“First page internet presence guaranteed!”

That’s the tagline of the bus bench ad I see driving to university. “If you’re not using us you’re losing money. FIRST PAGE INTERNET PRESENCE GUARANTEED!” it says, followed by a local phone number. No website, which isn’t surprising when I think about it. What is surprising is that this shady seeming ad isn’t a Russian phone number, because there is no first page of the internet. Plenty of people have Google as a homepage, but that’s certainly not the first page if you go through google.com first, is it? It’s the second even if it’s the first result.

So there’s two options the way I see it. One is that they mean first page AFTER a search, which is misleading the customers who really don’t realize Google is the first page of the internet because they know nothing of computers. Second is that they’re serious, and an incredibly shady spyware operation that really will make you the first page when someone opens a browser, the last page when they try to close it, and everything in between. Granted, I don’t think it’s actually good for your company to give the impression you infect computers, but the customers this company expects likely don’t understand the concept.

So everyone wins but the customer. And us! So nobody but the shady russian spyware production company wins, I guess. It’s like Alien Vs. Predator but the humans win, and nobody likes that ending.