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Why does searching Google for random hex lead to car dealers? [video]
- jimbobthrowawy 2y agoI tend to get variations on cryptocurrency block explorer websites mostly. It's annoying when I want to search for a btih or something exact.
- cratermoon 2y agoI'm going to guess that google makes more money from car dealer ads than it does for programmers searching for hex codes. Also probably just because Google's search is more and more giving irrelevant results.
- worik 2y agoSearch bubble?
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- hi-v-rocknroll 2y agoPerhaps Google trolls anyone in security or torrenting, and would instead prefer to show CPM/CPC ads to charge instead of nothing because money. /s
- ludicrousdispla 2y ago[dead]
- Terr_ 2y agoWeird... Maybe Google thinks that the closest inexact match is a VIN number?
- lambdaxyzw 2y agoWeird premise. I search for random hex literally all the time (checking hashes and guessing algorithms as a part of my reverse engineering work) and I don't remember car dealers coming up especially often. I suspect it's just the author who - because of their location or the previous search history - gets more targetted car dealership ads.
- joe_the_user 2y agoBut the results here aren't ads - at least they appear to be regular search results.
- dtagames 2y agoMost likely some part of the string matches the VIN number. Dealers are legally required to post the VIN of an actual vehicle in any advertisements that have a price, as a way of preventing bait-and-switch.
- OptionOfT 2y agoFunny, in Europe that's absolutely not the case. I watched some government sale and they posted a PDF vehicles for sale that were forfeited. The VINs where there but parts of it where blacked out. It was a PDF. I copy-pasted the text behind the black box and got the full VIN.
- dylan604 2y ago> It was a PDF. I copy-pasted the text behind the black box and got the full VIN. You're such a hacker. As the world turns now, I'd expect some legislation that says if you copy the text from a badly created PDF, then you are the one to blame and not the one that made the bad document. You're clearly circumventing the intent. You you...criminal.
- londons_explore 2y agoIn Europe VIN's of cars are treated a little like SSN's are treated in the US. Some governments assume that just because you know the VIN of a vehicle, you must be it's owner, despite many vehicles having the VIN written on every bit of glass and visible without even unlocking the car...
- JohnFen 2y agoIn the US, the VIN must be visible from the outside of the vehicle, through the windshield on the driver's side. Covering the VIN from view is illegal.
- dawnerd 2y agoAnd yet they still bait and switch. Most recently-ish with added markups not in their online price.
- deweywsu 2y ago[dead]
- CommieBobDole 2y agoLooking at this very briefly, the results seem to always be inventory pages for the dealerships, which use long strings of hex or just random numbers as identifiers for the vehicles they have for sale. For example, a search for "ca7112b7167c15e621412c0fbc0a6c97" brings up the URL "https://www.premierclearancecenterofstbernard.com/inventory/certified-used-2021-toyota-sequoia-limited-4wd-4d-sport-utility-5tdfy5b14ms183153/ https://www.premierclearancecenterofstbernard.com/inventory/...", which has a gallery of vehicles at the bottom whose image names are of the format "9b362510c100095f02cf3cad9e365ea6.jpg". I assume something inside the Google black box is saying "well, there's no exact match but this site has a bunch of strings with most of the same characters, so here you go". Edit: And to add to this, I'd surmise that the reason you see a lot of car dealerships in these results is that they sell a lot of one-offs - instead of having a list of SKUs in inventory, they sell a unique vehicle just once, so the inventory systems need to account for that by using long strings as item IDs and the like. Also there's probably a limited number of inventory systems out there, so a bunch of random dealerships are probably all using the same one.
- cedws 2y agoBack when Google search was good this query would have returned no results. As it should do. Now it desperately tries to dig up anything it can find just so the number of results is not zero. Somebody at Google wanted to the increase search 'hit rate' KPI and this is the result.
- refulgentis 2y agoThat doesn't sound right to me: Google used to suppress results with string matches? Why? If so, would that be a good thing? Why shouldn't I be able to find the vehicle via its ID?
- risenshinetech 2y agoThese aren't string matches. Check again.
- joe_the_user 2y agoI think this is notable just because it's a result of Google now having every single search result set be trying to sell you something. That's different from simply having targeted ads and rather disturbing.
- cratermoon 2y agoGoogle is now a glorified Yellow Pages, assuming that every search is a search for a business.
- libria 2y agoRepro'd in an incognito window so it's not a history thing. 1st 3 of OPs strings if anyone else is experimenting (remove spaces): 3344cfb4 78ead204a49b88 1da6079adf8a e2c75c64 eef8087f6f36df 57 eb944335 73626fe9b73550 b02a651620d8 -- Shoot, depending on crawling, this may end up causing this page to match. I'm injecting spaces above to deter this, but maybe it'll also prove out the partial string match theory...
- 1970-01-01 2y agoI'm only getting back 2 results: Citi.com and FDIC.gov Clicking on the 3 dots gives me this info: Your search & this result This result seems relevant even though this search term may not appear: 3344cfb478ead204a49b881da6079adf8a
- qnleigh 2y agoGood guesses in the comments so far: VIN number partial matches and targeted search. Anyone going to test what's correct? Ideas: 1. Vin numbers are 17 characters and don't contain I, O or Q, to prevent confusion with other letters. If you throw in lots of these always spaced by less than 17 characters, do you get fewer hits? 2. Does a VPN and/or private browsing affect the results? A third possibility is that Google has cheaper ad category for search queries that they can't categorize. This doesn't explain the diversity of dealerships though.
- chuckadams 2y agoMercedes uses 18-digit vins, tho I believe it’s the same format and checksum algorithm for the first 17 digits so it’s really more “17 + 1 digits”. Still drives validators nuts tho.
- joe_the_user 2y agoSure, it's matching VINs. But in the vast expanse of the net, surely there are many strings of random hex out there. Why this source of random digits.
- arresin 2y agoProbably the most authoritive sites with weird strings
- cratermoon 2y ago"most authoritive", for financially preferred values of authority.
- ww520 2y agoThe word embeddings computed from the hex values and the car dealership's inventory ID's probably have close similarity in Google's vector db.
- omoikane 2y agoI see that digits is between 10 and 19: DIGITS=$((10 + $RANDOM % 10)) If it was always an even number, I would have expected some checksum files to be matched (16 for md5sum, 20 for sha1sum, etc).
- I_o_IllI__o_I 2y ago[dead]