Last week I discovered the top ad for bestbuy.com also went to a scam site, tested on multiple PCs in and outside our network environment. I reported it to @bestbuy who confirmed the issue and reported it. In the exact same case, the green link claimed the URL went to bestbuy.com and everything.

From what I can gather, Google actually lets their ad customers lie about URL destinations on their ads so that they can use tracking links and such, and apparently isn't really doing anything to validate that the destination URL is ever actually reached.

Google Ads should be considered harmful, at least until they can guarantee the destination of their ads will match the destination Google Search shows users they are going to.

What I don't understand is how it's possible to be the number one ad for the search term "youtube.com" ? You would think that Google would ALWAYS be first in that case.

Google may not feel like it needs to pay itself for ad space there, being the top result. Though according to a WSJ article last week, Google products come up as the top ad result in 91% of searches involving product types Google or it's subsidiaries makes: http://www.wsj.com/articles/google-uses-its-search-engine-to...

Presumably though, since it's paying itself, Google can afford to outbid anyone on any ad term on their network.

It's actually a little surprising they allow ads on the term at all, actually. For instance, while "Windows support" results are filled with malicious ads at the top, Google has no ads whatsoever for search terms like "Chromebook support". Google actively disables advertising on terms that help their business, and Google does not seem to discourage malware sites on terms that predominantly affect Windows users, for instance.

This is happening to me logged in as well.