Search engines pointing WoV to malicious sites

A couple of people on the VPFree Yahoo group say that they tried accessing WoV through a Google search link, and got either malicious site warnings or possible virus attacks (one got the "You're the 50,000th visitor!" popup; another got the "Click Here to load the latest version of Flash Player" one). I tried it myself, with both Bing and Google; both were rejected as malicious by my anti-virus software. Note that typing "www.wizardofvegas.com" directly into the URL bar works fine.

Quote: ThatDonGuy

A couple of people on the VPFree Yahoo group say that they tried accessing WoV through a Google search link, and got either malicious site warnings or possible virus attacks (one got the "You're the 50,000th visitor!" popup; another got the "Click Here to load the latest version of Flash Player" one). I tried it myself, with both Bing and Google; both were rejected as malicious by my anti-virus software. Note that typing "www.wizardofvegas.com" directly into the URL bar works fine.

Thanks for the tip, I’m sure Wizard or I will pass that along to ownership. I’ve actually been having the same problem with several sites that used to not be a problem, so it might be a browser thing. Chrome won’t even attempt to open certain sites. I can’t even go to the 888 site directly.

Quote: ThatDonGuy

A couple of people on the VPFree Yahoo group say that they tried accessing WoV through a Google search link, and got either malicious site warnings or possible virus attacks (one got the "You're the 50,000th visitor!" popup; another got the "Click Here to load the latest version of Flash Player" one). I tried it myself, with both Bing and Google; both were rejected as malicious by my anti-virus software. Note that typing "www.wizardofvegas.com" directly into the URL bar works fine.

Thanks for flagging this.

I can confirm that I'm seeing the same behavior, searching either with google.co.uk or with the search engine duckduckgo.com. If I search for 'wizard of vegas', i see what looks like a totally appropriate set of entries for WOV. The URLs all seem appropriate, such as https://wizardofvegas.com/ ( actually copied that from my search result ) When clicked on from the search page, I get redirected to one of a few malicious sites.

Bringing this to the attention of wizard and zuga.

Similar thing was going on about a week ago:

https://wizardofvegas.com/forum/info/help/34888-i-couldnt-login-to-wizard-of-vegas-7-14/#post774638

Thank you for bringing this to our attention. I don't know what's going on at this time, but we'll get to the bottom of it.

thanks for the heads up guys, we are looking into this

Quote: Zuga

thanks for the heads up guys, we are looking into this

its fixed now

Quote: Zuga

its fixed now

what was the problem?

Google search really jumped the shark. It was better 20 years ago than it is now, IMO. I hate that map-related queries on google.com go to a half-assed version of google maps instead of the full version. I hate that they removed verbatim mode and do very excessive query expansion which makes it really hard to find specific obscure things, which is the whole point of having a search engine. The rankings are still being gamed a lot by SEO link farms. They should use the web history of paid youtubeTV etc subscribers to fix the rankings, since those can't be gamed by bots cost-effectively.