Tell HN: Google returning 'Untitled' results that redirect to malware/spam

170 points

4 years ago

Over the last few days I've noticed several distinct Google results that are simply 'Untitled', that redirect to other sites that are definitely spam and possibly malware (I didn't stay long enough to investigate). I've seen other examples of titles such as 'Oh' redirecting to the same spam sites. From the result preview below the title, the results otherwise seem somewhat relevant to the query, but most often end up loading a fake captcha page.

Google deleted a support thread posted 3 days ago about this issue [0]. There are a few comments on a HN thread from yesterday [1] which mention this issue as well. A reddit thread is active on /r/google about this issue [2].

Something seems to have gone wrong at Google to allow so many fake results to pollute so many different search queries. There have been many discussions on HN lately about how the quality of Google's search results have gone down, but until now I've never seen them become a massive influx of possibly malicious spam.

[0] https://support.google.com/chrome/thread/147896848/i-have-untitled-google-search-results-on-almost-everytging-and-it-redirects-me-to-malware-website?hl=en-GB

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30086059

[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/google/comments/seio29/is_anyone_else_getting_these_untitled_google/

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