Google Targets Bad Advertising - 780 Million Ads Removed

"Some ads are just plain bad—like ads that carry malware, cover up content you’re trying to see, or promote fake goods," say Google. In it's effort to screen out the bad ads it has a team of more than 1000 people worldwide fighting bad advertisers.

Last year Google disabled more than 780 million ads from webpages served with ads from Google's ad servers.

Some bad ads claim to help with weight loss, but mislead people, said Google. Others help fraudsters carry out scams, like those that lead to “phishing” sites that trick people into handing over personal information. Through a combination of computer algorithms and people at Google reviewing ads, we’re able to block the vast majority of these bad ads before they ever get shown. Here are some types of bad ads categories busted in 2015:

Suspended were more than 10,000 sites and 18,000 ad accounts for attempting to sell counterfeit goods (like imitation designer watches).  And blocked were more than 12.5 million ads that violated it's healthcare and medicines policy, such as ads for pharmaceuticals that weren’t approved for use or that made misleading claims to be as effective as prescription drugs.

Weight loss scams, like ads for supplements promising impossible-to-achieve weight loss without diet or exercise, were one of the top user complaints in 2015. 30,000 sites were suspended for misleading claims.

 10,000 sites were disabled for offering unwanted software, while ads designed to look like system warnings from your computer were rejected to the tune of more than 17 million.

Google stopped showing ads on more than 25,000 mobile apps because the developers didn’t follow it's policies. and rejected more than 1.4 million applications wanting to use Google Play.

Maybe you’ve just seen way too many car ads recently. “Mute This Ad” lets you click an “X” at the top on many of the ads and Google will stop showing you that ad and others like it from that advertiser. You can also tell them why.

Google says, "We want to make sure all the ads you see are helpful and welcome and we’ll keep fighting to make that a reality."