NIT – In a report issued on January 17, Google says it continues to battle those who would post misleading or fraudulent ads, pulling hundreds of millions of ads from their advertising system.
According to Google, “bad actors that want to abuse online advertising tools for harmful or deceptive purposes” are always on the prowl.
In order to combat them, Google says it “allocated substantial technical, financial, and human resources to stopping bad advertising practices and protecting users on the web. Hundreds of our engineers, policy experts and others have dedicated their careers to this work.”
Google removed more than 350 million bad ads from its systems in 2013. “This was a significant increase from approximately 220 million ads removed in 2012,” Google said. “This trend has been consistent in the last several years and we attribute it to several factors, including: the growth of online advertising overall and constant improvement of our detection systems.
“The number of advertisers we disabled, however, dropped from over 850,000 in 2012 to more than 270,000 in 2013. In part, we attribute this decline to scammers — counterfeiters, for example — being thwarted by our safety screens and searching for less-secure targets.”
