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[Rant] The broken capitalist web, yet another example

Posted on 2022-10-28

Don't worry, this post is not a ranting post about why the web as it is now is broken. All people reading content on gemini is fully aware of it I'm sure. This post is just highlighting yet another example that hit me while listening (against my will^^) to the latest TV ads of a well known company. The company is Carglass, but in the rest of the post it will be companyX because I don't want to repeat their name 10 times in this post :P. For those known familiar with this brand, it is known in France for their campaign for changing your car windshield and having a very annoying catch phrase (so marketing worked well). It is also known as Belron is other countries. Anyway enough about them.

Even for big companies, the "capitalist web" is broken… I'm sure everyone on gemini has different example but the latest one was quite amusing for me.

I found very interesting the evolution of their TV ads over the years, specially the last 3 changes, pushing people to go to their site directly instead of using search engine. These changes can be summarize by this:

Massive advertising and an annoying catch phrase that may stick in your head, become the most known company for changing your car windshield in France
Start saying companyX /.fr/ in the TV ad because people "googling" "companyX" found ads for competitor before companyX content, so trying to move them away from a google search but to their site directly
Taking more time to tell you to "not forget the .fr" because you could get to "be sure to reach out to them"
Last update[1] is hilarious as they give you a speach about why you should add the ".fr". A quick translated transcript is:

you know why we say type "companyX.fr"? Because when you just search for companyX on the internet you are not always sure to find the real companyX site. So if you don't want any bad surprises there are all the companyX advantages type in the address bar which is right there www.companyX.fr and you are sure to be on the real companyX site so go now to companyX.fr

There we are… People searching for a brand on the most used search engine in the world and not finding it… They summarize perfectly the state of the web now:

when you just search for companyX on the internet you are not always sure to find the real companyX site

How broken is that?

Don't get me wrong, I really don't care about the brand and their ads, or the google ads paid by competitors to be "at the top", but I find it fascinating that search engine can't do their most basic work… What is it going to be next? Search engine are really in a shitty place right now, even for advanced users. I can't believe how harder it is now to find a response to a precise question without having to go through so much crapy results that are mostly just copies of other existing sites.

Also, it should be a good reminder that google is not a bookmark engine… It is a search engine making lots of money by allowing companies to "hack" the search results (not even talking about how they actually "play" with their ranking engine).

Footnotes

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[1]: Carglass ad link in French (HTTPS - Youtube)

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