Over five percent of browser visits to Google owned websites, including Google Search, are altered by computer programs that inject ads into pages. One called Superfish is responsible for a majority of those ad injections.
The findings are the result of
a study by Google and researchers from the University of California at Berkeley and Santa Barbara, who analyzed over 102 million page views to Google sites between June and September last year.
Google added code to its websites that detected and reported back when ads were injected into pages by programs or browser extensions. This revealed that locally installed ad injectors interfered with 5,339,913 page views (5.2 percent of the total), impacting tens of millions of users around the world—or 5.5 percent of unique daily
Internet Protocol addresses that accessed Google’s sites.
