20241231-foogle.txt

It's another Big G rant I am extremely angry/frustrated at 3 entities,
though the one that could have stopped it before it happened is Big G.

This time, it's about their horseshit "pay for placement" strategy. I
have not used Big G Search for years. Years. My mom is not so savvy.
I told her she needed to renew her LP registration because it expires
at the end of this month. So instead of going to the fucking state DMV
site, she just types some horseshit into Big G, unbeknownst to me.
That was this afternoon, about 6 hours ago.

Then she gets a receipt from ee tee ay gee ess dot com. She says, "Oh,
I guess I paid way too much. Oh, well. It's fine." No, I told her.
It's not fine. Now I have to spend thankfully my excess free time now
searching for this horseshit site to see if it's a scam. Nothing but
negative reviews. So it is a scam in spirit if not in actual practice.
I told her she needs to contact her bank to stop the payment. She only
realized this recently and it was outside business hours so she didn't
call them. I told her she needs to call them because they may have a
24-hour support line. As she suspected, they were closed.

So probably this fucking horseshit "service," if you can even call it
that, at best charged her like 500% of the actual cost to get it
renewed. That's not exactly what I'm worried about. I'm worried about
CC theft and ID theft.

While my mom and certainly the fucking scammish site are definitely to
blame, I blame a shit-ton of this on Big G. They have every opportunity
to turn down scams or vet these businesses, but they don't. No, just
throw whatever nominal fee G charges and you're given priority
treatment without regards to facts or anything. Not even a fucking
warning that says "This site paid for placement. It may not be what
you were actually looking for." God forbid Big G would do that because
they'd either have to lower their fucking prices or lose a bunch of
business from scam artists.

And then when I tell her (granted I was quite frustrated) that she
can't just go to the first result that Big G shows, she fucking tells
me not to lecture her. I get that I'm your son, but I wouldn't fucking
"lecture" you if you didn't fall for this shit! She's smart enough to
know she paid way too much but when it comes to technology that was
invented after 2000, she turns into an idiot. I mean I guess "you
can't teach an old dog new tricks" somewhat applies, but this is my
first and only time running into having to take care of your
parent(s). I don't really understand it because she is smart,
especially with health stuff. I hope it's not dementia, but she hasn't
had any episodes of forgetting her name or mixing up family members.
And again, she's smart enough to catch on after the fact that
something isn't right, but she didn't do anything to fix it until I
followed up with her about it.

Fuck Big G, fuck scammers, and fuck ads. Get uBlock Origin, Adblock
Plus, Adaway (Android), DNS66 (Android) today. I'm probably preaching
to the choir, but the little time it took to type that could save just
one person from hours of headache.