I did Google “how to invest $2 million” a few times from different devices to see how it would change my search history.

It’s hard to tell systematically but my YouTube ads became super douschey. And my iheartradio ads and Spotify ads were also related.

Is there a site of funny search poisoning? Or a practical joke set of how many times you have to search “domestic abuse defense attorney” a friend’s phone to surprise them?

There once was a website called ruinmysearchhistory.com that would open a new tab and launch many Google searches on unsavory terms.

The original list of terms can still be found here: https://www.reddit.com/r/InternetIsBeautiful/comments/4nc763...

Do you have adblockers or did you turn them off for this experiment? I would assume most people on HN have adblockers and other browser ad ons to prevent the malicious tracking that so many companies are hell bent on using. It's an anomaly for me to see any ads on my devices.

I used chrome with no adblockers. I only use chrome for Google sites so I don’t bother with adblockers.

presumably, the people who seriously have $2M to invest are not just googling how to do it, so you may just be getting the set of ads for the people likely to actually put that in Google

as far as practical jokes go, it would probably be a lot easier to sign up someone to an unsavory email list.

> presumably, the people who seriously have $2M to invest are not just googling how to do it

If I sell my startup in a few years, it would be worth 4-10m$, and I wonder what I might do with the money. I find it funny that you dismiss the idea of not knowing how to invest millions of dollars, but when you’ve worked all your life, you don’t have time to build a network of people who can receive your investment, and you’re not used to actually having this money outside of the startup vehicle. And given 86% of billionaires of this generation are first-generation, I wouldn’t be surprised if it were the same for millionaires. I keep hearing stories of:

- Youtubers,

- Startup founded,

- Dropshipping, but not dropshippers, just people who sell services to gullible get-rich-quick dropshippers.

Most people that have that problem don't Google "How to invest $X million", they google for things like "best clean energy stocks" or "best index funds" or "should i buy Ethereum or Bitcoin" or "bay area financial advisors" or "angel investing getting started" etc.

Yeah, I'm not saying that people who come into money are investing geniuses, but you will lose your money pretty quickly if you type in how much money you have into Google and click the first link promising a get even richer scheme.

If you get $10m aren't you, like, finished? You escaped the game. It's over. Why does investing matter anymore?

Nah, it takes a lot of attention to keep $10 million under control. Unless you want to risk running out suddenly.

Having $10 mil in a bank account somewhere is pointless. No matter what philosophy you want to apply choices must be made. Investment, consumption or hedonism. The money will quickly vanish (decade or two) if the balance is wrong or the millionaire goes all-in on indexing at the peak of some bubble.

Investment, consumption, and hedonism: unless you have a broad sense of “investment”, aren’t all of those selfish?

I suppose my valuing the health of an ecosystem of other lives is selfish, too. I’m writing to push for a broader sense of what it means to invest, as in increasing the carbon content of soil for the health of future life, and promoting regulation towards cleaner air and water.

Giving money away to worthy causes is pretty easy. But FYI I'd class that under my broad definition of hedonism. In Xanadu did Kubla Khan .... and all that.

So that your escape money doesn’t get eaten away by inflation. You could put it in a low-ish risk portfolio composed of some bonds, indexes, etc so that it continues to make some amount of money.

Taxes and inflation will kill you.

Crypto traders are an exception to this, they'll just keep it invested in crypto :)

It might not be that focused; ~nobody with $2MM asks Google for investment advice, but "how to invest" and "how to invest to make millions" are searches worth targeting (and would match that search).

Rumour has it that Jeff Bezos AltaVista'd how to make 180 billion dollars before getting the idea to start Amazon.

What response did it give? Where does the anecdote come from?

it's a joke

I always thought he was doing it for ideological reasons.

Asking how to invest 2M probably means the "investor" has won money in a lottery and can be lured into "investing" them back into a casino.

> unsavory email list.

Of course that too. It’s not exclusive with search poisoning.

> $2million

It seems that way in that it’s either stupid advertisers that think rich people Google that. Or people thinking there’s a mindset of get rich quick, crypto scams who Google that.

> It’s not exclusive with search poisoning.

Not to say that it is, but email lists being sold around is table stakes for advertising and search, so that might be faster and easier than trying to change ad results via search queries.

Back in high school (pre-internet), we'd sign up a particular friend every time we saw one of the information collection boxes for 24 hour fitness.

He could never figure out why they just wouldn't stop calling him

Try Googling mesothelioma symptoms if you want to see how deep this particular rabbit hole goes (and cost some ambulance-chasing law firms some money while you're at it.)

20th-Century advice: "Dress for the job you want, not the job you have."

21st-Century advice: "Google for the problems you want, not the problems you have."

A couple of years ago Mozilla built a tool to trick trackers into believing you have a certain profile (rich, among others).

It worked by opening 100s of tabs but I don’t remember if it issued any query to Google.

The tool is Track This: https://trackthis.link/

It might be harder than it seems, Google is incredibly AIcist. I hit their threshold manually sometimes (it's like a dozen or so queries per minute) :D

Those "we have detected unusual traffic" messages after unusually heavy (hey, we're not all average in our usage patterns) but very human usage are kinda evil. I wasted so much time wiping the machine and reinstalling the OS etc after getting paranoid that I had some undetectable kind of malware before I caught on.

It usually means you're behind carrier grade nat or some other shared IP and someone else is running a bot.

Nah, happens quite often when Google refuses to serve the results you're asking for (ignoring a keyword, using something it believes is a synonym but is actually not in this context etc.), and one therefore do many successive almost identical searches with small tweaks.

I wasn't behind CGNAT. Had a dedicated public ipv4 ip. I was just using google a lot, sometimes.

Google does bot detection on a /24 basis. So you were still sharing with 253 other households most likely.

That would be idiotic. I don't think Googlers are idiots.

Of course they're not idiots. They're googlers, which means they have a very specific worldview and a work environment that focuses their perception of the universe into a very specific way of looking at things, where "scale" is both the cause and solution to all problems and of course attackers use whole subnets at a time and need to be shadowbanned appropriately.

Yeah, I have seen that as well... Usually when I try to actually find something and start tuning my query. Don't know if when you start building complex queries does it just get heavy and they have some threshold after which it doesn't make money anymore for them. So they block you...

Other than the ethical concerns, that's why I wouldn't bother with searching the users search queries.