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Viewing Adwords Ads in Different Countries

It’s always good to check your Google Adwords ads in the wild (see how they look in the actual search results), but how do you do it if they are targetting a different country?

Well, the clever folks at Google  have thought of this too and have provided an Ad Preview tool. Just enter your search terma and location/ language details.

You can also do it by editing the URL directly. Add ‘&gl=’ + ISO country code to it, for example:

• http://www.google.com/search?q=it%20services&gl=jp  – Japan
• http://www.google.com/search?q=it%20services&gl=us  – USA
• http://www.google.com/search?q=it%20services&gl=uk  – United Kingdom

Think Point Virus Outbreak

We have just dealt with an outbreak of the Think Point virus for a business in Coventry.

This virus pretends to be anti-spyware software from Microsoft and displays a fake ‘Microsoft Security Essentials’ alert saying that it has detected a trojan. It then proceeds to run a fake scan and asks for credit card information to buy the full version of the software to remove the supposed infection.

Luckily, our client didn’t take it that far despite the convincing nature of the alerts and messages generated by this malware.

We were able to clean up the first infected computer on-site using our remote support software, which minimised the disruption to the client. (These are the most comprehensive removal instructions we found: http://www.bleepingcomputer.com/virus-removal/remove-thinkpoint)

However, other computers required complete re-installation as even the system restore points were infected

Further information about this virus can be found on the Symantec forums.