Please, when you see any malware, go to http://www.google.com/safebrowsing/report_badware/ and report it.

Google does care, and will take action to disable malicious advertising. For many of these sites, there is no obvious badness on either the ad or the landing page, so a manual report will help us fix malicious advertising.

I work on some small portion of Google's systems related to automatic malware scanning (albeit, not anything that would show up on the search results page), and I want to make sure that we don't direct people to malicious advertising.

Thanks! I've bookmarked this and will try it in the future.

But: as an experiment, I just turned off ABP and Google'd (heh) "yahoo support". One of the ads at the top was for http://www.aurasupport.com/email_service; at a quick glance, I see a website template from http://pixel-industry.com/website/, lots of broken English, and a domain that was registered just last Summer to a house address in a suburban development in Texas. Not exactly a smoking gun, but also probably not what somebody's looking for when they search for "Yahoo support"...

And, farther down the first page of the actual search results is http://www.yahoosupport.org/, which has a toll-free phone number in the title, 1-888-551-2881. Googling that phone number takes you down a rabbit hole of lots of dirty SEO (e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AEO5-2RpYvo), no actual customer reviews anywhere, and offers for support for lots of services -- including, uhm, Gmail (http://www.password-recovery.us/contact-us, look at the page title).

So, I'll be happy to use the link you gave, but this seems to be a fairly serious problem, and I'm a little surprised that Google doesn't have a better handle on this.

It should be reasonably simple to add a "report malware" button next to banners when the search includes the word "download". It would be less simple to review flags every malware provider would make on every competitor, but the beauty is, you wouldn't need to - when someone asks for "download firefox" I'm pretty sure all banners advertising Firefox will include some form of malware.

I actually did that once, for some badware on "download minecraft".

All but one of the badware ads I reported disappeared, within 20 minutes too! (but why one remained I have no idea!)

There's caring and there's caring.

Is it something you can easily and obviously do, in place, when you find links to spam & malware sites?

Or do you have to know a special URL?