In today's snail mail was a flyer from Google Ads to my small company, "Reach more customers searching for your business." These things are coming in nearly as frequently as the AOL floppies of yore.
Next to this heading was a picture of a phone with "engineering consultant" in the Google search bar. Under that was the name of my company, as if it had been found by a search. The full company name is:
Anonymous Engineering Associates, Inc.
but maybe you can guess what mindless truncation did to that--yes, right there on the cover to the advert, and also inside it said,
Anonymous Engineering, Ass...
4.7 ***** 112 Reviews
I wondered why Google Ads had a reason to insult me, so I called the number inside, 1-855-287-5178 to complain about the incompetent ad agency or whoever programmed that variable data printing. Got a guy, only a few seconds on hold (since I was a potential customer), but when I tried to explain, he tried to tell me that this snail mail card, with "Copyright 2018. Google..." on the back wasn't from Google Ads!
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 01 2018, @03:21AM (4 children)
Google is lying or some impostor is fronting to be Google. Which is it?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by aristarchus on Monday October 01 2018, @03:45AM
And to think, we could have had an aristarchus submission, in all its untruncated glory.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 01 2018, @07:24AM (1 child)
There's a period after 2018 and before Google, so the answer is option 3: The poster doesn't know how to read and thus made incorrect assumptions about the ad.
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 01 2018, @10:59AM
(Score: 3, Informative) by toddestan on Tuesday October 02 2018, @02:38AM
I've gotten spam from scammers claiming to be Google, the basic pitch is that my website is not indexed by Google (not actually my website, but still a lie) and for a fee they can fix that. I've reported them to Google figuring their team of lawyers wouldn't take someone impersonating Google like that lightly, but the big G doesn't seem to really care.