Another thing that scammers exploit is peoples’ search results. When you search the internet for something, the bad guys are trying to predict what your’e looking for. If they can game the system well enough, they rise to the top of certain search results so that you’ll encounter their poisonous websites during your searches.

So how do you protect against this? An easy way is to install an extension in your browser that will filter or rate your search results. There are many free helper programs that you can set and forget for this purpose.

The easiest one that comes to mind is Bitdefender Trafficlight. After you add this to your browser, it will block most fraudulent websites as you search, AND it will put a ratings marker next to all of your search results. A green checkmark means it is a safe enough website to visit. But a yellow or red warning marker means you should avoid that item.

https://www.bitdefender.com/solutions/trafficlight.html

I like Bitdefender Trafficlight, because it works with all search engines and changes very little on your computer. But there are others like it out there, with similar protection. Norton Safe Search and DuckDuckGo also have browser extensions you can try out. Just understand that they will change your default search engine to theirs as you install them.