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"The ads were paid for by an outfit called Digital Eagle, which the transparency page says is an advertiser whose identity has been verified by Google." OF COU

"The ads were paid for by an outfit called Digital Eagle, which the transparency page says is an advertiser whose identity has been verified by Google." OF COURSE they were verified by Google. Google verifies identity by accepting money. Give them money, and you're verified. "Google representatives didn’t immediately respond to an email" Are there real humans at Google who actually answer email? I haven't seen a response from Google in more than a decade. It makes me wonder if all the phishing and spam I'm reporting even does anything. Honestly, it's time for the world to move on from Google. They haven't been safe to use as a search engine for more than two years. After clients had been sent to phishing sites by Google's ads, I decided to block these domains on all the networks I administer: googlesyndication.com googleadservices.com googletagservices.com googletagmanager.com google-analytics.com

giancarlostoro 3y ago
To be even more frank, Google's search capabilities diminished around late 2000s early 2010s for me. I used to be able to write out anything verbatim and find it. Now I can't even get the double quotes trick to work properly. Google's strengths have been slowly crippled for years. Windows has a similar problem: marketing / ads is ruining an otherwise decent product.
- DistractionRect 3y ago
  I don't know if it still works, but plus triple double quotes used to work as a verbatim match. Iirc I picked it up here when they broke double quote search a while back (which they fixed at some point). But last I checked, +"""search phrase""" works
  - petemir 3y ago
    A tip I saw here a couple of weeks ago that restored some quality to searches was to, after searching, open the drop-down menu from “Tools”, select “all results” and then “verbatim”. I do all of my searches in incognito so sadly I don’t know if the options is remembered or not.
    - DistractionRect 3y ago
      Huh, I didn't know that. I now use a meta engine, so I don't really keep up with Google dorking, but that is good to know for the few times I fall back to a Google search.
    - giancarlostoro 3y ago
      Ah! That sounds like a life saver!
  - godelski 3y ago
    Lately I've been finding that quoting doesn't have strong effects and even more frustratingly "-" appears to no longer do anything. So instead of filtering out the word it just ends up giving me that word more and I have to search some complex baby robot speech to get nuanced results. Or maybe Google just hates me
quietpain 3y ago
Are there real humans at Google who actually answer email? Google's strategy has always been to focus on the things that scale. Having a human answer a phone or a mail doesn't scale, so no customer service for the users. I think this is also the reason why these ads get through: to detect them they rely for a large part on crowd-sourcing: that "report a problem" link is IMHO one of their main mechanisms to deal with filtering out the bad ones. If more get through then it might indicate that the scale is tipping to the point that crowd-sourcing relies on too few people who go through the effort.
- DistractionRect 3y ago
  AFAIK, they do man a public relations address. It's for managing news outlets, not customer support.
- ravenstine 3y ago
  In that case, few things will actually scale for The Google except scaling itself. The only reason that The Google even has things like Gmail is they consider it a loss leader, and the only reason quirky things like Google Books still exists is because there is just enough engineers who care at that company that said projects get (barely) maintained. Otherwise, it's all about growth and scaling things, and because of the level of decoupling between the customer and the business model from direct-transactional perspective, there is little to no need to treat the customer as if they exist at all. The Google certainly have a very interesting business model, indeed.
- daenar19 3y ago
  [dead]
- lolc 3y ago
  I never report anything to Google. They don't give back. When I try to report mail spam from their network they want me to fill out a form instead of reading the abuse mail they got.
- avipars 3y ago
  For Google one and enterprise customers, I do believe there is a support line where you speak to an actual human
autoexec 3y ago
> It makes me wonder if all the phishing and spam I'm reporting even does anything. I'm usually first in line to hate on Google, but I report a lot of phishing to them and, at least when it comes to phishing sites being hosted by Google, they tend to take them down pretty quickly. I never get a response, and I assume that it's all automated, but it's a lot better than many other hosts. If you report a malicious website to namecheap it can remain online for months and, bad as they are, they aren't even the worst out there in terms of poor abuse handling. Google could do better, but they're really pretty good. That said, this is just another example of why we should all be blocking ads. It keeps us all safer.
Solvency 3y ago
In 2007 I had posted something on a message board that personally identified me. I had the post removed from the forum but it was captured on Google's result summary. I literally emailed Google asking if they could remove it and they not only did, someone responded saying "done." Such a different era.
jrnichols 3y ago
have you run into websites that stop working because of this?

giancarlostoro 3y ago

To be even more frank, Google's search capabilities diminished around late 2000s early 2010s for me. I used to be able to write out anything verbatim and find it. Now I can't even get the double quotes trick to work properly. Google's strengths have been slowly crippled for years. Windows has a similar problem: marketing / ads is ruining an otherwise decent product.

DistractionRect 3y ago
I don't know if it still works, but plus triple double quotes used to work as a verbatim match. Iirc I picked it up here when they broke double quote search a while back (which they fixed at some point). But last I checked, +"""search phrase""" works
- petemir 3y ago
  A tip I saw here a couple of weeks ago that restored some quality to searches was to, after searching, open the drop-down menu from “Tools”, select “all results” and then “verbatim”. I do all of my searches in incognito so sadly I don’t know if the options is remembered or not.
  - DistractionRect 3y ago
    Huh, I didn't know that. I now use a meta engine, so I don't really keep up with Google dorking, but that is good to know for the few times I fall back to a Google search.
  - giancarlostoro 3y ago
    Ah! That sounds like a life saver!
- godelski 3y ago
  Lately I've been finding that quoting doesn't have strong effects and even more frustratingly "-" appears to no longer do anything. So instead of filtering out the word it just ends up giving me that word more and I have to search some complex baby robot speech to get nuanced results. Or maybe Google just hates me

quietpain 3y ago

Are there real humans at Google who actually answer email? Google's strategy has always been to focus on the things that scale. Having a human answer a phone or a mail doesn't scale, so no customer service for the users. I think this is also the reason why these ads get through: to detect them they rely for a large part on crowd-sourcing: that "report a problem" link is IMHO one of their main mechanisms to deal with filtering out the bad ones. If more get through then it might indicate that the scale is tipping to the point that crowd-sourcing relies on too few people who go through the effort.

DistractionRect 3y ago
AFAIK, they do man a public relations address. It's for managing news outlets, not customer support.
ravenstine 3y ago
In that case, few things will actually scale for The Google except scaling itself. The only reason that The Google even has things like Gmail is they consider it a loss leader, and the only reason quirky things like Google Books still exists is because there is just enough engineers who care at that company that said projects get (barely) maintained. Otherwise, it's all about growth and scaling things, and because of the level of decoupling between the customer and the business model from direct-transactional perspective, there is little to no need to treat the customer as if they exist at all. The Google certainly have a very interesting business model, indeed.
daenar19 3y ago
[dead]
lolc 3y ago
I never report anything to Google. They don't give back. When I try to report mail spam from their network they want me to fill out a form instead of reading the abuse mail they got.
avipars 3y ago
For Google one and enterprise customers, I do believe there is a support line where you speak to an actual human

autoexec 3y ago

> It makes me wonder if all the phishing and spam I'm reporting even does anything. I'm usually first in line to hate on Google, but I report a lot of phishing to them and, at least when it comes to phishing sites being hosted by Google, they tend to take them down pretty quickly. I never get a response, and I assume that it's all automated, but it's a lot better than many other hosts. If you report a malicious website to namecheap it can remain online for months and, bad as they are, they aren't even the worst out there in terms of poor abuse handling. Google could do better, but they're really pretty good. That said, this is just another example of why we should all be blocking ads. It keeps us all safer.

Solvency 3y ago

In 2007 I had posted something on a message board that personally identified me. I had the post removed from the forum but it was captured on Google's result summary. I literally emailed Google asking if they could remove it and they not only did, someone responded saying "done." Such a different era.

jrnichols 3y ago

have you run into websites that stop working because of this?