Looking at this very briefly, the results seem to always be inventory pages for the dealerships, which use long strings of hex or just random numbers as identifiers for the vehicles they have for sale.<p>For example, a search for "ca7112b7167c15e621412c0fbc0a6c97" brings up the URL
"<a href="https://www.premierclearancecenterofstbernard.com/inventory/certified-used-2021-toyota-sequoia-limited-4wd-4d-sport-utility-5tdfy5b14ms183153/" rel="nofollow">https://www.premierclearancecenterofstbernard.com/inventory/...</a>", which has a gallery of vehicles at the bottom whose image names are of the format "9b362510c100095f02cf3cad9e365ea6.jpg".<p>I assume something inside the Google black box is saying "well, there's no exact match but this site has a bunch of strings with most of the same characters, so here you go".<p>Edit: And to add to this, I'd surmise that the reason you see a lot of car dealerships in these results is that they sell a lot of one-offs - instead of having a list of SKUs in inventory, they sell a unique vehicle just once, so the inventory systems need to account for that by using long strings as item IDs and the like. Also there's probably a limited number of inventory systems out there, so a bunch of random dealerships are probably all using the same one.
Repro'd in an incognito window so it's not a history thing. 1st 3 of OPs strings if anyone else is experimenting (remove spaces):<p><pre><code> 3344cfb4 78ead204a49b88 1da6079adf8a
e2c75c64 eef8087f6f36df 57
eb944335 73626fe9b73550 b02a651620d8
</code></pre>
--<p>Shoot, depending on crawling, this may end up causing this page to match. I'm injecting spaces above to deter this, but maybe it'll also prove out the partial string match theory...
Most likely some part of the string matches the VIN number. Dealers are legally required to post the VIN of an actual vehicle in any advertisements that have a price, as a way of preventing bait-and-switch.
Good guesses in the comments so far: VIN number partial matches and targeted search. Anyone going to test what's correct?<p>Ideas:
1. Vin numbers are 17 characters and don't contain I, O or Q, to prevent confusion with other letters. If you throw in lots of these always spaced by less than 17 characters, do you get fewer hits?<p>2. Does a VPN and/or private browsing affect the results?<p>A third possibility is that Google has cheaper ad category for search queries that they can't categorize. This doesn't explain the diversity of dealerships though.
The word embeddings computed from the hex values and the car dealership's inventory ID's probably have close similarity in Google's vector db.
Weird premise. I search for random hex literally all the time (checking hashes and guessing algorithms as a part of my reverse engineering work) and I don't remember car dealers coming up especially often. I suspect it's just the author who - because of their location or the previous search history - gets more targetted car dealership ads.
I think this is notable just because it's a result of Google now having every single search result set be trying to sell you something. That's different from simply having targeted ads and rather disturbing.
I see that digits is between 10 and 19:<p><pre><code> DIGITS=$((10 + $RANDOM % 10))
</code></pre>
If it was always an even number, I would have expected some checksum files to be matched (16 for md5sum, 20 for sha1sum, etc).
I'm going to guess that google makes more money from car dealer ads than it does for programmers searching for hex codes. Also probably just because Google's search is more and more giving irrelevant results.
Perhaps Google trolls anyone in security or torrenting, and would instead prefer to show CPM/CPC ads to charge instead of nothing because money. /s