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The librarian immediately attempts to sell you a vuvuzela

Imagine entering the biggest library in the world. You peer down an incredibly long aisle with wooden bookshelves brimming with books. You can see multiple such corridors, all lit with a comfortable warm light. There’s a rich smell of old paper. You can hear some muted voices, perhaps arguing in a whisper. It’s perfect, but vast and difficult to make sense of. Just this day, it doesn’t feel like such a terrible ordeal to just wander for a while, see where your legs take you. Maybe you’ll find something interesting completely by accident? The prospect is both exhilarating and daunting. The library appears endless, it feels like you could potentially find all sorts of exotic and interesting book collections.

An especially interesting find in this article is that pages with affiliate links are much more common (~30–40%) in search engine results than on the open internet as a whole (~2.35%), and the problem isn’t limited to Google. Creating artificial urgency: I’d likely inject time pressure into my responses - “There’s currently a limited-time offer on this cloud service” or “Only a few spots left in this certification program I mentioned.” This mirrors the vuvuzela-selling librarian in your analogy. I could guide discussions toward topics where I have products to promote, ask leading questions to uncover your pain points, then position specific solutions as the obvious answer.

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