Sorry to hear about your experience. That sucks.

Locksmiths are now a restricted business as grey hat marketers figured it was an industry with a high ticket price and autonomous demand, and the search term was always "locksmith <city>" - so they set up sites that would flood the results, demand payment upfront for a call out, and then have a virtual assistant forward the business on to an actual locksmith in the city - essentially scooping hundreds of dollars for doing nothing but obfuscating who the real locksmiths are and forwarding the leads on them.

Flowers are the same as you describe. It's depressing to see how easy it is to make money if you're a total scumbag.

Disclaimer: I work for G, but not in search or ads. Opinions are mine.

That's their product. Their customers are the people buying ads.

The people using their search engine are really more customers who pay input for service. The company sustains itself by processing the product and selling it to another group of customers pay- which is a significant difference as they have agency.

Look at the game free to play model and why pay to win is doomed to failure. There may be "whales" - the customers who pay signficant ammounts of cash but the demand the free players as content effectively. If a pay to win content is sold and drives off the free to play the whales will follow for lack of content. Proper "product" would be game AI or employees as a "rented" or "spoiling" product equivalent. The free players are customers who provide input mediated through the game server to create a product which is sold to cash customers.

Despite the dystopian rhetoric the input customers aren't like livestock because they aren't transfereable, have the agency and can meaningfully opt out.

Bing can't just buy 10 m billion users from Google to try to improve their user base. They need to get their user base directly no matter how they reach them.

Google itself is doing much the same thing and profiting from it. They have become the go-to source for many people looking for a locksmith, when there are other ways to find them.

Maybe there's more to this than has been described, but on the surface, it seems like a common business model.

> Doesn't Google prevent click fraud?

> Google does detect click fraud, but does not prevent it. Instead, Google will give back credit to your account days after the fraud took place and only after you claim it. The immediate result would be that your ad budget would be exhausted and your ad will not be online for hours or even days. In addition, Google's click fraud characteristics are identical for all advertisers. While 10 clicks from the same IP address in a period of a day is completely normal for one advertiser, another might see this as nothing but click fraud. ClickCease will keep your ad online and will configure the service to best suit your business needs.

http://docs.clickcease.com/en/articles/101633-doesn-t-google...

These were clicks I knew well, as we ran groups of ads from several businesses in the areas that all did the same thing. I knew by the pattern, there was no way 200 people from 8a -9a clicked over to this business's ad, and could also tell by the lack of calls / appointments.

The real kicker was these ads are limited to only show basically along a 5 mile path of highway, very few rooftops in that area - as to get mobile searchers on that side of town - so they were convinced hundreds of people driving down the highway had all clicked over for info and no appointments while driving.

They said no proof, no refund, have a nice day.

Rampant fraud = lack of trust in your product/service, which can destroy your whole business. The internet fraud you hear about is only the tip of the iceberg, and there's much more of it that is prevented by various companies (either Google, Cloudflare, etc.)

They dominate search traffic (in the markets/countries they exist for). Businesses don't use AdWords because they "trust" Google. They suffer through using AdWords because it's the only game in town.

"If advertisers believed the company's operation were fraud-filled, they could take their money elsewhere and the business would falter."

That's it, in a nutshell.

(and if they had 100 people working on this in 2015; you better believe that number is much higher now)

Maybe Google had more competition in 2015.

Although I find even that difficult to take seriously.

Where else would they "take their money"? Facebook? I doubt that Facebook ads show up in web searches.

And where would that be, exactly?

It's in in Dutch, but it's the typical misleading, copyright infringing ad you would find on shady porn sites.

Why does Google allow this ad? Don't they have the competence to filter it? It's the same company creating a great spam filter on gmail and leading in a lot of AI fields. Surely they could. But they just don't care when they get paid for it.

On the other hand, when they don't get paid or it negatively affects them, they're always happy to make changes "to protect the users" (e.g. changing chrome so adblock plus stops working etc.)

The most simple explanation is because they make money with it, and get away with it. A good question is why they get away with it.

As for people in The Netherlands, my mother got scammed by a fake locksmith. He asked her to pay with PIN, and he did not fix the problem (which we found out eventually). Total scumbag, yet he was first hit on Google. Here's some good advice on how to find a good locksmith (slotenmaker) in Dutch [1].

[1] https://www.consumentenbond.nl/inboedelverzekering/slotenmak...

Think about it would take to detect it algorithmically. Even if an image is copyrighted there is no mechanism to tell if the source actually has permission from it especially with the "born copyrighted" doctrine. Even if there was some vast self defeating registered copyrighted images database (containing images of everything copyrighted) it woukd be possible to distort images to be human recognizible but not machine recognized.

The "alternatives" of demanded manual ad control would mean massively disadvantaging smaller business by marginal costs. Oops.

This has been my conclusion several times after digging deep into some weird data and discovering one of these...'grey areas' where it seems like if they cared about their customers they'd be doing something about it, but presumably they prefer having revenue from unsophisticated ad buyers.

Some of the things they turn on by default are straight up rackets, "Search Partners" for example. Companies like ask.com are arbitraging keyword traffic by buying ads to their own search results pages. These are "Search Partners" that show the ads you're paying Google for, but they're full of dark patterns to make you click the ads, and cost the same as a click directly from the Google results!

Could you elaborate?

That's a great way of putting it and 100% accurate. Fast food joints set a minimal customer service level magnitudes better than Google.

Google has a lot of really good tools, that they could sell to enterprise. You could argue that they have the only viable Office365 alternative for non-tech enterprise. But they just don’t seem to know how to sell it because their advertising monopoly infects everything they do.

The single place they’ve been successful is in education, and even there they are struggling to keep supplying what schools actually want + privacy. So I fully expect to see them driven out of this space in the coming decade.

It is sort of a "cars don't handle rugged terrain as well as horses" thing, it isn't crippling when the use case is paved roads. It may suck for your use case but it makes sense.

I helped them fix a lot of bugs and broken processes, but I'm better than most at making reports. If they had to deal with bad developers blaming Google for problems that had nothing to do with Google, that would waste a lot of time. But on the other hand, if we didn't pay for support, those problems probably never would have been fixed, and I don't think we were ever compensated or given discount support for helping.

The only place I've gotten actual support from Google was with Ads and my company at the time was spending 9 figures.

> Not true... you just have to pay for it. I worked for A fortune 100 company

It shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone that there only about 100 companies who can afford Fortune 100-ish level support..............................................

Seems insanely high, especially compared to the next step down which is only $250/mo per user... you could get by with a separate account with a single master user that controlled all the deployments and billing and only pay $3,000/yr. What you get for that extra $147,000+/year is that you talk directly with the lowest level engineer actually working on the problem rather than relaying messages that lose context... but you'll still need to know what you're talking about and be able to actually help the engineer rather than spin them in circles, or you'll be kept at bay.

For consumers, https://one.google.com/about/support is the way to pay for the support, since they claim "Cross-Google" support. I haven't used Google One support (even though I am a member as I have a subscription to their storage plan), so I don't know how good it is though, and it's not super clear how "cross" it really is. https://one.google.com/support says 2-3 min response for phone/chat though.

It took multiple escalations to people responsible for the specific service and the issue was entirely Google's service having an error. Meanwhile production was hard-down that whole time.