Tip of the iceberg
Great so Microsoft took down one entire advertisement... I wonder if it will last as long as the fake "www.google.com/chrome" advert (that didn't go to www.google.com) ... take one advert down and they just fill in another form.
But ultimately this is just scratching the surface of the issue - when are search engines like google and bing going to deal with all the fake mcafee, office, norton, etc. sites that prey on customers who have just purchased their "we don't believe in friendly CDs anymore, lets see if you're savvy enough to tell the difference between an address bar and a search box" software.
Case in point, type in the mcafee "url" to activate their software into google... you would think that google would be helpful enough to rank the ACTUAL page you searched for at the top... but its actually slightly further down on... err... well... apparently it doesn't feature at all... gee thanks google.
Instead we have 7 out of the first 10 results are scams, all with much better URLS than mcafee bothered to think up.
Bing is no better - their page is covered with adverts and fraudulent pages claiming to be mcafee.
Duckduckgo - maybe a little better in terms of results provided but they display the URLs in light grey so you can't see so easily that the higher ranked mcafeeactivate pages are fraudulent
The big question is however, many of these companies have got UK FREEPHONE numbers - someone, somewhere is actively paying money to have a phone number that you can dial for free, and that number is then linking directly to people who are actively committing fraud on a daily basis... so where are measures in place to report this? Who out there actually cares that crimes are being committed on a daily basis?
Browsers have allowed search engines to hijack their intended purpose - the address bar is hidden out of the way and the search box is prominent.
Did you know that if you accidentally do a google search for a URL and then attempt to type that URL into the address bar, it autocompletes that same url in the address bar for chrome and if you press enter upon seeing it completed, it will take you back to a google search despite showing the full URL in the address bar?
As more and more new users start using computers for the first time without any awareness of the traps that befall them, everything is being stacked up against them - fraudsters are seemingly working in unison with search engines who happily direct customers away from the direct link to the correct page in order to offer spurious search results.
A simple solution would be for search engines to detect when you have searched for a URL and give you that URL link at the very top as the first result.
For sites like mcafee, they are oblivious to their own obvious failure - the url to activate their product redirects to another link unnecessarily, so as far as search engines like google are concerned, there is no website on the correct link. It will never rank on search engines despite it being an exact match for the search.
Sadly this has become the first test that many new computer owners experience and fail on a daily basis. They are the tree that falls in the woods, with no one around to hear.