5 ms·
I'm eagerly awaiting a response from google on this. Frankly I suspect that these guys are not actually associated with Google. Google isn't the kind of compa
by swalsh 15y ago
I'm eagerly awaiting a response from google on this. Frankly I suspect that these guys are not actually associated with Google. Google isn't the kind of company that would hire an army of employees to manually click through a website to cold call people.
- guard-of-terra 15y agoThey scan books that way too (manually), aren't they?
- asto 15y agoNo. Here's a description of a patent they filed for their book scanning tech. http://www.npr.org/blogs/library/2009/04/the_granting_of_patent_7508978.html?sc=fb&cc=fp http://www.npr.org/blogs/library/2009/04/the_granting_of_pat...
- travem 15y agoActually there is manual labor involved, see http://techcrunch.com/2007/12/06/google-books-adds-hand-scans/ http://techcrunch.com/2007/12/06/google-books-adds-hand-scan... and http://books.google.com/books?id=lAIJAAAAIAAJ&printsec=frontcover#PPP3,M1 http://books.google.com/books?id=lAIJAAAAIAAJ&printsec=f...
- mikecaron 15y agoSo how do you explain the ip addresses?
- quanticle 15y agoGoogle App Engine? Perhaps the scammer is hosting their scraping app. on GAE.
- alexmuller 15y agoHaving just checked, it's not Google App Engine. GAE appends the string "AppEngine-Google; (+http://code.google.com/appengine http://code.google.com/appengine) " to the user agent regardless of what it's set to. But still, I agree there may well be another explanation. http://code.google.com/p/googleappengine/issues/detail?id=342 http://code.google.com/p/googleappengine/issues/detail?id=34...
- bemmu 15y agoI suppose Google spider is already ruled out?
- vasco 15y agoI don't believe this is google just because of all the manual labor involved. Google would scrape the whole site and call people with pre-recorded messages or something. The operation would be fully automated. I actually don't have any opinion wether they would do it or not, but I doubt manual labor would be involved if that was the case.
- peteretep 15y agoNo, the reason it's not a sanctioned Google business process - amongst any other number of reasons - but the one that is important is that there is NO GOOGLE SIZED REVENUE in scamming small Kenyan businesses, and there is a huge huge PR downside. Whether it's the work of rogue employees or a third party, we'll see.
- adgar 15y agoI'm not commenting one way or another on the overall story, but when I read (paraphrasing) "tried to upsell a domain name" I got very suspicious. Domain names are pretty near zero-margin... unless you're scamming uneducated and unconnected small business owners by charging them way more than they cost.
- cyanbane 15y agoTotally agree, I just don't see why on earth Google would want to do something like this with the ability for such awful backlash in exchange for what I think would be minimal bump in profit for a company like them.
- dean 15y agoI agree. Google is not dumb enough to do this. Talk about no upside and all downside! Risking your reputation for the equivalent of a few pennies is ridiculous. Scamming African small businesses, of all things, that's making money the hard way.
- there 15y agoI don't believe this is google just because of all the manual labor involved. Google would scrape the whole site and call people with pre-recorded messages or something. for what it's worth, after i moved, google maps still showed that my old address was where my business was located. i filled out a short form saying it was not accurate any longer. there was no other contact information on the form, so i could have been anyone telling google a business had moved. about a week later i received a call at my business number from an indian-sounding man asking if my company was no longer at my previous address. i could barely understand him, but he didn't say he was with google and once i confirmed that my business had moved, he hung up. shortly after that, my company was taken off of google maps. so google is using manual labor, and they had to have done at least enough research to get my business phone number.
- jaredmck 15y agoThey've hired armies of people to cold call businesses for Google Places project, offering an adwords voucher.