Today, my aunt Sue did a google search for “ebay” and got this…

See the ad for ebay at the top of the results? Not particularly interesting, right?…

The google provided link text says ebay, and overing over the link shows ebay. But a careful look at the source shows this…

The person who bought that ad cleverly injected a link to very NOT ebay. The link is to here (posted as image so you can’t accidentally click it)…

Yikes! Yikes! There is no way you could tell that link was not going to ebay without clicking it, and in fact the link text says “ebay.com” which is supposed to be checked against the actual target link by adwords. Yikes!

When you click on the link, you end up here…

Quadruple yikes!

Normally when I get a call like this, I assume that the person calling did something wrong like installing software or clicking on a wrong link.

In this case my Aunt Sue didn’t do anything wrong – google did!

Worse, the person who paid for this ad specifically targeted old people!!!!

…and seems to be from ebay!

Google: you really need to fix this! Make sure that link text matches the link target, and also give me a button to check who paid for an ad!

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