I searched for Nike and my scraper never found Nike
I asked my Google Ads Transparency scraper for the ads of "nike". It returned ads from two advertisers called Nikena and nikey. It returned nothing from Nike, Inc., which Google counts at 9,000 to 10,000 ads. Every row in that output was valid. Each ad had an ID, a format, dates and a link that opened. This is about two bugs like that, where nothing was missing and the answer was still wrong. It…
A Google Ads Transparency scraper was used to search for Nike-related ads. Instead of finding ads from Nike, Inc., it returned ads from two unrelated advertisers called Nikena and nikey. The scraper did not find any ads from Nike, Inc., which Google reports to have 9,000 to 10,000 ads. The source material mentions that the bug was in the scraper's code, which silently guessed the first advertiser suggested by Google without checking its accuracy.
The fix involved adding match scores to each suggested advertiser, saving all candidates with their scores, and displaying both UTC timestamps and the dates shown on the page for easier comparison. Additionally, the source material notes that 89.6% of the ads returned by the scraper were image-only, with only 14.3% being readable text ads.
Written by urgent.news from Dev.to's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
