Google's Kenyan ripoff?

edit: source is in boingboing article

The majority of comments, including the top rated one, were extremely dismissive, e.g., "malarky", and glossed or contorted the facts repeatedly to make it seem as though scammers could have easily been responsible for the evidence trail. It was always beyond unlikely that scammers could have access to a a Google corporate headquarters IP. Nor is, as was claimed in the BoingBoing comments, spoofing IP addresses something that can done without some vanishingly unlikely access to Internet infrastructure.

It makes one wonder if people in the search term can manually mess around with the results to promote their own interests.

I haven't checked, but it might be beneficial for Google to come out and say that they will never work with businesses directly to increase their online exposure outside of allowing the business to buy ad space through their official self-serve Adwords platform.

Of course, if it is corporate strategy, I suppose the big G could always get an employee to take the fall and tar them as a "loose cannon" for press purposes, but I guess I'm still clinging to the shards of "Don't Be Evil".

I wonder though if the GAE data center (or part of it) is in Google HQ.

Moreover, as someone (EDIT: the article's author) mentioned in the comments of the article When an IP address registered to Google HQ's internal network is fed a unique phone number, and one hour later that phone number rings from someone who claims to represent Google, and repeats fraudulent claims that have been made for months from entities selling a Google product (that has no affiliate program), it is reasonable to infer that this is taking place with Google's cooperation.

Which is indeed suspect.

EDIT: as this comment below shows, it cannot be GAE: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3460663

The article is implying that the IP range was one that has been officially used by Google for international business in the past, making it the smoking gun in their accusation.

Whether it's the work of rogue employees or a third party, we'll see.

for what it's worth, after i moved, google maps still showed that my old address was where my business was located. i filled out a short form saying it was not accurate any longer. there was no other contact information on the form, so i could have been anyone telling google a business had moved.

about a week later i received a call at my business number from an indian-sounding man asking if my company was no longer at my previous address. i could barely understand him, but he didn't say he was with google and once i confirmed that my business had moved, he hung up. shortly after that, my company was taken off of google maps.

so google is using manual labor, and they had to have done at least enough research to get my business phone number.

http://www.npr.org/blogs/library/2009/04/the_granting_of_pat...

I'm unclear what you are saying - do you expect perfection from Google? I don't - mistakes happen. But I do expect them to fix things when they do something wrong.

I see this as the exact type of situation that, in the past, Apple has taken its time to respond to.

Rather than move in haste and make a misstatement, it's better to gather all the facts and be fully prepared for all of the obvious questions than to have to go back and restate something later on.

Of course there are a dozen Google services that could let you serve a webpage from some Google IP, so router-level spoofing seems a bit farfetched for this scenario.