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Can we do anything about Google Sponsored ads ?
Added by ask low about 1 year ago
There are ways to circumvent these ads by using FOSS meta engines like searxng, which I often use regularly. I'm trying to explore the google's search engine itself, trying to strip out their sponsored ads that listed as the top 4 links.
Unfortunately, nothing seemed to work around.
You would have to modify the HTML the page sends you.
Wouldn't those page results come under requests? I thought filter lists supposed to block them.
Probably, although they might be included with the same requests that include the non-sponsored results. You could take a look at the requests and see if you can identify some distinction that would allow them to be blocked by EasyList or UltraList.
That is the tricky thing with ad blocking. If the ad is served in some different way than the main page content then it can be fairly easy to block. But if the ad is served together with the page content then it becomes much more tricky.
This is very strange. I've been refreshing the google search results multiple times to see what happens.
Turns out that it hides the sponsor pages once on every 5 refreshes. Then brings back again. This behaviour didn't change with any configuration of filters, js, 3p cookies, etc.
I think google serves ads within the page content, just like sponsor segments in YouTube.
I'm coming to understand that there's no use of filters in situations like this. Caz majority of 1st party level filtering is already handled by dns provider adguard. Outside this, either ublock origin, or nothing. Which seems like a fair usecase, as I'm saving CPU cycles.
