Why is Google still serving dodgy ads?

I have a feeling this is supposed to be mocking and showing that the liability might extend too far.

Either way, I agree with the literal interpretation. They should vet the ads they serve and are complicit in this mess if they serve ads through Google et al.

There is a well known problem in the Netherlands where scammers will set up fake museum websites, like “vangoghtickets.co”. They don’t even collect the money - your card details are instantly stolen and used for some odd looking purchases in south east asia or something.

I’ve reported these multiple times. They always get to the top of search results via paid placement, and Google always responds to the reports saying they found nothing wrong with them, even when provided with detailed evidence of the fraud.

Money is the answer

Here's another one for you. If you search for any popular book on Google Play Books, you get a whole bunch of fake knock-offs alongside the real book. Sometimes, it is nearly impossible to tell which one is real.

And they, apparently, won't do anything about it.

A couple months ago I went searching for the book "Regime Change" by Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, an NYT bestseller. The top search result at the time used the exact official cover art and author names, and was otherwise in every way indistinguishable from the real book.

I foolishly bought it and started reading. I quickly noticed that the text seemed like more of a mediocre college paper than a bestselling book. After a few pages I was like... wtf is this. Jumped to the end of the book and found an "Abort the author" section naming a fellow named Marcus Whitfield as the author.

I dutifully opened a ticket with Google suggesting that they should really remove this book. They refunded me, but told me they couldn't remove the book because their policy states that only the true copyright holder could request a take down, and I am not that.

WTF? I wasn't even claiming a copyright issue. I was claiming false advertising and fraud. I was claiming that Google Play's store was listing an obviously, maliciously fake book, selling it for real money, and that they should stop doing that. They take a 30% cut! How are they not doing even the most basic vetting of these listings? A human could trivially identify it as fake in 30 seconds and an AI even faster.

It appears that since then, the actual real book has risen to #1 in the search results (I think; it's hard to tell), and the exact listing that got me is gone, but there are still a whole lot of obvious fakes after it:

https://play.google.com/store/search?q=%22regime%20change%22...

And if you search for any other popular book, you get the same thing.

(Of course, no real publisher actually cares about Google Play Books, because nobody uses it, so nobody files takedown requests, presumably. Also presumably no engineers work on it, and that's why it's a wasteland. What I don't get is why haven't they shut it down?)

Today search results are a page full of ads. They can't get away with that unless they completely corner down the LLM market.

I forget the name but I see one LLM chatbox that looked like one of those old world news media websites plastered from top to bottom with jumpy obnoxious ads. It did offer some good models for free. I honestly might even consider using it if I could remember what it was called.

If they turned Gemini into that today I think people would just laugh, shake their head and close the app.