By Cory Doctorow (GPG 0xBF3D9110957E5F4C) @doctorow.pluralistic.net · 05/08/2026This scammer - based out of a UC Berkeley dorm-room - had copied *hundreds* of restaurant websites, then bought Google ads for the restaurants' names, ensuring that searchers would see the scam result *before* the real one. 31/ 1515
By Cory Doctorow (GPG 0xBF3D9110957E5F4C) @doctorow.pluralistic.net · 05/08/2026Remember: Google *knows* what the true URL is for every one of those restaurants but it sold the scammer ads for a different URL that appeared when people searched for the restaurant by name. 32/ 1563
By Cory Doctorow (GPG 0xBF3D9110957E5F4C) @doctorow.pluralistic.net · 05/08/2026Google could trivially add a step to the ad sales pipeline that detects mismatches between a merchant's known URL and the URL in an ad bought against the merchant's name. 33/ 1495
