uBlock Origin [1].

[1] https://help.kagi.com/orion/browser-extensions/ublock-origin...

	▲	stack_framer 11 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Brave is excellent on Android. I watch YouTube all the time with literally zero ads ever.

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charlieyu1 an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It already happened to my friend, and they’re not so old. Some people typed WhatsApp to their search bar and was brought to a phishing site instead.

Oh wait it happened to me as well. Fortunately it was phishing a recruitment site and all they got is my CV.

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onionisafruit 13 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Not just the older generation. I can’t get my adult children to care about ad blockers.