They're definitely not trying - in any form. I run a marketplace for dogs (i.e. craigslist for puppies & dogs) and scammers are always trying to post fakes ads. They always use Gmail accounts. Every time I ban a gmail address, they scammers will just get a new one. Same scammer/person has created thousands of gmail accounts and Google doesn't care. I have reported this to Google. For the amount of info Google has on people, trivial for them to prevent some of this.
My wife has a masters degree in marketing. She ditched the desk job to become a dog breeder. She's never going to have desk job ever again. After a few years she asked me to build online business related to it (https://www.canadapups.com). I think the key is to mix expertise. Marketing + dogs, technology + dogs, technology + coffee. If someone feels like they need to switch careers, it's probably a great idea - good chance of success in the next career due to bringing the previous careers skills to the new one.
I did the same thing but dumped it into a table. Small enough dataset that can load the entire thing and just use jquery to filter via drop down selector.
To make it useful I tried filter on characteristics that a buyer would be interested in such as long-haired vs. short.
I also gathered the data manually. I'll have to compare datasets
I run an online marketplace. It's a constant battle against scammers putting up fake items to sell. While I do run "content moderation" to identify the scams, the fakes are identical or nearly identical to the real items. Content moderation isn't the solution for me. As other commenters point out it's just war of attrition or cycle of escalation from a few bad actors.
The only effective method I have now is fingerprinting (i.e., invading users privacy). Browsers are becoming more privacy oriented so at time goes on fingerprinting will be less effective, with more people being scammed online. I don't think those that want privacy at all costs understand the trade off.
In a few months, I will move to an voluntary fingerprinting/identification scheme soon (like GDPR cookies opt in). Where you identify yourself or don't use my website... which may leave me as a "die an MVP" example.
My website was built in the 1.x version days and I don't think there have been any material breaking changes. My website is moderate in complexity... authentication, database, forms, file uploads, email, language support.
> Their typical died consists of a mixture of green or yellow split peas, pressure cooked for 43 minutes, then blended to a medium-thickness liquid, and cooked brown rice
That's starting to sound like Beyond Meat's recipe!
It is not a meme. Rescue dogs often have issues. While not all, probably >50% in my personal ~10 dog sample size. At 50% it is worth a warning to new dog owners and shouldn't be outright dismissed.
Rescue dogs are usually surrendered because the owner didn't train them. So even excluding any emotional issues, the dog has to be broken of bad habits. A new puppy won't soil where it sleeps, so house training is easy. But a dog that's been locked up most of it's life will, and extra effort in training is needed... not the best for a new dog owner.
I used to live in an area with lots of apartment buildings and had to babysit a friends dog for a couple of weeks. I met a couple of people when I took the dog out at 6:30am because they were doing the same thing. Ran into the same people every day. Plus you always let the dogs visit (sniff each other) so starting a conversation is almost automatic.
Now I have my own dogs. Easy to meet people if you go to obedience, agility, or other dog classes.
With a dog you get all of the above, plus the affection from the dog, plus the additional exercise.
You can get a sense of advertising fees by looking at comparable newspaper ads and industry trade magazines. Even take a look at billboard or radio ads. Custom ads will be an order of magnitude higher that what you get from Google.
We started doing that too, in addition to Google ads. We deal directly with the advertiser, self host a specific ad for them. It's MUCH more profitable than Google ads. Will phase out the Google Ads soon.
Minimal work involved. A bunch of emails back and forth, where we tell them our ad size if they provide an image. Or they provide a logo and we manually ad the text if they aren't technical enough to provide a custom image.
Yeah, the magic is a big problem for me. When I was a absolute beginner, even knowing which magic (ruby gems) to pick was a problem. In contrast, Django has all of the functionality within the library, all working together. After I launched my website and became more experienced, I started replacing the default parts with custom parts. Django's explicitness and lack of magic made that easy.
What's wrong with Samoyeds? I understand corgis (dwarfism) and bulldogs (breathing problems) and american german shepherds (hip problems). A quick internet search didn't bring anything up regarding samoyeds and even says they have 12 - 14 life span and breed has been around for a long time.
Wow, that is the interesting article, not the wikipedia one. Some excerpts:
"The groundbreaking approach is based on analyzing the bioelectric activity of the animals' brain and central nervous system"
"Because of errors in "signal behavior," the accuracy achieved by the traditional dog method is only 60 percent, says Zaripov. However, the new method being used has increased detection accuracy to nearly 100 percent."
While we hate Google for the privacy invasion in advertising, reCAPTCHA is one the areas that is a definite positive. Google has the data and the unique position to make the web safer. I wish they did more.
Need to give them credit for fighting: hurting malicious websites by not sending them traffic, keeping search results relevant against SEO abuses, cutting down email spam effectiveness, ... and reCaptcha.
All of this becomes very relevant when you run our own online business like I do. You can lament that google knows you're shopping for a new car, but my users lose real dollars if a scammer gets on my website - and google provides the tools to combat this.
And, no you can't implement your own captcha. No matter how smart you think you are, you don't have the data that Google does.
No, my point is Google allows and/or enables fraud and they could be doing more to fight it. Source: the article we are discussing, "How a Massive Ad Fraud Scheme Exploited Android Phones to Steal Millions". And my experience with scammers using Gmail.