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Fake news and bad ads are as big a problem as any facing the tech industry, with the likes of Facebook and Google falling victim to malicious actors and state-sponsored campaigns. In a bid to do its part to combat such content, Google has been removing bad ads from the web for the past few years now, and 2017 saw the company pull more than 3.2 billion. 

That figure nearly doubles what Google managed in 2016 at 1.7 billion. This means that the company's methods of bad ad identification and removal have been enhanced, but also that there are even more bad ads out there than initially anticipated. 

A further breakdown of the numbers saw Google remove 320 000 ad publishers, blacklist 90 000 websites and withdraw ads from roughly two million web pages per day during 2017. Along with websites posting fake content, Google also cracked down on those which copied news articles, uncovering an estimated 12 000 sites in the process.  

Whether or not Google has made a dent on the number of bad ads, fake news sites and malicious material on the web remains to be seen, as the company has no real way of knowing just how much such content is out there.