Thus forcing everone to wonder why, if they believe some results are fraudelent, they are showing them to us at all.
Hovering over a checkmark will display a message that explains “Google’s signals suggest that this business is the business that it says it is,” which is determined by things like
I guess this due diligence cost time and money. And doing this due diligence for every ad customer might affect their bottom line.
Lets trust the company with an illegal monopoly with verification checkmarks I am sure nothing will go wrong.
Luckily duck is good enough-ish.
I wonder how much they'll charge for it.
The playbook as I understand it is that they offer a community improvement for free at first to get you hooked and then once everyone is entirely reliant upon it that's when they do the rug pull.
So there is a good chance that Google search will improve for the next 6 to 18 months while they are doing this just know that this is a temporary reprieve from the enshittification solely to prime the engine for the enshittification to get massively worse.
Anyone who has had to troubleshoot anything Windows related knows just how useless anything from a Microsoft website is.
How much will it affect ranking in the search algorithm? When will they announce the asking price? What about legitimate sites that cannot pony up that inevitable price?
Call me conspiratorial but this seems like a way to further subjugate civil society to cooperate society. . “Oh well, they couldn’t make a profit to pay for the blue check, so they’re not legitimate”
Can't affect the ranking in the EU as that would be considered advertising. But it will drive more clicks anyway
Next up, a paid Google subscription for a blue check mark in the search results.
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