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> nothing more than a PR stunt/tax write off

It was neither. It was a way to get people to go directly to Amazon in their browser rather than search items through Google. Clicking through Amazon from Google results gives Google an affiliate commission on those sales.

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Oh, that’s interesting. I always wondered why they didn’t allow me to just have all my amazon traffic get redirected to smile, and that would totally explain it. I probably only remembered to type smile in the browser one out of every 10 times I bought something, so my purchases could have been much more helpful to my chosen charity if it weren’t for this.

Is this observation based on knowledge of their motivations or just a deduction?

Take with a grain of salt obviously, but there was a Reddit post [1] from someone claiming to have worked there at the time and that this was the entire motivation behind it.

[1]: https://old.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/10ft5iv/amazon_...

Yeah, this was pretty widely known internally at the time (I was there 2012-2017). I didn't have first-hand exposure to the information, but I had a ton of second/third hand.

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