[jaaames]

https://support.google.com/adspolicy/answer/7520318?hl=en

Locksmiths are now a restricted business as grey hat marketers figured it was an industry with a high ticket price and autonomous demand, and the search term was always "locksmith <city>" - so they set up sites that would flood the results, demand payment upfront for a call out, and then have a virtual assistant forward the business on to an actual locksmith in the city - essentially scooping hundreds of dollars for doing nothing but obfuscating who the real locksmiths are and forwarding the leads on them.

[donmcronald]

Even the real locksmith businesses are pretty shady. CBC Marketplace recently had a story about fake locksmiths in the GTA.

Flowers are the same as you describe. It's depressing to see how easy it is to make money if you're a total scumbag.

[kortilla]

So I get that this is sleazy, but why is it google’s job to stop this? How is this different from any other type of middleman living on referral fees?

[Nitramp]

It's Google's job to make sure their customers (people using the search engine) have a good time. If they're getting scammed after clicking an ad, people will learn not to click ad links and/or migrate to a different search engine, which will hurt Google's business.

Disclaimer: I work for G, but not in search or ads. Opinions are mine.

[poizan42]

> customers (people using the search engine)

That's their product. Their customers are the people buying ads.

[Nasrudith]

That is a popular soundbite meme but "product" is a mislead conflation as a rhetorical bludgeon.

The people using their search engine are really more customers who pay input for service. The company sustains itself by processing the product and selling it to another group of customers pay- which is a significant difference as they have agency.

Look at the game free to play model and why pay to win is doomed to failure. There may be "whales" - the customers who pay signficant ammounts of cash but the demand the free players as content effectively. If a pay to win content is sold and drives off the free to play the whales will follow for lack of content. Proper "product" would be game AI or employees as a "rented" or "spoiling" product equivalent. The free players are customers who provide input mediated through the game server to create a product which is sold to cash customers.

Despite the dystopian rhetoric the input customers aren't like livestock because they aren't transfereable, have the agency and can meaningfully opt out.

Bing can't just buy 10 m billion users from Google to try to improve their user base. They need to get their user base directly no matter how they reach them.

[tremon]

That doesn't change the argument. If their products get scammed after clicking an ad, people will learn not to click ad links, and Google loses their product.

[CydeWeys]

This doesn't refute the argument at all though. Regardless of what you want to call people surfing the web and the companies buying ads, it's a problem if ads are scammy and fewer people start clicking them.

[mitchdoogle]

Is it really that sleazy? Any service-based company is built on charging their customers more than what it costs to actually do the service. In this case, the service is finding a locksmith and directing them to your location. If someone can find a way to get in front of customers for that, then more power to them - that's the business model for any directory.

Google itself is doing much the same thing and profiting from it. They have become the go-to source for many people looking for a locksmith, when there are other ways to find them.

Maybe there's more to this than has been described, but on the surface, it seems like a common business model.