Google Cracks Down on 1.7 Billion Bad Ads in 2016

Google took down 1.7 billion advertisements that violated its advertising policies in 2016, double the amount from the previous year, the company said in a Wednesday blog post. Google caught more by expanding its policies, including to cover payday loan ads, and by upgrading detection technology. Last year, the enhanced technology found and disabled 112 million “trick-to-click” promotions that often appear as system warnings to deceive customers, Google said. The web firm said it disabled more than 68 million bad ads for healthcare violations in 2016, up from 12.5 million the year before. Google took down 17 million ads for illegal gambling and about 80 million ads that deceived, misled or shocked users, it said. Google said it took down 23,000 “self-clicking” mobile ads that automatically download an app without the user tapping anything. The company removed about 7 million ads that intentionally tried to trick Google’s detection systems and suspended 1,300 accounts that cloaked their ads as news, it said. Google took action against 47,000 sites for promoting weight-loss scams, 15,000 sites for unwanted software and 6,000 sites and 6,000 accounts for advertising counterfeit goods, it said. The company said it disabled 900,000 ads for containing malware.