Seen this? Google pissing me off on its homepage simple search

In My Humble Opinion
1

This has happened to me at least three times in as many days, and it’s annoying.

I do a simple search at google.com, this time it was Penn Jillette.

Results come up, at the top of everything is exactly what I was looking for, the simple non-ad-related number one result, his own site: www.pennandteller.com.

So I immediately go to click it, my finger is already in motion, and a tenth of a second before I click, it changes.

A peach colored box appears, with two ads in it, in this case #1 was Showtime, and #2 was Vegas tickets for their show.

That’s all fine, the ads make sense, but what pisses me off, is that I see the #1 result, I go to click it, and *then *this ad shows up, pushing the real result down, and I accidentally click a Showtime ad.

It just doesn’t seem fitting with their supposed “don’t be evil” philosophy. It feels like they just have it timed precisely as to invite misclicks.

2

Sounds like it’s time to run Spybot and MalwareBytes.

3

I don’t think it’s a Google thing, it’s just a page loading thing. Happens more often on mobile browsers since they’re so small. I thought it could be solved by loading the page so the link under your mouse stays the same (Stop browsers jumping when loading! - Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share - Straight Dope Message Board) but people said it would be too hard to do.

4

Google doesn’t do peach-coloured, pop-up ads. A program on your computer is intercepting your Google results and showing those ads. As mister nyx said, you need to scan your computer.

5

OP didn’t say it was a popup. The background of google ads at the top of the screen is beige/pink.

At least it is when I use my desktop running firefox.

6

I gave up on google for other reasons - mainly the privacy issues, but also how it keeps resetting my preferences. Also I know it’s trivial but I got weary of these “artsy” google graphics celebrating Joe Artist nobody has ever heard of’s 193d birthday.

Results aren’t as comprehensive, but I like Goduckgo.com.

7

Are you using Firefox? Remove the IE Tabs Plus extension.

I was having the same issue and just looked into it due to this thread. The links all have a “Google-co.com” domain and looking that up pointed me to it being IE Tabs Plus. I just overarmed that, tested a search I did minutes ago and got the ad box (“grapefruit”) and now it’s clean. IE Tabs Plus is inserting the ads.

8

I have no idea what “overarmed” was supposed to be. I removed it.

9

My iPad does it if I don’t wait until the page has fully loaded. I see what I want and go to click it, but the page is still moving things around.

10

Thank you!

That was it. The ads did have the google-co.com domain, and removing IE Tabs Plus got rid of them.

Woot!

11

You’re welcome. You indirectly helped me as well since I also assumed it was just Google until your thread inspired me to look into it deeper.

12

You, Sir, are a gentleman and scholar.

13

For what it’s worth, I’m using IE Tab 2…Google results look normal when the tab is inactive, but I do get a small ad on a peach background if I search with the tab active. The ad appears to be Google based though.

14

Huh…just tried this on my home computer, and the ad I’m getting is actually generated by Google. There’s a little link in the upper right corner labeled “Why this ad?”; when clicked, a box pops up explaining that the ad is based on your search terms.

15

This sort of thing is actually a security issue. There is a minimum reaction time for people, and browsers should be set up to ignore new screen information that has come in during that time. It is easy to set up a page that does this on purpose. Heck, it’s even the reason why there’s a default delay when downloading plugins in Firefox.

The concept of fixing it is simple, as stated above, but actually implementing it is a completely different paradigm to how applications work. At the very lease, you should be unable to click on a link that has only been active for less than the minimum time of perception (somewhere around 150ms, just less than 1/8 a second).