Instead of delivering just the application we were looking for, all of the links tacked on additional software. And these kinds of results showed up in Google Chrome, Firefox, and Internet Explorer.įor each ad link, we clicked through and installed the respective programs via the link or button provided.
But for every one of the above programs, we were able to bring up more questionable sponsored search results within a few minutes of repeated searching. Sometimes, particularly with iTunes, the first ad link actually took us to the software's source site ( in this example). To be fair, the ads didn't appear after every search, and the ones that appeared varied from search to search and from one browser to another. Then, we clicked on ad results, which appear above the standard search results highlighted in a pale yellow to differentiate them (slightly) from the nonpaid links below. We searched for nine programs, many of them among the first programs that get installed on a PC: iTunes, Adobe Flash, Java, Adobe Acrobat, VLC, WinRAR, WinZip, Google Chrome, and Any Video Converter.
Just how bad is it? To find out, we set up a fresh install of Windows 7 on a virtual machine, installed all available Windows updates, grabbed the free version of Avast! antivirus software (which can be tricky itself), fired up Internet Explorer 11, and started searching Google and Bing for popular free programs.