Do-It-Yourself Google Consumer Surveys (#gsurveys) make it possible to throw away money like nothing else. Over and over, we see examples of people trying to test the invisible against the invisible. Here is the latest example:

We have a lot of great-big hi-resolution monitors in this office, and carry this ad from screen-to-screen though we did, we cannot even tell which industry these side-by-side (apparent) advertisements come from, much less what they are advertising, much less what the microscopic text says. We are doing our best to show this example (as we show all #gsurveys examples), actual size, so you see the question exactly as the respondent would see the question.

At first, we thought the ad on the left was for Coke, with the many different red and silver cylinders, and the ad on the right was for new Lesbian Coke, but we decided we were wrong. So we turn this one over to you, and ask you: what in the world are these ads about, and who do we think approved this before it ran? An advertising agency? A brand manager? Who could have thought it was a good idea to put these images in front of consumers and — by God — antagonize the hell out of consumers. Just make them irate.

What kind of possible learning could come from this #gsurveys question as it appears? Nothing. So the DIY researcher will almost certainly try, try again. This is exactly the Google AdWords model. Each small business will spend a few hundred dollars, or a few thousand dollars using Do-It-Yourself Google Adwords incorrectly, and then eventually either give up, or, Google hopes, go to one of dozens of “pay per click” specialty firms who have taken root, parasitically, on the Google Adwords beast.

If you think illegible images are an infrequent occurrence with #gsurveys, you are wrong. Illegibility happens all the time:

We assume that the image, above-right, is of a eye-drop product with the antlers still on, and the image above-left is of the same eye-drop product after the antlers have been rutted off. We could be mistaken.

Have any of you seen even a single example of the #gsurveys side-by-side image question type used well? We look forward to seeing such an example.