Stuff that occurs to me

All of my 'how to' posts are tagged here. The most popular posts are about blocking and private accounts on Twitter, also the science communication jobs list. None of the science or medical information I might post to this blog should be taken as medical advice (I'm not medically trained).

Think of this blog as a sort of nursery for my half-baked ideas hence 'stuff that occurs to me'.

Contact: @JoBrodie Email: jo DOT brodie AT gmail DOT com

Science in London: The 2018/19 scientific society talks in London blog post

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?!


2 comments:

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

      Delete

Comment policy: I enthusiastically welcome corrections and I entertain polite disagreement ;) Because of the nature of this blog it attracts a LOT - 5 a day at the moment - of spam comments (I write about spam practices,misleading marketing and unevidenced quackery) and so I'm more likely to post a pasted version of your comment, removing any hyperlinks.

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