<story><title>Why does searching Google for random hex lead to car dealers? [video]</title><url>https://tmp.tonybox.net/hexgoog.mp4</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>CommieBobDole</author><text>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.&lt;p&gt;For example, a search for &amp;quot;ca7112b7167c15e621412c0fbc0a6c97&amp;quot; brings up the URL
&amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.premierclearancecenterofstbernard.com&amp;#x2F;inventory&amp;#x2F;certified-used-2021-toyota-sequoia-limited-4wd-4d-sport-utility-5tdfy5b14ms183153&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.premierclearancecenterofstbernard.com&amp;#x2F;inventory&amp;#x2F;...&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot;, which has a gallery of vehicles at the bottom whose image names are of the format &amp;quot;9b362510c100095f02cf3cad9e365ea6.jpg&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;I assume something inside the Google black box is saying &amp;quot;well, there&amp;#x27;s no exact match but this site has a bunch of strings with most of the same characters, so here you go&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;Edit: And to add to this, I&amp;#x27;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&amp;#x27;s probably a limited number of inventory systems out there, so a bunch of random dealerships are probably all using the same one.</text></comment>
<story><title>Why does searching Google for random hex lead to car dealers? [video]</title><url>https://tmp.tonybox.net/hexgoog.mp4</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>dtagames</author><text>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.</text></comment>