Does Google make money on malware?

[davidnix71]

Yesterday after 9 pm local time, a story came out about the horse deaths at the Wellington Polo Club.
It said someone had used injectable Biodyl on all the horse that got sick/died. I had no clue what Biodyl was so I google for it.

The SECOND hit was a malware site that linked to two others. One ranking from "I'm Feeling Lucky"
Fake virus scan and Mac OSX DNS trojan/fake pr0n codec. The trio sorted by user-agent. After seeing the fake dmg and mov scripts, I changed user-agents and then reloaded and was presented with the peecee exploit.

When I asked about reporting it to an antivirus clearing house, our Mac IT guy at work said Google gets paid for rankings. We (at work) pay and construct our web store pages to get higher rank. If Google is taking money to bump rank, then maybe someone should go after them for damages for gross negligence like that.

And on a side note, is there someone other than Google to report sites like that to? An antivirus clearing house, or such? Maybe a Sourceforge antivirus/internet security suite project?

[worker201]

I believe that Google gets paid for sponsored results, or sidebar links.  But the stuff in the normal list of results gets there because somebody promoted their site well enough to enter the ranks.  There are hundreds of companies out there who get paid to improve search rankings, on Google and elsewhere.  Since internet promotion is basically a multi-level marketing scam, those promoters are basically terrorists, and I wouldn't be surprised if they were in cahoots with scam/attack consortiums.

Maybe these guys care enough to help:
http://www.antiphishing.org/