Amusements by Goooooogle
I’m a big fan of Google’s increasingly popular targeted ads, which you’ll now find nestled unobrusively in the design structure of a myriad of sites (including mine, thanks to my free blog host). I’m a fan not because they actually compel me to buy things ever, but because it’s amusing to see what topics they latch onto.
If you haven’t noticed them before, they basically grab frequently mentioned words from the text of whatever site you’re looking at and then display a link to a commercial site that relates to that topic. Right now mine links to coffee vendors because of my TURKISH COFFEE post.
The source of comedy for me is that, of course, the ads are completely insensitive to context. My post about how I don’t particularly know/particularly like/particularly care about the Beatles yielded weeks of ads selling John Lennon memorabilia. A campus security update in Gmail yielded an ad for antique cabinet locks. An e-mail that included the phrase “straight from the horse’s mouth” yielded a slew of equine industry ads. If you put a Google ad on a site that said, “I hate Bush I hate Bush I hate Bush,” you’d probably get ads for Bush T-shirts. Or shrubberies. Or… you get the idea.
But my favorite ad ever came from an e-mail conversation about the legality of a particular MP3 site I’d come across. The ad:
Illegal software
Find the best software price deals &
compare products, shops & reviews
Oh, Google. You always know exactly what to say.
UPDATE: Here are the ads associated with this post:
Alexis
Locate old School
Friends from Alexis!Alexis
Products and info
about Alexis.
I thought of this post today when I cleaned out my junk e-mail folder; Gmail kept giving me Spam recipes.
Comment by Lauren — February 9, 2006 @ 11:46 pm