Scott Bush

Google’s Adsense program, which places “relevant” ads on subscribers web pages based on a page’s content, is pretty clever. The idea being if someone’s reading a blog about fishing, seeing ads on that page for reels, rods, and flies would generate a vastly superior click-through rate than the same ad on some car site. Nothing too new there, except Google’s algorithm is what determines what ads should appear—not a human.

Such a setup can lead to odd pairings of content and ads (thanks, ambiguity of the English language!). I had reason to dig through the trash in my Gmail account recently (Gmail, of course, is Google’s mail client and also displays targeted text-based ads) and I saw the following:

Hmmmm… probably not what they intended!