WHEN GOOGLE IS POSSESSED BY PROFIT
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If I google
Download Notepad++I don’t see any fake website links in the first page of results. -
@Alan-Kilborn ,
Yeah, I just tried it and it gave me normal non-ad results, all legit, but of course, this could be because it’s a US based server? Maybe the different overseas servers are getting hit locally without propagation because it gets caught and filtered here? Or maybe, Mozilla’s Firefox with adblock prevents it. When I use Firefox with adblock AND DuckDuckGo, I guess I never see anything, but then again, I bail out if something tries opening IE/Edge instead. :)Heck, just using this forum on Firefox shows 2 blocked ads. :)
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Hi, All,
From France, with Microsoft Edge version
108.0.1462.76(Official64 bitsversion) :- Typing the sentence
télécharger Notepad++gives this page :
where the official site is the
2ndresult- Typing the sentence
download Notepad++gives this page :
Where the official site is the
1stresult !Best Regards,
guy038
- Typing the sentence
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@Lycan-Thrope said in WHEN GOOGLE IS POSSESSED BY PROFIT:
Heck, just using this forum on Firefox shows 2 blocked ads. :)
It shouldn’t. I don’t have adblock installed, and I don’t see any AD in this forum.
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@donho ,
Just so you don’t think I’m imagining it <g>, here’s a screenshot I took on this page before responding to you.
If you’ll notice up in the right hand part of the window, is a stop sign behind the popup…that shows the number 2, that’s how I know something is being blocked, regardless of what it is, and the popup confirms it’s blocking something here on this site. Unfortunately, I don’t have dark mode set on the browser yet.
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Perhaps an explanation:
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@DomOBU ,
I can’t read French, but that’s also why I see things in French in the code, but I suspect you’re showing him what my Ad-Blocker is finding worth blocking. I mean, it could even just be the Google Tracking, that is being blocked for all I know. I only know that I like Ad-Block doing it’s job, period. :)When a site insists I shutdown the Ad-Block, I close the site, instead. :)
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When googling for
download notepad++I stumbled upon the following result:
It is not a top-ranking entry but the site looks quite different from the original so it seems unrelated to me. I didn’t dig any deeper so I can’t tell if it spreads crapware but I thought you should know about it.
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In USA.
Tried “Notepad+” and every possible combination of “Notepad++” with (“free”, “download”, “help”, or “install”) on Google from Firefox. In every case, official sites were the top two results.
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Still it appears as of today on 17 Mar, 2024.
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@SinghRajenM I took a look at the site and it seems legitimate. The links for downloading go to https://notepad.plus/download/
It seems to be a fan site. The font it uses bothers me a little. Every time they have “NOTEPAD++”, such as in the blog titles, I see “NO TEPAD++”
There is one odd thing is that the Google search results are showing an icon for Notepad++ that looks like a California poppy flower, the letter V, and ++. That’s in both your screen shot and when I did a Google search. Google is not showing https://notepad-plus-plus.org/favicon.ico
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@SinghRajenM said in WHEN GOOGLE IS POSSESSED BY PROFIT:
Still it appears as of today on 17 Mar, 2024.
Thank you for your heads up.
@mkupper said in WHEN GOOGLE IS POSSESSED BY PROFIT:
That’s in both your screen shot and when I did a Google search. Google is not showing https://notepad-plus-plus.org/favicon.ico
That is one of problems I should solve. Though I use google’s search console for requesting re-index notepad-plus-plus.org, the old icon (which is not in the website at all) is still shown in the search result. I have no idea to make new logo icon shown.
The links for downloading go to https://notepad.plus/download/
It seems to be a fan site.
It is not.
I think the intention of this “so called” fan site is quite clear:
Hijacking the traffic to show their ADs, and cheat users to click on these ADs if possible (many are malicious ones).
I wonder the declaration of not “Official Notepad++ website” but a “fan site” and no hosted malicious binaries make the website not taken down by google and still exist.Do anyone here has more experience about it? Any suggestion to stop it is welcome.
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@donho said in WHEN GOOGLE IS POSSESSED BY PROFIT:
Any suggestion to stop it is welcome.
<sigh>, where are the DNS attacks when you need them. :-)
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@donho said in WHEN GOOGLE IS POSSESSED BY PROFIT:
That is one of problems I should solve. Though I use google’s search console for requesting re-index notepad-plus-plus.org, the old icon (which is not in the website at all) is still shown in the search result. I have no idea to make new logo icon shown.
I started with https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/favicon-in-search
- Create a favicon…
Google says “Your favicon must be a multiple of 48px square, for example: 48x48px, 96x96px, 144x144px and so on.”
Your favicon.ico file contains 64, 48, 32, and 16 pixel square icons. While you have a 48px square in there we don’t know if Google gets upset at the smaller sizes.
- Add a
<link rel="icon">tag to the header of your home page.
You have two
<link rel="icon">tags but neither of them follow the guideline syntax exactly plus Google is looking for a 48x48 icon which you don’t mention. I would replace your<link rel="icon">tags with the following:<link rel="icon" href="/favicon.ico"> <link rel="icon" type="image/x-icon" sizes="64x64 48x48 32x32 16x16" href="/favicon.ico">The first line follows Google’s suggested syntax exactly.
The other one is because your favicon.ico contains 64, 48, 32, and 16 pixel square icons but you had only mentioned the 32, and 16 pixel versions. It’s possible Google looked and since you did not mention the 48x48 size Google then did not bother with inspecting your favicon.ico file.- Google looks for and updates your favicon whenever it crawls your home page.
Request indexing once the
<link rel="icon">tags are cleaned up.I think the intention of this “so called” fan site is quite clear:
Hijacking the traffic to show their ADs, and cheat users to click on these ADs if possible (many are malicious ones).
I wonder the declaration of not “Official Notepad++ website” but a “fan site” and no hosted malicious binaries make the website not taken down by google and still exist.Do anyone here has more experience about it? Any suggestion to stop it is welcome.
It’s ironic that while you advocate free speech that you try to get speech that you don’t agree with shut down.
That site, while peculiar, seems harmless. They are not even running ads. There’s an empty yellow box at the top of the page which could carry an ad, or maybe is stealth advertising for yellow. Their download page promptly redirects to yours.
The domain name will expire in September 2024. If it’s allowed to expire then I expect the site to get taken over by genuine scammers or at least, domain name squatters.
You could try the Contact-us link and see if they are willing to transfer control of the domain name to you or at least to make it a permanent redirect to https://notepad-plus-plus.org/ for long enough that Google and Bind finally drop it from their search results. At that point the traffic should be low enough that the domain name can be abandoned.
I suspect it’s not worth the $10/year it would take to keep the domain forever as a permanent redirect.
If the person is a fan, as they claim, they should not have a problem with transferring control.
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Pas de problème avec Startpage.
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It’s ironic that while you advocate free speech that you try to get speech that you don’t agree with shut down.
Ah, the old “I don’t understand free speech and think anyone defending it should automatically tolerate everything and I can’t differentiate between a government issued, violence backed censorship from a personal opinion opposing anything, whether deceptive or simply wrong”. It will never get old, never.
And as I understand, that site should be flagged by google from their documentation:
Insufficiently labeled third-party services: A third-party service is someone that operates a site or service on behalf of another entity. If you (third party) operate a site on behalf of another (first) party without making the relationship clear, that might be flagged as social engineering. For example, if you (first party) run a charity website that uses a donation management website (third party) to handle collections for your site, the donation site must clearly identify that it is a third-party platform acting on behalf of that charity site, or else it could be considered social engineering.
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“free speech” and “free beer” are terms used by @donho on his website
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@mkupper said in WHEN GOOGLE IS POSSESSED BY PROFIT:
It’s ironic that while you advocate free speech that you try to get speech that you don’t agree with shut down.
Copyright protection, and free speech, are two different things, @mkupper . It’s protection of the apps integrity on the one, versus stifling someone’s free speech on the other.
As @notdodgeball points out, there is a process for fan sites to follow, which is also in keeping with fair-use doctrine of copyright laws, so I don’t see a conflict here, of @donho trying to rein in sites that are misleading to possible users. This isn’t a slight to you, I’m just trying to clarify the difference.
There is so much out there to know, that one can’t possibly be a developer and know all the nuances of Google’s preferences as you point out for @donho to fix the icon issue, and also as @notdodgeball points out the copyright requirements of Google, elsewhere in their documentation. Which is why, we have this forum here, to help people find the answer to a large world of options in Notepad++ and how to use it. We can’t all know everything…that’s the providence of our higher power, whatever form that takes. :-)
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It’s ironic that while you advocate free speech that you try to get speech that you don’t agree with shut down.
The mimic website, using a copycat domain name, fails to explicitly disclose its non-affiliation with the official Notepad++. Instead, it strategically diverts traffic from the legitimate Notepad++ site, misleading unsuspecting users into clicking on it and generating profits for the site owners.
Their ploy is remarkably effective - I’ve received numerous inquiries via email and Twitter, questioning whether the suspicious site is indeed the official Notepad++ website.
So let’s be clear: the situation described above has no connection to the concept of free speech.
That site, while peculiar, seems harmless. They are not even running ads.
I guess that you don’t call these “ADs”:
Thank you for your report. I finally find the time to do the news:
https://notepad-plus-plus.org/news/help-to-take-down-parasite-site/I’ll ask users’ help on different social media tomorrow. Time to sleep for me.
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@donho ,
Reported both, https://notepad.plus and also https://notepad-plus.en.softonic.com via the Google search, and the link you just had us follow. Just a note, this is only showing up, so far, on Google, not DuckDuckGo, which is one of the reasons I use that instead of Google the monopoly. :-)
