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Comment by mrguyorama | Hacker News Reader

Google is the entire problem here. Pay them money and your literal scam site can sit above the real site in the search results.

Why are they allowed to direct you to literal scams? Why are they allowed to profit off of literal scams?

This affects the company I work for, who gets called every single day with customer complaints from people who clicked the scam link from a search ad when looking for our site.

Our site has existed for over a decade. There's no justifiable reason that a company who's brand is known by every single grocer or merchant to somehow show up under a literal fly by night scam company pretending to have the same name. It's unacceptable.

My sister got scammed by this exact mechanism just last week.

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I often use google shopping when I’m looking at items in categories I’m not familiar with. About half the time there is a store charging significantly less than the others. I’ll open a new tab ask Google search AI if the site is legit, and 95% of the time the response is that it’s a well known scam site. So the anemic search AI knows it’s a scam, but google shopping has no problem sending people there (likely with an affiliate code).

Sounds like you pay less for ads than someone else will. Attention is the currency in the world, pay more and your site will be on top, clearly there are customers that want your product.

You shouldn't have to pay more than someone who is obviously committing fraud because people working at Google should be going to prison for deciding to partner with people who are obviously committing fraud.

Yeah and housing should be affordable, and there should be no wars in the world, people should not be greedy, etc. Let's look at the facts and incentives in front of us now instead of fairytail "shoulds".

1) Google has more money than anyone who can file for litigation

2) You don't want your brand reputation damaged

So you can choose to either complain, spend a load of money in pointless juridical processes you will lose, or just pay up for the ads now, which will in the end pay for part of it at least since people are interested in the product.

So the fully rational choice right now you can do is: if brand damage costs > ad costs, buy ads. If not, then it's fine and let people get scammed because its out of your hands.

You can of course do both: pay the protection racket money while also working to spread an understanding and build consensus/a demand for the government to crack down on major companies directly participating in fraud.

you could but then you should call it protection money

Recently I tried to download Blender, so I put "blender" in Google search... and the first link was some scam website pretending to be Blender, trying to make me install their malware.

Google doesn't even try anymore. The easier way to distribute malware to people is simply to pay Google to pretend that you are someone else.

(Similarly it's been months since I last saw a non-scam ad on YouTube. Sure, Elon Musk will send me tons of money made by AI brokers as soon as I give him my bank account. And the AI-generated video is great proof of how you can lose 50% body weight in 21 days just by sitting in a chair and nodding your head according to the special secret exercise routine.)

You work for a company? Why hasn't your company sued Google for creating this problem yet?

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