> Bing makes it clear when a site is promoted by prepending "ad" to the search result. Other search engines such as DuckDuckGo and Google do the same.

They very specifically do not make it clear, they (and I mean all of them) intend to make sponsored results look as identical as possible to organic results to improve the likelihood that you'll click them. They only have subtle markings showing that they're ads because if they didn't, such an abuse of trust would be ruinous to any search engine.

What's even worse here is that in the linked video, the Bing ad shows the domain as `google.com`, which is something you expect to be accurately represented in any listing, organic or paid. That's the sort of thing that should be ruinous to Bing.

>the Bing ad shows the domain as `google.com

There's a reason for this - ad tracking for conversion, performance or even to make sure the advertising network is honest. The ad tracking domain is not always the same as destination domain.

AFAIK, this problem seems easily solved.

All Ms has to do is flag ads whose displayed URL do not match the final URL for manual review. Or simply ban it.

> All Ms has to do is flag ads whose displayed URL do not match the final URL for manual review. Or simply ban it.

The ad did match the final URL, it just selectively redirected to the legitimate or malicious page based on user agent. See https://twitter.com/sephr/status/1055751684146655232?s=19

Bing and Google have always paid a lot of attention to the "landing page" for search ads, and they have a lot of technology to make sure that the landing page for an ad doesn't change after they've reviewed it.

Still, fraudsters have ways of changing the landing page to something different. In this case someone seems to have successfully convinced bing that the landing page domain is google.com -- it's unlikely that it's "easily solved". Or that the next one will be easily solved.

This does not excuse displaying false information, especially when that information misleads users into downloading malware.

>It is near impossible for Bing to manually review every advert

I don't agree with this. Reviewing ads should be a straight forward process, much more so than reviewing an app submission. Plus, obvious issues can easily be automated, reducing the load of manual reviews.

It’s easy for Bing to manually review every ad. What’s hard is manually reviewing every ad while maintaining their current prices and profit margins.

> perhaps it would be beneficial for search engines to provide a way for users to report rouge promoted links

You're absolutely right - it would be beneficial for them to dump their responsibility on the end users.

> It is near impossible for Bing to manually review every advert

Why? Are there hundreds of ad campaigns being created per second?

It would be possible to handle the quantity of ad campaigns, but not without false positives or missed fraudulent ads.

If you paid a person or a team of people to remove adverts promoting fake websites, the person reviewing the advert would have to understand the product being sold, the company selling the product and the companies real website. For Chrome this may be easy, but for more obscure projects such as a cryptocurrency wallet or email client it'd be hard for a person to distinguish between real and fake continually over the course of an 8 hour work day.

People who are searching for a product already understand that context and so will be able to make a less erroneous judgement on whether a promoted link is real or fake.

> It would be possible to handle the quantity of ad campaigns, but not without false positives or missed fraudulent ads.

That calculus applies to just about everything.

If you roll with pigs, you are bound to get dirty , if you promote links for profit, your reputation may suffer.

Really? If I go to the site in Chrome, it tells me it's a malicious site. If they can do this, then I can't see why they can't handle it when serving out advertisements.

Google Adwords has the same problem but, um, much bigger. They manage to review ads and mostly prevent malware much more successfully than Bing does.