Why does searching Google for random hex lead to car dealers? [video]

https://tmp.tonybox.net/hexgoog.mp4

by bonyt • 2 years ago

133 71 2 years ago

tmp.tonybox.net

Terr_• 2 years ago

Weird... Maybe Google thinks that the closest inexact match is a VIN number?

lambdaxyzw• 2 years ago

Weird premise. I search for random hex literally all the time (checking hashes and guessing algorithms as a part of my reverse engineering work) and I don't remember car dealers coming up especially often. I suspect it's just the author who - because of their location or the previous search history - gets more targetted car dealership ads.

joe_the_user3• 2 years ago

But the results here aren't ads - at least they appear to be regular search results.

dtagames• 2 years ago

Most likely some part of the string matches the VIN number. Dealers are legally required to post the VIN of an actual vehicle in any advertisements that have a price, as a way of preventing bait-and-switch.

dawnerd• 2 years ago

And yet they still bait and switch. Most recently-ish with added markups not in their online price.

cratermoon4• 2 years ago

Or just claiming the vehicle is currently unavailable or not yet for sale because it's in the shop/in use as a loaner/the manager has a hold on it or some BS, but here's a very similar vehicle that we'd love to unload on you!

It's very technically legal because they do have the vehicle in their inventory, and you can test drive and buy it, but just not right then.

OptionOfT• 2 years ago

Funny, in Europe that's absolutely not the case.

I watched some government sale and they posted a PDF vehicles for sale that were forfeited.

The VINs where there but parts of it where blacked out.

It was a PDF. I copy-pasted the text behind the black box and got the full VIN.

dylan6045• 2 years ago

It was a PDF. I copy-pasted the text behind the black box and got the full VIN.

You're such a hacker. As the world turns now, I'd expect some legislation that says if you copy the text from a badly created PDF, then you are the one to blame and not the one that made the bad document. You're clearly circumventing the intent. You you...criminal.

londons_explore• 2 years ago

In Europe VIN's of cars are treated a little like SSN's are treated in the US. Some governments assume that just because you know the VIN of a vehicle, you must be it's owner, despite many vehicles having the VIN written on every bit of glass and visible without even unlocking the car...

CommieBobDole• 2 years ago

Looking at this very briefly, the results seem to always be inventory pages for the dealerships, which use long strings of hex or just random numbers as identifiers for the vehicles they have for sale.

For example, a search for "ca7112b7167c15e621412c0fbc0a6c97" brings up the URL "https://www.premierclearancecenterofstbernard.com/inventory/...", which has a gallery of vehicles at the bottom whose image names are of the format "9b362510c100095f02cf3cad9e365ea6.jpg".

I assume something inside the Google black box is saying "well, there's no exact match but this site has a bunch of strings with most of the same characters, so here you go".

Edit: And to add to this, I'd surmise that the reason you see a lot of car dealerships in these results is that they sell a lot of one-offs - instead of having a list of SKUs in inventory, they sell a unique vehicle just once, so the inventory systems need to account for that by using long strings as item IDs and the like. Also there's probably a limited number of inventory systems out there, so a bunch of random dealerships are probably all using the same one.

libria2• 2 years ago

no exact match but this site has a bunch of strings with most of the same characters

I suspect it's something similar, but more like partial string match which may score as "close enough to display". I get consistent results with the same hex string - dealerships - but if I quote it (exact match), I get no matches.

rerdavies2• 2 years ago

I suspect there's a single word embedding for WTF_IS_THAT.

cedws2• 2 years ago

Back when Google search was good this query would have returned no results. As it should do. Now it desperately tries to dig up anything it can find just so the number of results is not zero. Somebody at Google wanted to the increase search 'hit rate' KPI and this is the result.

refulgentis2• 2 years ago

That doesn't sound right to me: Google used to suppress results with string matches?

Why?

If so, would that be a good thing?

Why shouldn't I be able to find the vehicle via its ID?

duxup• 2 years ago

Is there anyway we can somehow find out that is true?

I could have sworn google always was happy to return some odd url matches, typically when the given results weren't great.

noqc• 2 years ago

Garbage in garbage out is fine here, no? I hate google quite as much as the next person here, but this seems like a non-issue. If I type in a random string, it should be assumed that I'm searching for something.

SquareWheel• 2 years ago

If you put quotes around the string (the "exact match" operator), the only results are this very thread. So it seems to be working as intended.

Basically, you did a fuzzy search and got a fuzzy result. Usually that's what people want. Quotes will let you fine-tune results. Or if you want all results to be strict by default, use verbatim mode. I tested that with the above string and again, only this thread showed up.

shadowgovt2• 2 years ago

I can't tell you the number of times I've searched for random serial numbers and gotten the exact product I seek. I'm glad Google indexes this random crap.

Galatians4_16• 2 years ago

I miss when Google had thousands of results, and you could browse past page 5. Now it just lies to you.

1vuio0pswjnm7• 2 years ago

An experiment would be to create high quality, non-commercial websites with pages containing these hex strings and see if the pages appear in Google SERPs.

The fact that Google returns car dealerships when the user is searching for hex strings is telling.

confused_boner• 2 years ago

Bing search results for that are interesting

shadowgovt2• 2 years ago

Additionally, the user is doing the search in a non-Incognito session, so the system will bias based on assumption of user preferences. "Hm, I see this random hex identifier in three pages... Oh, but this user likes cars. Let's give 'em the car result first."

wlesieutre• 2 years ago

Edit: And to add to this, I'd surmise that the reason you see a lot of car dealerships in these results is that they sell a lot of one-offs - instead of having a list of SKUs in inventory, they sell a unique vehicle just once, so the inventory systems need to account for that by using long strings as item IDs and the like.

If only there were some sort of standardized identification number for vehicles

alanh• 2 years ago

I DO NOT BUY IT. Plenty of sites use unique identifiers and other random hex strings all over, e.g., fingerprinted assets. If your explanation were accurate I would expect more kinds of sites to show up

joe_the_user3• 2 years ago

I think this is notable just because it's a result of Google now having every single search result set be trying to sell you something. That's different from simply having targeted ads and rather disturbing.

cratermoon4• 2 years ago

Google is now a glorified Yellow Pages, assuming that every search is a search for a business.

libria2• 2 years ago

Repro'd in an incognito window so it's not a history thing. 1st 3 of OPs strings if anyone else is experimenting (remove spaces):

    3344cfb4 78ead204a49b88 1da6079adf8a
    e2c75c64 eef8087f6f36df 57
    eb944335 73626fe9b73550 b02a651620d8

Shoot, depending on crawling, this may end up causing this page to match. I'm injecting spaces above to deter this, but maybe it'll also prove out the partial string match theory...

1970-01-01• 2 years ago

I'm only getting back 2 results: Citi.com and FDIC.gov

Clicking on the 3 dots gives me this info:

     Your search & this result
     This result seems relevant even though this search term may not appear: 
     3344cfb478ead204a49b881da6079adf8a

qnleigh• 2 years ago

Good guesses in the comments so far: VIN number partial matches and targeted search. Anyone going to test what's correct?

Ideas: 1. Vin numbers are 17 characters and don't contain I, O or Q, to prevent confusion with other letters. If you throw in lots of these always spaced by less than 17 characters, do you get fewer hits?

2. Does a VPN and/or private browsing affect the results?

A third possibility is that Google has cheaper ad category for search queries that they can't categorize. This doesn't explain the diversity of dealerships though.

joe_the_user3• 2 years ago

Sure, it's matching VINs. But in the vast expanse of the net, surely there are many strings of random hex out there. Why this source of random digits.

arresin• 2 years ago

Probably the most authoritive sites with weird strings

chuckadams• 2 years ago

Mercedes uses 18-digit vins, tho I believe it’s the same format and checksum algorithm for the first 17 digits so it’s really more “17 + 1 digits”. Still drives validators nuts tho.

ww520• 2 years ago

The word embeddings computed from the hex values and the car dealership's inventory ID's probably have close similarity in Google's vector db.

rerdavies2• 2 years ago

I like that theory, but with one slight modification.

There's a single word embedding for DARNED_IF_I_KNOW, and, statistically, automobile listings outnumber other pages with the DARNED_IF_I_KNOW token.

omoikane• 2 years ago

I see that digits is between 10 and 19:

   DIGITS=$((10 + $RANDOM % 10))

If it was always an even number, I would have expected some checksum files to be matched (16 for md5sum, 20 for sha1sum, etc).

jimbobthrowawy• 2 years ago

I tend to get variations on cryptocurrency block explorer websites mostly.

It's annoying when I want to search for a btih or something exact.

cratermoon4• 2 years ago

I'm going to guess that google makes more money from car dealer ads than it does for programmers searching for hex codes. Also probably just because Google's search is more and more giving irrelevant results.

hi-v-rocknroll• 2 years ago

Perhaps Google trolls anyone in security or torrenting, and would instead prefer to show CPM/CPC ads to charge instead of nothing because money. /s

worik• 2 years ago

Search bubble?

Why does searching Google for random hex lead to car dealers? [video]

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