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So you think you know me

Nury Vittachi on what Google recommends

The future of advertising has arrived. And it stinks. The week before writing this, a friend looked up “Covid deaths” on Google and received an instant survey about shopping for Covid deaths. Not everything is about shopping, Google.

Or maybe it is. A friend who got married was soon badgered by an algorithm which basically said, “We see you had a wedding, here are other weddings you can buy.”

I once looked up “Hannah Montana” on the Internet to answer a query from a young reader about Miley Cyrus’s earlier work. A note popped up on the Google results screen: “Meet girls who look like Hannah Montana on the Shek Pai Wan Resettlement Estate” Huh? How come blonde starlets in glittery clothes are hanging out in such an odd-sounding place? I asked my colleague Eddie, a tech writer, to comment and he said: “These days, computers work out exactly where you are and point you to stuff you’d like in your neighbourhood.”

How incredibly clever. Or at least it would have been if it hadn’t tried to send me to a place which sounded like a refugee camp in Darfur.

It was nearly lunchtime and I still had Google up so I did a search for eating places, typing in “Sri Lankan food”. A new message popped up: “Find hot new restaurants, bars and nightclubs at the Shek Pai Wan Resettlement Estate.”

Clearly this odd-sounding district was the happening place. Not only was it crawling with international rock babes, but you could get a decent curry there. Google Maps showed that it was round the back of Aberdeen on the south side of Hong Kong Island.

The next time I was visiting friends in that district, I took a look. It turned out to be a suspiciously dull lane with trees on one side and crumbly municipal buildings on the other.

There were no Miley Cyrus lookalikes anywhere to be seen. In fact, the youngest women there appeared to be in their early nineties. There were not a lot of blondes. In fact, no one seemed to have much hair of any color, especially the women.

And the phrase “restaurants, bars and nightclubs” turned out to be a slight exaggeration. There was a hole-in-the-wall shop selling boxed tea and adult diapers. But I assume there is some sort of giant internet exchange underground, which is why Google thinks Hong Kong computer users all live there.

That night, I shared this tragic experience with my mentor/bartender. He told me that targeted recommendations were notoriously inaccurate. We agreed that YouTube recommendations were the most annoying. This writer has no hair but regularly gets hair product videos at the top of the recommendations list. They stay there for weeks, even if I type “baldie” into the search bar every morning. After I watched David Bowie and Queen videos, my advertising feed changed to “Gay Cruises” for almost three weeks.

My laptop was in my bag, so we decided to experiment. The bartender typed in a request on Amazon to buy a “shaver for men with hairy backs”.

He was shown several shavers, plus an on-screen list of recommended products that the Amazon computer decided that a hairy-backed person like him would like to have. It said he also needed (and this is not a joke, you can try this yourself) a construction worker’s hard hat, a 10-pack of Neapolitan ice cream, a deluxe rat trap and a video called “Girls Gone Wild 2: Best Breasts Ever”.

I laughed at the absurdity of the recommendations made. But his eyes widened and he looked amazingly guilty. Hey, you know what? Perhaps they do work sometimes.

Nury Vittachi is an award-winning author and journalist based in Hong Kong. He is best known for his comedy-crime novel series, The Feng Shui Detective. Contact him via nury@vittachi.com or through his public Facebook page.