Google recently launched a new tool for your search with the help of Artificial Intelligence (AI). The goal is to offer more to users, with summaries of their requests and other web pages with related results.
It is precisely in the last point that lies a discovery that is worrying users. As reported by several international sources, some of these suggestions are malicious pages, filled with malware, spam or fake sweepstakes.
SEO expert Lily Ray was one of the first sources to report this unwanted Google Search behavior. As she says, this is a method that will mean that many users may fall for these schemes due to the trust they place in Google's results.
As you can see from the shared image, many of these malicious results end with .online domains. Many use the same HTML templates and frequent redirects.
When users click on these results, they are redirected to malicious or deceptive pages. In some cases, they are directed to fake captchas or pages pretending to be YouTube in order to harvest users' subscriptions.
Users may be flooded with fake Chrome notifications
This is a well-known practice for flooding users' desktops with unwanted advertisements. There is also the case of spam notifications for fake sweepstakes and other unwanted pages.
One of these draws would allegedly be promoted by Amazon with the offer of an iPhone 15 Pro. However, its objective is only to collect user data to later be sold to third parties.
The publication Bleeping Computer reports a case in which they received an alert from McAfee antivirus claiming that their computer was infected with 10 viruses. This alert offers the option to remove them or renew the antivirus license.
The same source also reports the download of unwanted extensions for Google Chrome. Once again, the objective is to collect information from users or serve as a bridge for the spread of more malicious software.
How do these malicious websites get to Google Search results?
This is the main question that arises after these reports, however, without a clear answer. One theory is to optimize the SEO of these pages so they can be included in Google's indexes.
An effective strategy as users tend to place their trust in the results they receive directly from Google Search. Even so, we warn you to take extra care when accessing suspicious pages.
In light of these reports, Google said in a statement that it is constantly working on its systems and algorithms to stop the spread of this type of malicious pages.
Image created by IA Microsoft Designer
“We continue to update our advanced spam-fighting systems to keep spam out of Search, and we use these anti-spam protections to protect SGE. We took steps in accordance with our policies to remove shared examples that appeared for unusual queries.”
How to remove page notifications in Chrome
Since some cases result in a flood of unwanted notifications, below we explain how you can remove notifications from Chrome:
Go to Settings – Privacy and Security – Site settings – NotificationsAt the bottom of the page you have the category “Authorized to send notifications”Click on the three vertical points of the site you want to cancel notifications and choose “Remove”