Why You Can’t Always Trust the ‘Best’ Search Results

[00:00:00] 3, 2, 1

[00:00:03] What will the world look like 10 or 20 years from now?

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[00:00:10] And we can't wait to show you what's coming.

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[00:00:19] Welcome to Tech News Briefing.

[00:00:20] It's Friday, January 3rd.

[00:00:23] I'm Cordelia James for The Wall Street Journal.

[00:00:25] The space to build data centers to support artificial intelligence is limited.

[00:00:30] And everyone wants a piece.

[00:00:33] WSJ housing reporter Will Parker tells us why major tech companies have their sights set on Atlanta

[00:00:39] and why the city is pushing back.

[00:00:42] And then, it's getting harder to tell which reviews online are good

[00:00:46] and which ones are too good to be true.

[00:00:50] WSJ reporter Andrea Fuller went down a rabbit hole of questionable online product rankings.

[00:00:56] And she tells us what to look out for so you don't fall for phony reviews.

[00:01:00] But first, data centers provide the computing power needed for the AI boom.

[00:01:09] But the amount of space available to build them is in short supply.

[00:01:13] Big tech companies, including Meta, Google, Microsoft, and X,

[00:01:17] have turned to Atlanta to build bigger, more powerful facilities.

[00:01:21] Data center construction is growing faster in Atlanta than in just about any other major city.

[00:01:27] Now, though, Atlanta residents and lawmakers are pushing back.

[00:01:31] For more on this, we're joined by WSJ housing reporter Will Parker.

[00:01:35] Will, why do real estate developers have their sights set on Atlanta?

[00:01:39] Atlanta has gotten really popular for data centers for a few reasons.

[00:01:43] It's got cheap land and cheap electricity,

[00:01:47] and it's got fiber optic internet connectivity.

[00:01:52] That's some of the best in the country.

[00:01:55] And those are the places that real estate companies that are putting up these warehouses,

[00:01:59] essentially, for large computing services are looking to go to.

[00:02:03] Okay, so how has the presence of these data centers impacted Atlanta?

[00:02:08] Atlanta is one of the places where they've really grown very, very quickly.

[00:02:12] A lot of them are in suburban areas, but in the city, too,

[00:02:15] there's been a lot of interest in building them.

[00:02:18] You've seen them come up in downtowns.

[00:02:20] They've filled up empty office spaces there, but also redevelopment sites.

[00:02:25] Large available empty lots in Atlanta that might be primed for apartments or retail

[00:02:31] and other contexts of the real estate cycles have been really attractive to some of these data center companies

[00:02:37] because that's a type of building that there is a lot of demand for.

[00:02:41] Banks are willing to finance it, and it's seen as a pretty profitable investment bet right now

[00:02:47] when other real estate sectors are not looking quite as hot for the time being.

[00:02:52] So it sounds like this could be good for cities.

[00:02:55] But you reported that in September, the city council banned new data centers

[00:02:59] from opening in neighborhoods near transit and the Beltline.

[00:03:03] Why is Atlanta pushing back?

[00:03:05] Yeah, the city of Atlanta has a lot of things it would like to do with its available land.

[00:03:09] They have a housing shortage and affordability issue there that has been growing.

[00:03:13] And some of the land that data center operators are attracted to

[00:03:17] is land that would be primed for building more housing.

[00:03:20] This is land around transit corridors close to the Martyr rail station.

[00:03:25] And the problem right now is that not that many people are building apartments due to financing issues.

[00:03:29] Interest rates are much higher. Rent growth has tapered off.

[00:03:32] So investors have pulled back from that.

[00:03:34] And the city is worried that if all of that land fills up with data centers,

[00:03:38] by the time the market is more suitable for apartment construction again,

[00:03:43] you know, a lot of the sites that would have been really great to put more housing won't be available anymore.

[00:03:48] What could this mean for other cities with these data centers across the U.S.?

[00:03:53] There haven't been that many examples of yet to, you know,

[00:03:56] restricting the construction of new data centers to this extent.

[00:03:59] And this is really focused on the land use side of data centers.

[00:04:02] But there's been a lot of blowback to the growth of data centers really around the use of energy consumption

[00:04:09] and how much electricity they require and some of the environmental concerns related to that.

[00:04:15] You're likely to see the pushback against these grow and to lead to more policy changes.

[00:04:20] Some of that's inevitable.

[00:04:22] In Northern Virginia, you've had one county that has done something similar to Atlanta

[00:04:25] where they have restricted where the centers can be built.

[00:04:28] That's going to be more common.

[00:04:31] That was WSJ Housing reporter Will Parker.

[00:04:34] Coming up, why you may not always be able to trust the so-called best and top-rated products in your search results.

[00:04:42] That's after the break.

[00:04:43] What then will the future reveal?

[00:04:53] There's one thing we know about the future.

[00:04:55] It's being built now.

[00:04:57] We all have a stake in the future.

[00:04:59] The future.

[00:04:59] The future.

[00:05:00] The future.

[00:05:01] And the Wall Street Journal's Future of Everything podcast is here to give you a glimpse of what's on the way.

[00:05:06] I'm Danny Lewis.

[00:05:07] Join us as we dig into how science and technology are shaping the future.

[00:05:11] For that is where you and I are going to spend the rest of our lives.

[00:05:15] Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

[00:05:24] Searching the web for the best product to buy can be tough, especially when you don't know who to trust.

[00:05:30] Our reporter, Andrea Fuller, says her family almost fell for some clever marketing when searching Google for vacuums this holiday season.

[00:05:37] She went digging and found that SnapBuy, a site that claimed to sell the top-rated vacuum in the U.S.,

[00:05:44] had its glowing testimonials from ProductReports.org,

[00:05:47] another site that appeared among the top-sponsored links in her Google search.

[00:05:51] Andrea joins us now with more.

[00:05:53] You described four fake review traps.

[00:05:57] Let's start with the first one, sponsored links.

[00:06:00] Why should we avoid them while searching?

[00:06:02] When you search Google for something, the first couple links are going to say sponsored,

[00:06:07] and those are really just ads.

[00:06:10] Somebody has paid for that to appear highly in Google search.

[00:06:14] And the case here is there was an ad for a site called ProductReports,

[00:06:20] which ostensibly looked like a review site, turned out to be more of a marketing site.

[00:06:28] But for someone like my dad, who was looking at this very quickly, looking at a lot of vacuums,

[00:06:33] most people would come across one of these links, assume it actually is an independent consumer ratings link,

[00:06:40] and then click on it.

[00:06:41] Now, some of them, obviously, you can have sponsored links that take you to legitimate websites.

[00:06:46] People need to do the research associated with a particular site before they get in too deep.

[00:06:52] Google says that all ads go through automated review or human review before they're posted.

[00:06:58] And Google has ad policies, and any ads that have misleading product information violate its policies.

[00:07:06] However, in this case, Google determined that the ad linking to the product report site wasn't in violation of its policies.

[00:07:15] Got it.

[00:07:16] Okay, so the next trap.

[00:07:19] Alleged experts.

[00:07:21] What steps should you take to suss out whether or not the reviewer is legit?

[00:07:24] People, anytime they're shopping, particularly for the holidays, are going to search best vacuums, best dishwashers, best laundry machines.

[00:07:31] And you're going to get a lot of rankings.

[00:07:33] There's some ranking sites that are very reputable, whether Consumer Reports or something like Wirecutter.

[00:07:40] And there are others that you don't know whether you're looking at rankings that are legitimate

[00:07:46] or have been set up to promote a particular product.

[00:07:50] When I started looking at product reports, I found that this site didn't appear to have an address.

[00:07:59] None of its social media links worked.

[00:08:01] The guy who was purporting to review these vacuums was actually a stock photo that appeared on even on the same website with different names.

[00:08:11] And so those were ways I was able to determine, actually, product reports may not be what it says it is.

[00:08:19] I did reach out to product reports.

[00:08:21] The emails didn't go through that I sent to the addresses on the website.

[00:08:26] And the phone number on product reports website doesn't work.

[00:08:30] Trap number three, the website.

[00:08:32] Some of these look so convincing.

[00:08:34] Even you almost fell for one.

[00:08:35] What should people look out for on these sites?

[00:08:38] So product reports, in this case, directed me to the site SnapBuy.

[00:08:42] So SnapBuy, it looked really glitzy, but then it had these As Seen On logos for this vacuum.

[00:08:50] And one of the key things people should check out is when you see an As Seen On logo, okay, was this actually featured on something?

[00:08:57] And so one of the As Seen Ons was Fox News.

[00:09:00] I started doing some research, and I couldn't find any articles that mentioned this vacuum or this company on Fox News' website.

[00:09:09] So that's a red flag.

[00:09:11] This site that I was looking at, it was in Germany, and the only customer service phone number was in Germany.

[00:09:18] And you had to call between the hours of something like 3 a.m. and 9 a.m. Eastern time if you wanted customer service.

[00:09:25] And then you call, and no one picks up.

[00:09:28] These are things that you should look around a website.

[00:09:30] Is this actually a U.S.-based company?

[00:09:33] What's their return policy?

[00:09:35] A lot of these things weren't very clear from this particular website.

[00:09:39] Okay, and the final trap you mentioned was five-star reviews, which can be hard, especially if you're trying to shop for the best thing out there.

[00:09:48] Why might these reviews be too good to be true?

[00:09:51] So this is something that the journal has written a lot about, fake reviews, and how people can manipulate this by getting people to write positive reviews for them.

[00:10:01] However, in this particular case, it was actually a step further because the site, SnapBuy, had images of Trustpilot five stars.

[00:10:12] And so people see Trustpilot five stars, they think, ah, independently this company or this product has been received support from an outside review site like Trustpilot, where people go in and they vote this is a trustworthy site or not.

[00:10:26] But then, of course, I went to Trustpilot and found, hey, wait a minute, a lot of these reviews about this company that are on Trustpilot sites seem to be inflated.

[00:10:36] They say unusual things like, oh, this was a great shopping experience.

[00:10:40] I haven't actually received a product yet from them, which are red flags.

[00:10:44] If the positive reviews are not specific enough, if they are very vague, those are red flags.

[00:10:50] The negative reviews, on the other hand, were much more concerning, which say, I never actually got a product.

[00:10:58] I couldn't reach this company.

[00:10:59] They have no customer service.

[00:11:01] And so one thing you should check is when a company has Trustpilot branding on its website but doesn't actually link back to Trustpilot, that's a red flag.

[00:11:12] And after I raised this issue in this particular case to Trustpilot, Trustpilot put a warning about this company on its website.

[00:11:19] At the time, I called them Snap-by had 4.4 stars on Trustpilot and Trustpilot removed those stars.

[00:11:28] And when you go to its page, it issued a warning at the top of its site.

[00:11:33] What about Snap-by?

[00:11:34] How did they respond?

[00:11:35] So I reached out to Snap-by for comment a number of times.

[00:11:40] Snap-by did respond to me.

[00:11:43] And I had asked the questions a number of times through a number of channels over the course of a number of days.

[00:11:51] But ultimately, they didn't answer any of my questions or engage about their relationship with product reports.

[00:11:59] The company that owned Snap-by was the company that was paying for the product reports ad.

[00:12:05] They wouldn't engage with questions about their Trustpilot branding.

[00:12:08] That was our reporter, Andrea Fuller.

[00:12:12] And that's it for Tech News Briefing.

[00:12:14] Today's show was produced by Julie Chang.

[00:12:16] I'm your host, Cordelia James.

[00:12:19] We had additional support this week from Danny Lewis and Belle Lynn.

[00:12:23] Jessica Fenton and Michael LaValle wrote our theme music.

[00:12:26] Our supervising producer is Catherine Millsop.

[00:12:29] Our development producer is Aisha Al-Musli.

[00:12:32] Scott Salloway and Chris Zinsley are the deputy editors.

[00:12:35] And Felana Patterson is the Wall Street Journal's head of news audio.

[00:12:40] We'll be back this afternoon with TNB Tech Minute.

[00:12:43] Thanks for listening.