Chromium Blog – Under the hood: How Chrome’s ad filtering works – While most advertising on the web is respectful of user experience, over the years we’ve increasingly heard from our users that some advertising can be particularly intrusive. As we announced last June, Chrome will tackle this issue by removing ads from sites that do not follow the Better Ads Standards. We’ve previously discussed some of the details surrounding how Chrome protects users from intrusive ads, but as we approach the launch date of February 15, we wanted to go under the hood and discuss how this feature works in more detail. What are the Better Ads Standards? The Better Ads Standards are the result of public consumer research by the Coalition for Better Ads, an industry group focused on improving users’ experience with online advertising. Over 40,000 internet users in North America and Europe participated in surveys where they were shown common ad experiences and asked to evaluate how intrusive the experiences were. The most intrusive ad experiences include prestitial ads (those full-page ads that block you from seeing the content on the page) and flashing animated ads. More details about the research and methodology can be found on the Coalition’s website. Although a few of the ad experiences that violate the Better Ads Standards are problems in the advertisement itself, the majority of problematic ad experiences are controlled by the site owner — such as high ad density or prestitial ads with countdown. This result led to the approach Chrome takes to protect users from many of the intrusive ad experiences identified by the Better Ads Standards: evaluate how well sites comply with the Better Ads Standards, inform sites of any issues encountered, provide the opportunity for sites to address identified issues, and remove ads from sites that continue to maintain a problematic ads experience…”