TLDR: Scammers cloned a restaurant website. Amex gave them a merchant account despite fake address and fake phone number. Google let them advertise the fake restaurant despite none of the data matching Google's knowledge box.
And I just love the quote, here in context:
"Doug @Rushkoff says that the ethic of today's "entrepreneur" is to #GoMeta - don't provide a product or a service, simply find a way to be a predatory squatter on a chokepoint between people who do useful things and people who use those things."
I am pretty sure that doctorow how has a better imagination than to believe that "Holy shit do we live in the worst of all possible timelines."
We actually live in a pretty good timeline when we complain about ordering Thai food over the internet and the worst that happens is we get our food delivered with some trouble.
Wait what? You don't seem to realize the Cyberpunk dystopia we are living in? Yes it is amazing that we can order online! But having a company that is a near monopoly search and decides what is 'true' benefits by an otiose 15% markup that steals from the local economy is not! These are two different things...
It is amazing that I can watch videos on youtube for free but it is not awesome that they freely present alcohol ads to alcoholics and it is near impossible to get rid of them unless you are savvy enough to block them and/or pay for youtube premium. It is not okay to have predatory get-rich-quick-schemes categorized in the ads for creators that they can opt out of. It is nice that creators have that option not to advertise something that is designed pray upon vulnerable people, but what the fuck.... if youtube categorize the ads then they should be able to say no to them wholesale and not benefit from that. There are videos get-rich-quick-schemes uploaded that you need to search for that is another ballgame, it is easier to report them and having them removed because they are not giving them money.
It really seems to be true. I believe Doctorow now has a book called "Chokepoint Capitalism". Is it not true that so-called "tech" companies operate as chokepoints on the web. No matter what "services" they purport to provide, usually for "free", they will never get out of the way. They are always surveilling others for profit.
How is it legal?
If you mislead a customer by assuming an identity that is not yours, how is this not identity theft? (not legal)
The fraudsters' website says "Kiin Thai eatery - Official Website".
Anyways that is for a judge to decide.
Aside from "Official website" they are offering the product from the company that sells it, not a knock off.
I could sell Armani, and buy from their site, I'd be an unofficial reseller.
The point in general (slight change of position here) is that had they not stated "official", reselling is perfectly fine. As you point out trademark infringing (representing yourself as them by saying official) is not.
"Besides from the identity fraud, how is this illegal?"
The identity fraud is core to the product. Had they not registered a domain that made them sound official and said that they were the other company, nobody would get confused and think they're ordering from the actual company.
Armani will tear you up if you set up "armani-losangeles.com" and pretend that you're Armani, even if you don't mention "Official Website".
Who cares if it's legal or illegal. We don't have these discussions to let the law be the arbiter of morality, we have these discussions to get to the bottom of what the law ought to be, or at the very least, how we as individuals are going to respond to this kind of stuff.
Personally I'm going to continue to block ads on the advice of the FBI regardless what some other people say about it, I'm going to continue to refuse to use third party delivery services, and I'm going to continue to refuse to use any third party rating or aggregator service for local businesses. And also I'm going to continue aggressively avoiding Google products and services.
> Perhaps not being morally right is something to have outrage about.
Well, evidently, it doesn't outrage you.
But my impression was the rage was more directed at Google and Amex, who were in a position to easily prevent the fraud but instead choose to benefit from it.
The one party who cannot do anything about it (except cancelling orders and calling their customers until the fraud stops) is the original restaurant.
In this instance isn't Google guilty of fraud? They put on their website something that defrauds, it being called "search" makes no difference IMHO.
Isn't there in the US a small claims court for the restaurant to seek takedown and compensation for damages?
It will likely be harder than you think to find them. KYC is a joke, a regulatory checkbox that must be ticked to not get in trouble with federal authorities.
You don't need to enforce KYC or a particular verification method by law. Merely making the ad platform liable for any illegal content they get paid to host/serve will make the market resolve the problem immediately.
No, the person creating the fake ad is guilty of fraud. Google is guilty of not verifying it enough.
Same as Apple/Google aren't guilty of creating malware apps then it slips through, but the predatory ass who coded the app and published it is. Same as Walmart isn't guilty of poisoning people when they stock a product that's spoiled in production, but merely failing to verify proper credentials set up by regulators.
I don't know why so many people here and elsewere refuse to hold people creating predatory/fradulent companies accountable , but instead demand that megacorporations control access to your products instead. Which they repeatedly fail and and exploit to enrich themselves at your expense.
I don't follow - you say "Google is guilty of not verifying it enough", then you turn around and say it's bad that people "demand that megacorporations control access to your products". Which is it?
Compare to food: it's like demanding that Walmart screen all the food itself to protect you and then you'd screech at Walmart and only Walmart for not making sure Keloggs cereal is healthy while letting the manufacturer off the hook with zero (I repeat, zero, none, null, NADA) consequences for fraud and damage they caused.
The way media, HNers and other people behave is creating a situation that's terrible to the extreme.
Now, do a thinking experiment: how did we ensure product quality in food/electronics/other parts that DID NOT hang on the fact that Walmart has 100% monopoly on all sales of those products and completely locks out you ability to go to any other store? How did we build a system that holds manufacturer of fradulent good accountable, not the megacorporation doing the distribution?
Except Walmart has to follow certain standards to ensure the products it sells are legitimate. If they'd literally just accept products from random unmarked vans and put them up for sale, they'd be very much on the line if those products end up being unsafe.
Likewise you can't just sell stolen goods even if you don't know they're stolen. They'll be confiscated at best and you'll be charged for fencing stolen goods at worst.
Exactly. Where are those standards for software and content?
Remember that we punish the companies that build products against standards first, not just Walmart for stocking them. We also don't trust exclusively just Walmart to set and enforce food safety standards (because that would be problematic for competition wouldn't it)? We have independent standard bodies.
And right know we have NOTHING to beat Google (or Apple or anyone) on the head with because there's no standard or rule they've ignored when they allowed this ad to be published.
That's my point. Google can just take money from any random entity and let them run fraudulent ads and the worst that will happen is they have to shut down the ads and get to pocket the unspent money.
I love these analogies to retail markets, but one major difference keeps digital goods from behaving the same way: spoiled food is easy to identify by customers and changes their behavior, incentivizing the quality controls we have today.
Spoiled advertisements/news programs/blog spam are not easy to identify by _todays_ customers, and thus do not incentivize quality controls. I think the solution to todays attention problem is to meet the problem on the same battlefield; attention! If anyone has a clever idea to marry people w/o situational awareness to a flywheel that creates situational awareness lmk.
> Same as Apple/Google aren't guilty of creating malware apps then it slips through, but the predatory ass who coded the app and published it is.
People certainly can point the finger, for them to share some accountability, because Apple/Google are debatably suppressing competition. If people must use their store or search engine, then become victims of fraud, they are going to question how such got through their filtering systems and why can't they have other alternatives. It's one thing, if on an open system, the user chose a shady app on some odd corner of the web and it's another if the app is put in front of their face.
I couldn’t agree with you less. Enabling fraud and turning a blind eye is as bad as the fraud itself, if not worse. There’s a reason we have laws about being an “accessory to…” stuff right?
It certainly sounds like a blatant case of trademark infringement. The scammers are trading under the name of the legitimate restaurant in order to defraud their customers. Sounds like the most blatant case of trademark infringement I've heard of in a long time.
Some percentage of the profit from advertising frauds and scams goes towards "lobbying" and "political donations" so that they may continue to freely profit from advertising frauds scams.
The most surprising thing about this is that someone as internet-savvy as Doctorow doesn't just skip over the ads but instead clicks on them. That's just asking for trouble.
> How does this logic work for victims of other crimes and misdemeanours?
If a security expert has "password123" as their password for all services, everyone would be surprised unless he had been previously identified as a fool.
That someone tech-savvy doesn't use an adblocker is surprising to me, too.
Happens to me, occasionally, and I’m as smart/cynical as they come.
It’s embarrassing, but I have managed to avoid being really ripped off. The worst one, was many years ago, when I responded to a “your domain name is available” email.
I got the domain, eventually, but I probably paid double its worth, and had to get into an e-shouting match with the scammers, who were trying to lease me the name, as opposed to sell it to me (they do this, so they can quadruple the cost, as soon as you set up some infrastructure on the name).
They gave it to me, in the end, because I made it clear that I was gonna be one hell of a PItA to keep as a “customer.”
I think you're missing the point: a journalist with an interest in internet things and "chokepoint capitalism" comes across an everyday example of these, and writes about it, using his experience as a starting point, is not a surprising outcome at all.
Of course he's savvy, that's how he's placed to explain it to less savvy people.
Of course he could just avoid it. You or I might (with a 98% success rate maybe), and then get on with our internet-savvy day job. But doing this is his internet-savvy day job. And good that it is someone's.
Google very intentionally made ads to look like a part of the search results. The reason why we know this is intentional is because it wasn't always like that.
It's important for us tech-savvy folks to be reminded of the jungle that exists out there beyond the technological walls of safety that our hard earned knowledge has afforded us.
And that those of least means all live outside those walls.
Calling out a megacorporation for not defending your rights is oxymoronic by the extreme. You didn't stop other products from killing people by asking Walmart nicely to make sure it's safe.
Isn't there a small thing called "regulators" for this? Or is US government now so fundamentally broken that it can't even provide its basic function anymore and has to be replaced by "pretty-please" appeals to megacorporations?
It's broken by design. AKA regulatory capture by business. Ever since America made corruption (paying money to politicians) legal it's just been downhill. Enjoy!
Regulatory capture has nothing to do with corruption. Regulatory capture is when businesses benefit from complex regulation because the competitive moat that the regulation gives them is more valuable than the cost (so high that only huge companies can afford it) to comply. Large businesses like moats and regulators like to regulate. No coordination required. Actual corruption, at least in the US, is much less common.
> Isn't there a small thing called "regulators" for this? Or is the US...
The latter, partly.
But a bigger problem is that actually-functional government is no longer part of the worldview of most of the public. Ditto for serious consequences for the responsible elected officials, when government fails at its basic functions.
Without those things, it is really not possible to sustain a high-functioning government.
Nevermind that if you are relying primarily on agents of the state to prevent fraud, your society is already fundamentally broken.
The state enforcing laws using the threat of violence (the only enforcement mechanism they have) is a last resort, not a first. Institutions having the desire to not create a broken world should be the first line of defense.
Google doesn't give a fuck anymore, and are fine watching the world burn now. I personally speculate that most Googlers today are simply there for the paycheck, and their apathy about the way their products work reflects that.
Okay. Society is fundamentally broken. Our "last resort" seems to be completely dysfunctional. And the institutions you want as the first line of defense mostly don't exist.
>Nevermind that if you are relying primarily on agents of the state to prevent fraud, your society is already fundamentally broken.
Huh? Why's this? It seems like a core component of a functional state to me, and if the state is doing a decent job, why should a bunch of private parties be sticking their noses in too?
The same argument comes up in atheism-- "if you don't believe in [eternal damnation], what stops you from just killing people indiscriminately?" It reflects the sad state of the asker's moral compass.
Same with Catholics and confession-- another broken system in which you are free to sin arbitrarily through confession and repentance. The point of the doctrine itself is to transcend the cycle and be better than that. (I know little about it but I'm told there is a similar mechanism in Hinduism re: karma.)
Fear of god/state/consequence keeps people in line, but it's a failsafe, not the governor. The only thing preventing fraud in your tribe should not be the intangible threat of later consequence from a greater authority. You're supposed to respect each other enough to not prey on your own kind.
Another take is looking at crimes like CSA. The state punishes it when it is brought to their attention, but that does not absolve the community from necessarily participating in its policing ahead of that-- the community are the ones best positioned to detect, intervene, and enforce social norms around it in the first place.
> The only thing preventing fraud in your tribe should not be the intangible threat of later consequence from a greater authority. You're supposed to respect each other enough to not prey on your own kind.
This moral argument may be applicable to individual people, but this is yet another example that companies under the current system (and, by extension, their governing bodies) only have one goal: maximizing profits.
In the abscence of fear of punishment by a more powerful actor, if the common good gets in the way of profits, the latter will always prevail.
Yeah... but replacing it with a corporation that doesn't even pretend to have an incentive to help you (especially when its monopolistic in their field like Google/Apple/Microsoft are) doesn't make things better. You can't even vote.
More importantly, it makes them irreplaceable since competing products from smaller companies simply cannot afford policing at such level while the bad actors are running around unpunished.
Quite true. But a huge number of people seem to believe in the mega-corporate "government is the problem" capitalist dystopia. Where you can - at most - vote your purchasing dollars for corporations which have managed to convince you that they are somewhat less evil.
So long as the people believe that their only choice is "which king will rule over us?", their society will remain a monarchy.
How is this different to what the real estate agents do?
If you try to sell property on your own, you'll get many unsolicited offers from real estate agents, sometimes claiming they already have a buyer and sometimes this is even true.
Totally different. If an agent is actually an agent, it isn't fraud. If an agent legitimately has a buyer lined up already, depending on the market, it's likely worth the 3%.
My questions surround: where's the (society saving) "parasite lawyers" going to town in a shark frenzy eating these criminals business models? It is not as if these small business fraud scams are not omnipresent in modern society... why are not attorneys making bank and DA's making headlines shutting these clear and obvious public criminals down?
Because Google and the other ad networks have successfully convinced everyone in power that they aren’t the scammers, and that the people paying for the ads are. Those people are tiny fly-by-night operators with nothing to lose (and not worth anyone going after).
AGs and DAs don't care about small-scale scams and ripoffs and cheats, generally aren't equipped to investigate them, and if the party committing fraud is in another country are likely to throw up their hands and say "not in my jurisdiction."
This will stop with tough legislation and penalties that force Google to give up a percentage of its annual revenue. It will never happen in the United States.
Yes agree with that which is exactly what the second half of my post is about. Google should not be advertising competitors when you directly search for someone. If you search for Thai restaurant then yes. But not for a specific business. And only legitimate verified businesses which are not fronts for this behaviour.
But really, is the famous Doctorow not using an ad blocker in 2023?
I saw this exact same thing happen locally. We have a Ramen restaurant whose squatter website opened before they got their own website up and running, and its SEO is better, too.
I’m just amazed Cory Doctorow of all people doesn’t use uBlock and got duped by this. I’ve always seen Google Ads as about as reliable as the fake download buttons on crappy file websites. You tune them out or block them.
I'm sure he personally does use it, but that doesn't stop him from highlighting these issues and talking about it. That's what he's been all about for years now.
Also it could have been a friend or family member finding it first. I use browser based adblockers on all my devices. My partner doesn't always. Luckily I have Pi-hole setup to at least block these links on my home network.
This has happened to bycicle owners. If you don't lock your bike it's your fault your bike gets stolen. But theft is illegal. Theft is if someone wants to take something that doesn't belong to him and then executes the taking. Locks don't change this fact. It just makes the execution of the crime more difficult.
I have a vision of an utopia where people can leave all things unlocked. If they get stolen, the thief gets identified immediately and he has to give the things back. No punishment at all or only a token punishment. This should work because sanctions are not neccessary if no harm was done. Today we punish caught thieves somewhat harshly because we need to deter people from becoming thieves. If we can stop thefts just after the fact, token punishment will suffice. If someone repeatedly tries to steal things in that utopia we could offer therapy or try to find out the underlying cause of the attempted thefts. That's utopia: everything works out perfectly for everybody (shrugs).
Today we lock our browsing experience using uBlock just because we have to. We also have to lock our bikes, because we have to. Sorry for the tangent.
To catch all bicycle thieves, everywhere, at all times, would require 24/7 worldwide surveillance of every square meter on Earth. Do you really desire this?
This is an utopia and the definition of utopia is that this is not a problem. This might be because this surveillance is benevolent. Another way could be that everybody has the tools to do this surveillance themselves in a beneficial way for everybody.
I gave some examples why this would not be a problem.
One advantage of visions of utopias: they give ideas for a better world and also it shows what-if perspectives: what if we really could catch thieves in a beneficial way and help them? what if there is a business opportunity because there's a need to be fulfilled?
I think the point isn’t that you (or Cory Doctorow) has to use ublock to prevent fraud, only that one would expect such users to block ads qua ads and accidentally benefit from the fraud protection.
Plot twist: Cory Doctorow gets paid by the restaurant to promote them. He then made the fake website and bought the Google ads in order to concoct this outrage story to go viral.
I mean, if this is a "great Thai restaurant in my neighborhood", how likely is it he ordered there yesterday for the first time?
Do you have perfect recall of every restaurant's website? Even if you do, surely one of them changed their site at some point.
You're probably joking, but even if you do order from a place a couple times a year it can be hard to tell which site is theirs. A local restaurant for me at one point had two different websites, each featured different indoor pictures of the location and their food. I never knew if I should use the new one or the old one, with the problem being solved when they retired and the new owners renamed the place.
But uBlock doesn't absolve Google of their responsibility. Google is allowing the fake ads on their platforms, which are doing harm. Furthermore, Google is often picking and choosing who is "allowed", relative to the money, and their opaque internal filtering and policies. These "bad ads" are partially making it through, because Google is getting paid, so they can share some of the accountability for widespread fraud and damage.
The billing descriptor issue doesn’t seem like a KYC violation or Amex failure to me.
Instead of using a static descriptor “Parasitic Middleman, LLC”, they send a dynamic descriptor for each transaction to tell the user “KIINTHAILA: OK, that was my Thai order; yeah, that was me”. It’s no different than when you see an order number on your statement or other dynamic text.
I don’t approve of the business practice (and take care to avoid it with my local takeout places), but I don’t think it’s an Amex failure here.
> just following in the shoes of DoorDash and Uber Eats
Typical error of his, going "A Bridge Too Far". He points out something interesting and important to lure you in and then hand-gestures grandly toward an industry/practice that he feels we should all question. Because, you know, brilliant genius Cory Doctorow.
Uber and DoorDash did exactly the same thing as what you somehow find “interesting and important” when done by someone else, but you don’t care. Because, you know, brilliant disruption tech? Or what?
I find it absolutely hilarious that you're doing the exact thing you're railing against in two sentences flat.
Also, I'll give you that he does hand-gesture grandly in this Twitter thread, but he co-wrote a whole book about it called Chokepoint Capitalism. There's a lot more detail about it there, and the logic there applies here.
Simple legislative fix: entitle the victim (small business) to quickly and easily claim a trademark infringement on an ad, and claw back 100% of Google's revenue on that ad. And let Google be civilly liable, if they choose to contest such a trademark claim and they're in the wrong.
Inspired by YouTube's DMCA claim system (or my superficial understanding of it). If there's a "bug bounty" on fraud, there will be an enthusiastic market for identifying it. If ad fraud doesn't reliably pay, the fraud market will be disincentivized. Finally, Google itself will have incentives less mis-aligned with its users'; its current incentive system being "the fraudsters pay us more; therefore we love fraud!"
Any chance you have model legislation (for me to use)?
Two years ago, I got fluffed up about scammers claiming unclaimed businesses. Like the food delivery startups (like Doctorow mentions).
I started talking to my reps (city council, state) but haven't gotten any further. And I don't know where to start drafting the legislation.
With some sort of resolution or model legislation, I can shop it around, get the ball rolling. Like chamber of commerce, some scammed businesses, my representatives.
This is already illegal. Mom and Pop businesses don't have the resourced to wage legal battles and in the time it would take to get an injunction, the scam has more than paid for itself. The solution here is for Amex and Google to do their jobs properly.
How is it a solution to say that successful businesses should voluntarily shave their profits? Why do we look to these disreputable actors to reform themselves?
If a real and thorny problem seems to have a trivial answer.. there's a good chance the trivial answer is incorrect.
Amazon has a system like this, where you can "claim" listings. It's how scam products get all those five star reviews for some other profuct. They find a t-shirt or some little thing doing well and file claim after claim until they win the listing.
> If a real and thorny problem seems to have a trivial answer.. there's a good chance the trivial answer is incorrect.
Two of my favorite H. L. Mencken quotes:
"There's always an easy solution to every human problem; Neat, plausible and wrong."
"The fact that I have no remedy for all the sorrows of the world is no reason for my accepting yours. It simply supports the strong probability that yours is a fake."
And this one:
"Any proposal must be viewed as follows. Do not pay overly much attention to the benefits that might be delivered were the law in question to be properly enforced, rather one needs to consider the harm done by the improper enforcement of this particular piece of legislation, whatever it might be."
Why ironic? Honest question. I do not know enough about the career of LBJ to get it. My understanding is that he was an extremely effective legislator. A bit of a bastard, but very effective.
Some of the legislation he pushed through, mostly in the Great Society program, could be poster children for "the harm done by the improper enforcement of this particular piece of legislation".
Public policy affects millions of lives. I don't think enumerating 1st order or 2nd order effects is too onerous. And if it is, that's why government officials have assistants and interns.
Unless you have a magic wand, simplicity usually masks conflicting incentives backed by lots of political, financial, and legal capital. It's like looking at a war and saying 'why don't people just stop fighting, because peace would be nicer.'
The social default is to look at problems as examples of individual deviance from a principled ideal. It's more instructive to look at them as examples of resource mobilization in contested/conflicted spaces. The italicized words are terms of art in social science that represent two prominent schools of thought (which are themselves in competition).
The DMCA shields content providers from copyright liability. What you’re probably thinking of is YouTube’s voluntary ContentID system and related policies that they started doing to make Viacom happy. It doesn’t really have anything to do with the DMCA.
Broadly speaking, when someone infringes trademark, they are entitled to the damages done, which are likely much greater than the ad revenue here.
The answer from Google's point of view is for the Thai restaurant to pay more for the advert so they are at the top of the rankings.
When Google stopped putting a meaningful distinction between paid results and organic results that was a line for me. It's fine to have an adverts - you have to pay the bills but when the adverts become the results it's just pay to play rentseeking by Google and the product is now untrustworthy and on a downward spiral as a result. Amazon search results have taken a similar route, you can search for something specific and get something totally unsuitable as top result now.
Exactly. Google results can't be trusted, because it's clear they are very manipulated, based on their cut of profits and siphoned data that's used for user targeting. It has reached the point of being suspect, significantly detrimental, and increasingly criminal. And an argument can be made that they are actively suppressing competition, so that useful alternatives are not viable.
It has always boggled my mind that you're even allowed to publish ads targeting other companies brand names as keywords without being the verified owner of that company.
But I understand Google here. It's probably their single biggest income stream. Our company is using a very big chunk of our ad words budget targeting our own brand name to make sure it's on top. More than for any other keyword by far. And I imagine many others do the same.
Google are enabling fraud on a massive scale by permitting the hijacking of established names and brands. Often brands or names that some small family company has worked for years to build a reputation for.
We do indeed live in a world where tech and capitalism have birthed some sort of horrific offspring that’s choking us all.
But that's only part of it. Google will also happily serve up ads for fake bank websites that will steal your credentials. Google will happily serve up ads for a lot of malicious content on the Internet.
Google are not only making it worse because of advertising, they're making it worse by facilitating scammers and fraudsters and various other criminals.
All because their systems are so automated as to eschew any review that might actually make advertising on the Internet slightly less distasteful (and maybe the FBI wouldn't be recommending the choking off of Google's primary income stream)
I don't think sex bad is a Google problem as much the US problem. After all, it's not just ads and it's not just Google.
People in the US have this puritanical view on sex -> it is inherited by Silicon Valley -> it gets forced onto the rest of us.
Since the rest of us are forced to rely on US-based products in some capacity (app stores, payment processors, CDNs...), you can't make anything sex-related even in places where sex work is viewed far more openly than in the US.
Let me correct that for you - the systems are automated to provide plausible deniability, just like with the recent Hertz scandal. As soon as you admit there may be a problem with the automation the door is cracked open to admit a lawsuit in. It's the equivalent of "computer says", and the legal system is greased to permit such abuse.
The US doesn't have a smalltime corruption problem, you don't bribe your local cop, it has a bigmoney corruption problem as seen (again) here.
> Our company is using a very big chunk of our ad words budget targeting our own brand name to make sure it's on top.
You shouldn't need to do this. Googles ad auction on search multiplies your bid by a quality score when deciding which ad to show. A site that satisfies what the user is looking for will have a high quality score, whereas the 'wrong' site (ie. one for a competitor) will have a low quality score - partly determined by the user clicking the back button when they find they have been misled.
That means that if your competitors are pumping $100 into becoming the top search result, you perhaps only need to put $1 into getting the same ad spot.
If you are finding that not to be true, then it might be because your site is low quality for some reason (for example, maybe it doesn't load for some users in some browsers), or maybe your site doesn't have the info people are looking for when they search your company name.
This doesn't seem to work very well at all.
I frequently search for a particular vendor of something by name only to be served another similar vendor as the top result.
It feels like it should be doable to serve these results in some sort of "you may also like these similar vendors" box or something like that which would massively improve the user experience
It doesn't work if the real company isn't an advertiser, or if they are an advertiser but aren't in this auction due to their targeting rules or being out of budget.
For a while I'd bid on the names of competitors (Not being scammy - just trying to win the #1 result placement); however, I found I was spending a bunch with basically zero conversions because - I assume, if someone is searching for something, they're expecting that something, so when they click it and realize it's not - they just exit.
The same rules that allow scammers to look like a legit result allow smaller firms to compete with the Best Buys and Targets of the world by advertising their local outfits on searches for "Best Buy" and "Target." Without that allowance, organic search degenerates into a winner-take-all system and one of two things happens: (a) small places are just locked out of search traffic, (b) they invest that money in SEO instead of ads and the organic results get worse as people try and trick Google into thinking their site is Best Buy or Target.
There should be a solution to the problem of the scammers. Banning advertising being allowed to show up on someone else's organic search results ain't it.
It may not be their biggest revenue stream, but I'll bet it's critical to Google for another reason. Advertising is somewhat zero sum. You can invent a more effective way to advertise, but the total dollars that a business will spend on advertising will remain the same, just through the new channel. So how do you increase revenue once you have captured the market? Make businesses spend to defend their own brand against imposters. This is something that didn't even exist prior to online advertising and could get businesses to actually increase their ad spend over what they would have previously. The internet is becoming more dystopian every day.
I disagree that it’s a scam to advertise over someone else’s name as long as it’s clear and you’re not trying to confuse the user. I’ve found better alternatives than what I was looking for through competitor ads. I’ve had this happen on Google and the App Store and I appreciate it.
It gives newer, or less well-known, companies a chance to gain exposure. And consumers like me might learn about a superior option they didn’t know previously.
Edit: Thought experiment. Over in the Figma thread there’s a lot of talk about trying to ween themselves and others off Adobe products. So is it really a negative for the industry and consumers if Figma shows ads on searches for Photoshop?
Yea, I think it should be allowed to advertise in another brand, but it should draw heightened scrutiny.
If the ad at all appears to originate from the company that is the target of the ad keyword it should be rejected or require verification that it’s from the company.
Google could even charge a $10 “review fee” for ads placed directly on competitors keywords (per ad treatment, not per ad treatment per keyword) to discourage this behavior from scammers
> is it really a negative for the industry and consumers if Figma shows ads on searches for Photoshop?
Yes, because Google's intended and actual outcome is companies are blackmailed into paying to compete on advertising for their own names. Which is highly likely a navigation query.
It would be different if someone googled "photoshop alternatives" or sth
In Google maps, the top result for a locksmith in my city is a company that doesn't actually exist.
The company has no website, just a toll-free number. The business name doesn't match anything in the state records. If you zoom in, the address given is literally in some kind of alley. The business has 4.5 stars and all of the reviews are in vague, broken English that never contain any details about the service or why they needed it.
My guess is that when you call them, they take your info and then call a real locksmith in the area and pocket the difference.
TL;DW: this is widespread in most cities in Canada. Scammers just setup fake businesses on google to have your nearest locksmith be some generic chain.
Almost all Google search for businesses are "scam". If you search for locksmith, plumber, heating and cooling, lawn, mechanic. It's all fronts often in eastern europe masking like local business and taking a hefty cut.
Think about it. Pushing a fake restaurant to number 1 is not that hard. No real people eat at it and so no real person writes a less-than-five-star review. Real restaurants have off nights. Or maybe they have a snooty patron that is overly picky. Real restaurants-- even the best of them-- get a few one star reviews.
So if you're looking at averages, there's no way that real can compete with fake.
Ublock origin in firefox returned, in order. 1. openai.com, 2. openai.com blogpost, 3. ChatGPT Wikipedia, 4. ChatGPT story on digitaltrends.com, 5. ChatGPT article on ZDNet.com.
Clean firefox with no ublock, in order. 1. openai.com, 2. ChatGPT Wikipedia, 3. ChatGPT story on digitaltrends.com, 4. ChatGPT article on ZDNet.com, 5. ChatGPT article on businessinsider.com.
The scammer has to receive money, and they have to spend money to buy ads. This is usually not something you can do anonymously. I'm wondering why it isn't shut down already, and I wonder how much of Google's ad revenue comes from this sort of thing.
This is even worse in developing countries. I tried booking a hotel in the Albanian Riviera the other day. Good luck finding any of the hotels’ actual websites, the moneymiddlemen have got their first…
I’d like to know what the author or any of these commenters think the process would look like that would have actually stopped this advertiser. Some guy wants to advertise their Thai restaurant. They’ve got the domain name, the site is up, it works. What else is the ad marketplace supposed to check? It’s not like you can’t have the same name as another Thai restaurant. After all, the domain registrar gave them that name.
Hypothetically? You just recently moved your site to a new domain name (your reasons are your own) and you want to advertise the new one even though the old one is “organically” first.
You want to control the snippet in a way that’s impossible with organic search.
Google could notice the paid link goes to the same page as the organic link and choose not to charge the advertiser as they are obviously not adding or creating value.
Instead, because Google chooses to charge for that first link, it creates a situation where the business owner knows they have to outbid the competition to get the link above their own.
This is great for Google’s shareholders, bad for the restaurant.
It would look a little bit like a company that's got a fuckton of relatively well curated data about the world and maybe combining that data with some kind of "artificial intelligence" to maybe produce something useful to society like a reduction in the number of scams it gives advertising space to.
But maybe that's just me being shortsighted and valuing benevolence over revenue.
You look for it. Because you know that it might be a possibility and you own the platform upon which the banner will be placed.
The poor human just wanted some food, they didn't realise they were going to have to navigate scams when searching Google for a local, unique business name.
Maybe the human is just a rube and they deserve all the trickery served up to them.
Amex: The phone number you've provided for your business account appears to be incorrect. Please correct the number and provide some evidence that you are the same person who registered your business with the state.
Google: You've registered ads for hundreds of unrelated businesses. We've suspended your account for fraudulent automated activity, please provide evidence that you own or are acting on behalf of these entities.
235 comments
[ 4.9 ms ] story [ 245 ms ] threadTLDR: Scammers cloned a restaurant website. Amex gave them a merchant account despite fake address and fake phone number. Google let them advertise the fake restaurant despite none of the data matching Google's knowledge box.
And I just love the quote, here in context:
"Doug @Rushkoff says that the ethic of today's "entrepreneur" is to #GoMeta - don't provide a product or a service, simply find a way to be a predatory squatter on a chokepoint between people who do useful things and people who use those things."
https://twitter.com/doctorow/status/1628948931710451712
(which sadly mirrors my impression with all those #Entrepreneurs that like to tag #Hustle on everything they do, like those: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34921099 )
We actually live in a pretty good timeline when we complain about ordering Thai food over the internet and the worst that happens is we get our food delivered with some trouble.
It is amazing that I can watch videos on youtube for free but it is not awesome that they freely present alcohol ads to alcoholics and it is near impossible to get rid of them unless you are savvy enough to block them and/or pay for youtube premium. It is not okay to have predatory get-rich-quick-schemes categorized in the ads for creators that they can opt out of. It is nice that creators have that option not to advertise something that is designed pray upon vulnerable people, but what the fuck.... if youtube categorize the ads then they should be able to say no to them wholesale and not benefit from that. There are videos get-rich-quick-schemes uploaded that you need to search for that is another ballgame, it is easier to report them and having them removed because they are not giving them money.
But, equally, do you enjoy your paradise when you’re dimly aware you might be living in The Matrix?
We could all not be here now, for instance. That would be the worst for me.
I could sell Armani, and buy from their site, I'd be an unofficial reseller.
The point in general (slight change of position here) is that had they not stated "official", reselling is perfectly fine. As you point out trademark infringing (representing yourself as them by saying official) is not.
The identity fraud is core to the product. Had they not registered a domain that made them sound official and said that they were the other company, nobody would get confused and think they're ordering from the actual company.
Armani will tear you up if you set up "armani-losangeles.com" and pretend that you're Armani, even if you don't mention "Official Website".
Poor example, I'm fairly sure that the designer brands are most likely to sue parallel importers and grey marketers.
Personally I'm going to continue to block ads on the advice of the FBI regardless what some other people say about it, I'm going to continue to refuse to use third party delivery services, and I'm going to continue to refuse to use any third party rating or aggregator service for local businesses. And also I'm going to continue aggressively avoiding Google products and services.
I've just recently migrated to a daily driver android phone without any Google services sitting in the background.
Stay strong, follow the path!
Well, evidently, it doesn't outrage you.
But my impression was the rage was more directed at Google and Amex, who were in a position to easily prevent the fraud but instead choose to benefit from it.
The one party who cannot do anything about it (except cancelling orders and calling their customers until the fraud stops) is the original restaurant.
Also a law to hoover up more personal information with zero repercussions…
Same as Apple/Google aren't guilty of creating malware apps then it slips through, but the predatory ass who coded the app and published it is. Same as Walmart isn't guilty of poisoning people when they stock a product that's spoiled in production, but merely failing to verify proper credentials set up by regulators.
I don't know why so many people here and elsewere refuse to hold people creating predatory/fradulent companies accountable , but instead demand that megacorporations control access to your products instead. Which they repeatedly fail and and exploit to enrich themselves at your expense.
Compare to food: it's like demanding that Walmart screen all the food itself to protect you and then you'd screech at Walmart and only Walmart for not making sure Keloggs cereal is healthy while letting the manufacturer off the hook with zero (I repeat, zero, none, null, NADA) consequences for fraud and damage they caused.
The way media, HNers and other people behave is creating a situation that's terrible to the extreme.
Now, do a thinking experiment: how did we ensure product quality in food/electronics/other parts that DID NOT hang on the fact that Walmart has 100% monopoly on all sales of those products and completely locks out you ability to go to any other store? How did we build a system that holds manufacturer of fradulent good accountable, not the megacorporation doing the distribution?
Likewise you can't just sell stolen goods even if you don't know they're stolen. They'll be confiscated at best and you'll be charged for fencing stolen goods at worst.
Remember that we punish the companies that build products against standards first, not just Walmart for stocking them. We also don't trust exclusively just Walmart to set and enforce food safety standards (because that would be problematic for competition wouldn't it)? We have independent standard bodies.
And right know we have NOTHING to beat Google (or Apple or anyone) on the head with because there's no standard or rule they've ignored when they allowed this ad to be published.
And so Walmart makes a solid effort to ensure they know who they are buying product from.
Spoiled advertisements/news programs/blog spam are not easy to identify by _todays_ customers, and thus do not incentivize quality controls. I think the solution to todays attention problem is to meet the problem on the same battlefield; attention! If anyone has a clever idea to marry people w/o situational awareness to a flywheel that creates situational awareness lmk.
People certainly can point the finger, for them to share some accountability, because Apple/Google are debatably suppressing competition. If people must use their store or search engine, then become victims of fraud, they are going to question how such got through their filtering systems and why can't they have other alternatives. It's one thing, if on an open system, the user chose a shady app on some odd corner of the web and it's another if the app is put in front of their face.
If they can't sanitise their primary means of profit then...
Nothing, because there's no regulation after how many years?
Why are actual criminals being unpunished while you wring your hands on how megacorporations aren't playing the police?
I also block ads like my life depends on it.
How does this logic work for victims of other crimes and misdemeanours?
If a security expert has "password123" as their password for all services, everyone would be surprised unless he had been previously identified as a fool.
That someone tech-savvy doesn't use an adblocker is surprising to me, too.
It’s embarrassing, but I have managed to avoid being really ripped off. The worst one, was many years ago, when I responded to a “your domain name is available” email.
I got the domain, eventually, but I probably paid double its worth, and had to get into an e-shouting match with the scammers, who were trying to lease me the name, as opposed to sell it to me (they do this, so they can quadruple the cost, as soon as you set up some infrastructure on the name).
They gave it to me, in the end, because I made it clear that I was gonna be one hell of a PItA to keep as a “customer.”
Welcome to “being human.”
Of course he's savvy, that's how he's placed to explain it to less savvy people.
Of course he could just avoid it. You or I might (with a 98% success rate maybe), and then get on with our internet-savvy day job. But doing this is his internet-savvy day job. And good that it is someone's.
And that those of least means all live outside those walls.
Seems like straight up fraud to me.
Doctorow calls them out in the thread: AmEx and Google in particular.
Isn't there a small thing called "regulators" for this? Or is US government now so fundamentally broken that it can't even provide its basic function anymore and has to be replaced by "pretty-please" appeals to megacorporations?
The latter, partly.
But a bigger problem is that actually-functional government is no longer part of the worldview of most of the public. Ditto for serious consequences for the responsible elected officials, when government fails at its basic functions.
Without those things, it is really not possible to sustain a high-functioning government.
The state enforcing laws using the threat of violence (the only enforcement mechanism they have) is a last resort, not a first. Institutions having the desire to not create a broken world should be the first line of defense.
Google doesn't give a fuck anymore, and are fine watching the world burn now. I personally speculate that most Googlers today are simply there for the paycheck, and their apathy about the way their products work reflects that.
Now what?
Huh? Why's this? It seems like a core component of a functional state to me, and if the state is doing a decent job, why should a bunch of private parties be sticking their noses in too?
Same with Catholics and confession-- another broken system in which you are free to sin arbitrarily through confession and repentance. The point of the doctrine itself is to transcend the cycle and be better than that. (I know little about it but I'm told there is a similar mechanism in Hinduism re: karma.)
Fear of god/state/consequence keeps people in line, but it's a failsafe, not the governor. The only thing preventing fraud in your tribe should not be the intangible threat of later consequence from a greater authority. You're supposed to respect each other enough to not prey on your own kind.
Another take is looking at crimes like CSA. The state punishes it when it is brought to their attention, but that does not absolve the community from necessarily participating in its policing ahead of that-- the community are the ones best positioned to detect, intervene, and enforce social norms around it in the first place.
This moral argument may be applicable to individual people, but this is yet another example that companies under the current system (and, by extension, their governing bodies) only have one goal: maximizing profits.
In the abscence of fear of punishment by a more powerful actor, if the common good gets in the way of profits, the latter will always prevail.
More importantly, it makes them irreplaceable since competing products from smaller companies simply cannot afford policing at such level while the bad actors are running around unpunished.
So long as the people believe that their only choice is "which king will rule over us?", their society will remain a monarchy.
If you try to sell property on your own, you'll get many unsolicited offers from real estate agents, sometimes claiming they already have a buyer and sometimes this is even true.
AGs and DAs don't care about small-scale scams and ripoffs and cheats, generally aren't equipped to investigate them, and if the party committing fraud is in another country are likely to throw up their hands and say "not in my jurisdiction."
This will stop with tough legislation and penalties that force Google to give up a percentage of its annual revenue. It will never happen in the United States.
But really, is the famous Doctorow not using an ad blocker in 2023?
better than an essay explaining the scam and digging into root causes? For the benefit of less sophisticated people.
But yeah, a journalist interested in this specific topic could have run an adblock instead.
It is easy to assign blame to victims.
This has happened to bycicle owners. If you don't lock your bike it's your fault your bike gets stolen. But theft is illegal. Theft is if someone wants to take something that doesn't belong to him and then executes the taking. Locks don't change this fact. It just makes the execution of the crime more difficult.
I have a vision of an utopia where people can leave all things unlocked. If they get stolen, the thief gets identified immediately and he has to give the things back. No punishment at all or only a token punishment. This should work because sanctions are not neccessary if no harm was done. Today we punish caught thieves somewhat harshly because we need to deter people from becoming thieves. If we can stop thefts just after the fact, token punishment will suffice. If someone repeatedly tries to steal things in that utopia we could offer therapy or try to find out the underlying cause of the attempted thefts. That's utopia: everything works out perfectly for everybody (shrugs).
Today we lock our browsing experience using uBlock just because we have to. We also have to lock our bikes, because we have to. Sorry for the tangent.
That's utopia for you (shrugs).
What?
It's difficult to tell online whether a statement is facetious or not. But I can't see how this makes any sense otherwise.
One advantage of visions of utopias: they give ideas for a better world and also it shows what-if perspectives: what if we really could catch thieves in a beneficial way and help them? what if there is a business opportunity because there's a need to be fulfilled?
I mean, if this is a "great Thai restaurant in my neighborhood", how likely is it he ordered there yesterday for the first time?
You're probably joking, but even if you do order from a place a couple times a year it can be hard to tell which site is theirs. A local restaurant for me at one point had two different websites, each featured different indoor pictures of the location and their food. I never knew if I should use the new one or the old one, with the problem being solved when they retired and the new owners renamed the place.
Instead of using a static descriptor “Parasitic Middleman, LLC”, they send a dynamic descriptor for each transaction to tell the user “KIINTHAILA: OK, that was my Thai order; yeah, that was me”. It’s no different than when you see an order number on your statement or other dynamic text.
I don’t approve of the business practice (and take care to avoid it with my local takeout places), but I don’t think it’s an Amex failure here.
Typical error of his, going "A Bridge Too Far". He points out something interesting and important to lure you in and then hand-gestures grandly toward an industry/practice that he feels we should all question. Because, you know, brilliant genius Cory Doctorow.
https://support.google.com/business/thread/5820393/doordash-...
https://www.eater.com/2020/1/29/21113416/grubhub-seamless-ki...
Also, I'll give you that he does hand-gesture grandly in this Twitter thread, but he co-wrote a whole book about it called Chokepoint Capitalism. There's a lot more detail about it there, and the logic there applies here.
* https://www.eater.com/2020/1/29/21113416/grubhub-seamless-ki... * https://www.eater.com/2015/11/11/9714840/in-n-out-doordash-d...
Inspired by YouTube's DMCA claim system (or my superficial understanding of it). If there's a "bug bounty" on fraud, there will be an enthusiastic market for identifying it. If ad fraud doesn't reliably pay, the fraud market will be disincentivized. Finally, Google itself will have incentives less mis-aligned with its users'; its current incentive system being "the fraudsters pay us more; therefore we love fraud!"
Two years ago, I got fluffed up about scammers claiming unclaimed businesses. Like the food delivery startups (like Doctorow mentions).
I started talking to my reps (city council, state) but haven't gotten any further. And I don't know where to start drafting the legislation.
With some sort of resolution or model legislation, I can shop it around, get the ball rolling. Like chamber of commerce, some scammed businesses, my representatives.
Thanks.
Not to mention a cottage industry of creating then "solving" the ad fraud. I imagine Google's solution for this would be 100% Yelp.
Sounds like we need scammy middleware between regular people and the complaint system to keep complaints flowing, monetize later!
https://reportfraud.ftc.gov/#/faq
Amazon has a system like this, where you can "claim" listings. It's how scam products get all those five star reviews for some other profuct. They find a t-shirt or some little thing doing well and file claim after claim until they win the listing.
Two of my favorite H. L. Mencken quotes:
"There's always an easy solution to every human problem; Neat, plausible and wrong."
"The fact that I have no remedy for all the sorrows of the world is no reason for my accepting yours. It simply supports the strong probability that yours is a fake."
And this one:
"Any proposal must be viewed as follows. Do not pay overly much attention to the benefits that might be delivered were the law in question to be properly enforced, rather one needs to consider the harm done by the improper enforcement of this particular piece of legislation, whatever it might be."
-Lyndon B. Johnson
I wish there were a requirement to list all the foreseeable consequences of any law that's proposed, both positive consequences and negative ones.
If this was feasible why wouldn't you do this for every decision in life.
Public policy affects millions of lives. I don't think enumerating 1st order or 2nd order effects is too onerous. And if it is, that's why government officials have assistants and interns.
Please enumerate all the positive and negative consequences of your requirement!
Unless you have a magic wand, simplicity usually masks conflicting incentives backed by lots of political, financial, and legal capital. It's like looking at a war and saying 'why don't people just stop fighting, because peace would be nicer.'
The social default is to look at problems as examples of individual deviance from a principled ideal. It's more instructive to look at them as examples of resource mobilization in contested/conflicted spaces. The italicized words are terms of art in social science that represent two prominent schools of thought (which are themselves in competition).
Broadly speaking, when someone infringes trademark, they are entitled to the damages done, which are likely much greater than the ad revenue here.
When Google stopped putting a meaningful distinction between paid results and organic results that was a line for me. It's fine to have an adverts - you have to pay the bills but when the adverts become the results it's just pay to play rentseeking by Google and the product is now untrustworthy and on a downward spiral as a result. Amazon search results have taken a similar route, you can search for something specific and get something totally unsuitable as top result now.
But I understand Google here. It's probably their single biggest income stream. Our company is using a very big chunk of our ad words budget targeting our own brand name to make sure it's on top. More than for any other keyword by far. And I imagine many others do the same.
Google are enabling fraud on a massive scale by permitting the hijacking of established names and brands. Often brands or names that some small family company has worked for years to build a reputation for.
We do indeed live in a world where tech and capitalism have birthed some sort of horrific offspring that’s choking us all.
Google are not only making it worse because of advertising, they're making it worse by facilitating scammers and fraudsters and various other criminals.
All because their systems are so automated as to eschew any review that might actually make advertising on the Internet slightly less distasteful (and maybe the FBI wouldn't be recommending the choking off of Google's primary income stream)
Stealing and impersonation good, sex bad.
People in the US have this puritanical view on sex -> it is inherited by Silicon Valley -> it gets forced onto the rest of us.
Since the rest of us are forced to rely on US-based products in some capacity (app stores, payment processors, CDNs...), you can't make anything sex-related even in places where sex work is viewed far more openly than in the US.
The US doesn't have a smalltime corruption problem, you don't bribe your local cop, it has a bigmoney corruption problem as seen (again) here.
We are going to end up with 10 'scammer' ad in the top 10 result, each and everyone fighting each other with more ad budget and lower profit margins.
In the end, the website owner won't even need a website.
You shouldn't need to do this. Googles ad auction on search multiplies your bid by a quality score when deciding which ad to show. A site that satisfies what the user is looking for will have a high quality score, whereas the 'wrong' site (ie. one for a competitor) will have a low quality score - partly determined by the user clicking the back button when they find they have been misled.
That means that if your competitors are pumping $100 into becoming the top search result, you perhaps only need to put $1 into getting the same ad spot.
If you are finding that not to be true, then it might be because your site is low quality for some reason (for example, maybe it doesn't load for some users in some browsers), or maybe your site doesn't have the info people are looking for when they search your company name.
[1] https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/hackers-abuse...
For a while I'd bid on the names of competitors (Not being scammy - just trying to win the #1 result placement); however, I found I was spending a bunch with basically zero conversions because - I assume, if someone is searching for something, they're expecting that something, so when they click it and realize it's not - they just exit.
On the other hand, bidding my own name: pennies.
From the end user's point of view, how is "win the #1 result placement" for a competitor's name not a blatant scam?
It's the difference between bidding on the keyword BrandX when my company is ABCBrand with an ad that says:
"Come shop at BrandX" .. when it's going to my ABCBrand, and possibly even having a landing page pretending to be BrandX
vs.
"Come shop at ABCBrand" ... and going to my ABCBrand, as it should.
I can plug OEM 1 + Model1 and get two to three ads for OEM2/3/4 before I get the result I was looking for.
There should be a solution to the problem of the scammers. Banning advertising being allowed to show up on someone else's organic search results ain't it.
It gives newer, or less well-known, companies a chance to gain exposure. And consumers like me might learn about a superior option they didn’t know previously.
Edit: Thought experiment. Over in the Figma thread there’s a lot of talk about trying to ween themselves and others off Adobe products. So is it really a negative for the industry and consumers if Figma shows ads on searches for Photoshop?
Fair enough, but a lot of them are trying to confuse the customer, as Cory Doctorow found
If the ad at all appears to originate from the company that is the target of the ad keyword it should be rejected or require verification that it’s from the company.
Google could even charge a $10 “review fee” for ads placed directly on competitors keywords (per ad treatment, not per ad treatment per keyword) to discourage this behavior from scammers
Yes, because Google's intended and actual outcome is companies are blackmailed into paying to compete on advertising for their own names. Which is highly likely a navigation query.
It would be different if someone googled "photoshop alternatives" or sth
Like "Figma: an Alternative to Photoshop" (you can tell I'm not an advertising copywriter).
The company has no website, just a toll-free number. The business name doesn't match anything in the state records. If you zoom in, the address given is literally in some kind of alley. The business has 4.5 stars and all of the reviews are in vague, broken English that never contain any details about the service or why they needed it.
My guess is that when you call them, they take your info and then call a real locksmith in the area and pocket the difference.
TL;DW: this is widespread in most cities in Canada. Scammers just setup fake businesses on google to have your nearest locksmith be some generic chain.
I would expect this to be the same for the US.
https://services.google.com/inquiry/aw_tmcomplaint
Google opens the floodgates to the spam-dam, but here's a bucket and a ladder you can use in case you want to put some of the water back.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/434gqw/i-made-my-shed-the-to...
https://wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shed_at_Dulwich
I can even agree with Trip Advisors' reasoning that their main concern are not fake restaurants, but dodgy reviews.
Nevertheless, this never should have been allowed to slip through the cracks.
It wasn't just a make pretend great London eatery on Trip Advisors.
It was fucking number 1 in a city with literally 10s of thousands rated restaurants.
So if you're looking at averages, there's no way that real can compete with fake.
Ublock origin in firefox returned, in order. 1. openai.com, 2. openai.com blogpost, 3. ChatGPT Wikipedia, 4. ChatGPT story on digitaltrends.com, 5. ChatGPT article on ZDNet.com.
Clean firefox with no ublock, in order. 1. openai.com, 2. ChatGPT Wikipedia, 3. ChatGPT story on digitaltrends.com, 4. ChatGPT article on ZDNet.com, 5. ChatGPT article on businessinsider.com.
What am I missing?
I noticed the website was weird and I found my way to the correct one.
So what would it look like?
You want to control the snippet in a way that’s impossible with organic search.
Among other hypothetical situations.
Instead, because Google chooses to charge for that first link, it creates a situation where the business owner knows they have to outbid the competition to get the link above their own.
This is great for Google’s shareholders, bad for the restaurant.
But maybe that's just me being shortsighted and valuing benevolence over revenue.
The poor human just wanted some food, they didn't realise they were going to have to navigate scams when searching Google for a local, unique business name.
Maybe the human is just a rube and they deserve all the trickery served up to them.
Google: You've registered ads for hundreds of unrelated businesses. We've suspended your account for fraudulent automated activity, please provide evidence that you own or are acting on behalf of these entities.