In a blogpost titled "How we fought bad ads, sites and scammers in 2016", Google revealed that it removed around eighty million ads for "deceiving, misleading and shocking users" this year. In total, the company took down around 1.7 billion ads that violated advertising policies. To illustrate its technology's speed, Google said that spending one second to remove one ad would take fifty years.
The tech giant wrote, in the blogpost, that although ads play an important role in ensuring the user has access to accurate, quality information online, they can also ruin the online experience for users by promoting illegal products and unrealistic offers. "They can trick people into sharing personal information and infect devices with harmful software." Therefore, such bad ads pose a threat to users, Google's partners, and the sustainability of the open web itself.
With a strict set of policies around ads and a team of engineers, policy experts, product managers and others, Google took down more than double the amount of bad ads in the year 2016 than they took down in 2015.
Last year, Google did two key things to take down more bad ads, as mentioned in the blog.
Besides bad ads, Google also took action against the bad sites in 2016 that committed common policy violations that include: