today i needed to find some moving boxes and a car to rent. first i tried to find uhaul for the boxes. impossible to find a company website.
the top thirty google listings for uhaul toronto have almost all been spammed by a single company. what’s worse that company has a talking doll as its spokesperson. i have written google to let them know about the spammer.
next i decided to rent a car, preferably from national as i had some good experience with them in the past and they were not expensive.
no luck there either. no company website turned up in the listings. do they have one?
the closest i came was a very funny epinions review of a negative experience in toronto with national car rental.
but what i needed right now was not to laugh but a car. so i pressed on.
lots of different companies offered to help me book a car. cheaper, faster, easier.
i tried to or three of them including one called hotwire. none of them actually came up with cars (do i believe toronto is sold out of rental cars right now, i guess i’ll find out tomorrow).
lessons drawn from the exercise. online commerce still has a long way to go. google is not as good as i thought it was. the optimization scams of cloaking and mirroring work a lot better than i would have liked to believe.
none of it matters as i and probably most people won’t do any business with the hardcore spammers who are easy to spot almost right away. you search for one thing and get another.
it’s really hey buddy you want to buy a watch, taken to ridiculous extremes.
so much better for bell. at least the telephone will usually get you what you want.