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Tuesday, 14 October 2014

Short Task - where people ask you to do random things for tiny amounts of money

Short Task is an odd website, similar to Amazon's Mechanical Turk and it is full of people making strange requests of other people for small cash payments.

This one's pretty specific (click to enlarge). It wants you to go to Google and search for "non slip rug pad ruglock spray" and say the name of the video and the product's price on Amazon. For this you get 7 cents. Obviously doing this involves running a search which presumably increases Google's indexing of this product but isn't that a strange advertising strategy?!


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2 comments:

  1. AnonymousTue Oct 14, 04:04:00 am 2014

    It's not the indexing of the product that this is manipulating - it's the *autocomplete* results. Note that they specifically ask for you to type the search and not cut-and-paste it, and the search term starts with something general but ends with what is clearly a brand name.

    The makers of "Ruglock Spray" are paying to get their name into the Google and Amazon autocomplete results.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. JoTue Oct 14, 09:20:00 am 2014

      Aha! Thanks :) Wondered what was going on. It's the bowels of the internet, that's for sure.

      Delete

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