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It's an age-old truism that you need to spend money to make money, and it can be especially effective in the world of online advertising.
For criminals looking to break into online password managers, the payouts are potentially huge if their fake login pages are at the top of Google search. Here's a very real reason why you should take care to avoid clicking on adverts in search results.
Google Adverts Look Like Real Search Results
The Google search results page isn't what it used to be. In the early days of the search engine's rise to dominance, you'd type in your search term, hit return, and see a page of search results, sorted by Google's algorithm to be useful.
More recently, the top of the page is typically devoted to cruft Google wants you to see. Typical culprits include a snippet taken from a website or dictionary, a range of similar questions to your query, two or three adverts, and then the actual search results.
The visual style of most of these elements is different enough from the meat of the results that it's easy to scan past them and scroll down. The adverts, however, are not immediately recognizable.
They use the same link color as regular results, and have the same lengthy of summary and selection of sitelinks to URLs within the website. There isn't even a dodgy tracking URL.
The only clue that you're looking at a paid ad...
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Published by: Book Club