Here's How Many Bad Ads Google Purged From The Web Last Year

Bad advertising is the scourge of the internet. Though it is a Sisyphean task, Google, along with the rest of the tech industry, has been working on reducing it. 

Google announced Wednesday the company removed 3.2 billion bad ads in 2017. That's almost twice as many in 2016, where the tech giant pulled 1.7 billion of these less-than-savory advertisements.

Google also removed 320,000 ad publishers and permanently banned 90,000 websites. There was also a small section of ad publishers removed for "misrepresentative content" such as fake news or scams, Engadget reported.

So, what makes these bad ads so bad? About 79 million of them were shut down for redirecting users to malware sites. Another 66 million got booted for being a "trick to click" scheme, meaning they were disguised as other things besides an ad. Google also yanked 48 million ads for pressuring people to download unwanted software.

There was also a small section of ad publishers removed for misrepresenting content. 

In February, Google also introduced a feature for Chrome that will automatically filter out ads that meet the criteria for an annoying ad experience, according to the Coalition for Better Ads.

So what will the rest of 2018 hold for Google? Probably more terrible ads.