Google Fighting Back Against Ranking Poisoners

There have been multiple reports recently about botnets flooding Google with bogus search requests intended to steer its users toward false hits that are riddled with malware. And once Google straightened it up, the botnets changed keywords.

Now Google is fighting back with a Turing challenge. It seems that Google is able to sense when keyword searches are likely caused by botnets and is stopping the bots from completing their searches by asking for a captcha feedback.

See an example below for a common search I had submitted.

Had the bot completed the google search, he would have then clicked on his own malware site hosting his keyword in order to drive it upwards in Google’s results rankings. As such, unsuspecting real users, making a similar request, may have ended up clicking on the bogus website and becoming infected with a drive-by download.

I wonder if they will be doing this to fight click fraud too? By doing that, they would put a serious dent in the wallets of bot herders.