Is it just me, or has anyone else noticed that the "goooooogle" adwords are showing up almost everywhere?

It seems like almost everyone has decided to put adwords on their websites, in the hope of earning some extra cash.

Of course, I find these (and other) embedded ads very irritating and distracting. I'm sure I'm not the only one that has gone to some heavily advertised websites, and not know where to click... it seems like most ads on the page take you to other sites, with your click paying someone.

A quick search on the internet turns up a lot of popup ad blockers, but very little is said about the ads that are built-in to web pages.

Well, I have found a quite effective way to stop them from appearing, which also makes many web pages much more readable.

The answer I have found, is in a browser called Maxthon ( http://www.maxthon.com ).

Although many people look at maxthon as a minor competitor to IE, Opera & Firefox, I see it more as an overlay for Internet Explorer, which gives IE a lot more functionality, with virtually none of the incompatibilities of a non-IE browser.

The reason is that under the covers, Maxthon is actually Internet Explorer, but it has tabbed browsing, RSS support, supports skins & plugins, and most importantly: it can remove popup and inline adverts using a feature called adhunter.

Adhunter has a host of pre-configured filters that can block the vast majority of ads.

The types of ads blocked by adhunter fall into 6 categories:

1) The popup blacklist (uses a configurable builtin list of keywords used by adverts)
2) Auto popup blocker (blocks auto popups, unless specifically allowed)
3) Web ads blocker (also known as the content filter). Blocks ads builtin to a webpage, eg: google adwords
4) Web dialog blocker (blocks web dialogs... this also stops a lot of legitimate stuff)
5) Float ad blocker (blocks those annoying ads that float on top of the page you want to view)
6) ActiveX blocker (blocks ads that use activeX to display windows).

I usually enable the first 3 categories, but I also configure the "whitelist" or exceptions list, so that adhunter doesn't block any "https" pages, and any other sites that I am familiar with (eg my exceptions list for the content filter looks something like this:

https://* http://www.ourbrisbane.com/*

This will allow ads from all https sites & everything within the www.ourbrisbane.com domain.

Of course any site that doesn't look right, might need to be added to the exception list.

Likewise any ads & popups that are not caught by the default filters can quickly be added by typing CTRL-Q

For all those annoying flash adverts, Maxthon ships with an external "plugin" that allows you to block or save flash ads/images. This is a slightly more manual way that the bult-in adhunter filters, but works well with sites that you visit regularly.

If anyone in the Brisbane area needs assistance with setting-up Maxthon, please take a look at: http://www.ComputerAid.net.au