Day: May 18, 2007

In the first update of it’s interface in a LONG time… Google has re-tooled it’s offering… I like it!

Big Google search upgrade

“In the most significant upgrade of its search engine in years, Google Inc. has added videos, book excerpts and local store information on its main results page, eliminating the need for users to visit the company’s separate, specialized sites. The Mountain View company unveiled the changes Wednesday as part of a plan called universal search that aims to make more kinds of information accessible from a single Internet search box. Users will see that Google’s results, traditionally a long list of blue links and snippets of text, are peppered with images for certain searches. For example, a query for ‘Steve Jobs’ brings up several images of Apple Inc.’s co-founder at the top of the results, plus a video of him down the page from Google’s video service, YouTube. Sergey Brin, Google’s co-founder, called the new approach ‘the largest revamp we’ve made to search in at least a few years.’ Google’s executives described Wednesday’s news as the first step in a long effort to integrate the company’s disparate search engines, all but the main one focused on narrow categories. Many users, the executives acknowledged, had no idea some of the engines existed or were confused about how they worked.”

And they did! How stupid is that?!? A security guy decided to do a Google Adwords ad to see, first, would Google accept it (they did,) then, would anyone respond and click the ad that promised a virus infection if you clicked on it… the ad said, “Drive-By Download, Is your PC virus-free? Get it infected here! drive-by-download.info” Ouch! Nobody’s THAT dumb, right? Wrong.

Hundreds Click on ‘Click Here to Get Infected’ Ad

“People will click on anything. That was evidenced by the 409 people who clicked on an ad that offers infection for those with virus-free PCs. The ad, run by a person who identifies himself as security professional Didier Stevens, reads like this:

Drive-By Download
Is your PC virus-free?
Get it infected here!
drive-by-download.info

Stevens, who says he works for Contraste Europe, a branch of the IT consultancy The Contraste Group, has been running his Google Adwords campaign for six months now and has received 409 hits. Stevens has done similar research in the past, such as finding out how easy it is to land on a drive-by download site when doing a Google search. In a posting about the drive-by download campaign, Stevens says that he got the idea after picking up a small book on Google Adwords at the library and finding out how easy and cheap it is to set up an ad… First, Stevens bought the drive-by-download.info domain. .info domains are notorious for hosting malware, he points out. Then he set up a server to display the innocuous message ‘Thank you for your visit’ and to log the requests. No PCs were harmed in this experiment, he emphasizes. The site is benign and has never hosted malware or other scripts or code. Then he started the Google Adwords campaign, using combinations of the words “drive-by download” along with the ad, which links to the drive-by-download.info site. Next, he sat and waited … for six months. Over that period, his ad was viewed 259,723 times and clicked on 409 times, for a click-through rate of about .16 percent. The experiment cost him $23, or 6 cents per click/potentially infected machine. Of the 409 people who clicked, 98 percent were running Windows machines, according to the user agent string, which is a text string that identifies a Web site visitor to a server. The agent string typically includes application name, version, host operating system and language.”

Wow.