Using Google Suggest To See If A Company Is A Scam

from the neat-tricks dept

Jeremy Wagstaff has a neat little trick to determine if a company contacting him is likely to be a "scam" of some sort. He just types the name into the Google search bar in Firefox and lets the "Google Suggest" feature take over. Google Suggest, of course, tries to suggest what you might be searching for based on the most common searches done on what you've already started typing in. For some companies, Wagstaff has noted that many of the top results are the name of the company and "scam" or something equally questionable. It's a neat trick, though, as Wagstaff wonders, how long will it be until those companies hire "media specialists" to come up with ways to scrub the Google Suggest results. In the meantime, I'm curious when Google will end up getting sued for such a suggestion. You can bet that some company will try to twist Google Suggest into saying that Google is responsible for the implication from the suggestions, rather than the collection of Google users and their searches.

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