This is just the flip side of what was at the time a revolutionary search strategy: prior to Google search results were even worse than they are now. Altavista

This is just the flip side of what was at the time a revolutionary search strategy: prior to Google search results were even worse than they are now. Altavista and the rest were just indexing content and providing naive text search over their cache of the Internet and spammers had ensured that only very specific searches having nothing to do with commerce were discoverable. Then Google came along with PageRank, which rated pages based on which and how many other sites linked to them. Suddenly the Internet was usable again. For a few years. But spammers caught on and the algorithm has had to become more complex. But companies are so desperate for attention and there’s so much money floating around that the huge swaths of entirely fake content have sprung up and become more and more sophisticated. Unfortunately Google still rules and it takes some unsavory activity to get a new product or service to surface effectively. That’s not actually a new phenomenon, it’s just different mechanisms. But I feel sorry for anyone in the situation described here. I would not be able to bring myself to do effective PR in this or any other age.