One of my friends was cribbing about how the quality of Google’s search results seemed to have gone down the toilet lately. Some questions later it was obvious this was not the usual griping about Pagerank. He sent me a screenshot which he said “has junk inserted at the top” (I’ve obscured personal details in this image).

Look at the third result in the screenshot. Unless Pagerank has really been flushed down into the sewer, there’s no way qksrv.net would feature as #3 for a search. Some googling later I found this post dated July 14 –

there appears to be a form of adware that is able to hijack google results and insert ads to make them appear as if they were real results.

The poster goes on to provide this screenshot, in which another well known ad server (click.atdmt.com) features at #1.

I’d love to know what particularly ugly piece of spyware is behind this. So would Google’s lawyers, I’m sure.

Update June 28: CNET’s now got the story. If you think your PC has been troubling you, get a good Spyware remover like Spybot Search and Destroy and see if there are any of these pests on your system. And oh, switching to Mozilla Firefox as your primary browser is strongly recommended.