Category Archives: Google

Google Ad(non)sense contd.

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The logic behind the Adsense engine is truly weird. As I write this, the top posts on this Blog are:

  • A neat little Apple Mac facility
  • A link to Simon Jenkins’s column about the future of newspapers
  • An item about population shrinkage in industrialised countries
  • An item about how Microsoft has shut down the Blog of a Chinese dissident
  • An account of an eBay farce
  • A note about the Windows Metafile vulnerability
  • An item about the award of the Charles Stark Draper Prize to the inventors of the CCD
  • An item about the funding of some daft research
  • A pic of a personalised numberplate
  • A report that Sony has begun to settle the class-action suits resulting from its DRM fiasco.

    So what ads does Google Adsense put up based on the above content? Answer: one link to a site dealing with the Warsaw Uprising of 1944 and three anti-piracy sites. It’s idiotic.

    • Two hours later: It gets worse. Two of the piracy-related ads have been replaced — by one for “Jewish Tours of Berlin” and one for “School History Software”. Could it be that the Google engine is somehow inferring a link between the Economist story about population shrinkage and the Holocaust?

    A neat trick

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    If you highlight a word in Text Edit or Microsoft Word running on a Mac and then drag-and-drop it onto the Safari icon in the dock, a new browser window will open with the results of a Google search on the word. Neat.

    Thanks to Pete for the hint.

    The Alexa story

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    John Battelle, author of an excellent book on search, has a hyperbolic post on his Blog. It begins like this…

    Every so often an idea comes along that has the potential to change the game. When it does, you find yourself saying – “Sheesh, of course that was going to happen. Why didn’t I predict it?” Well, I didn’t predict this happening, but here it is, happening anyway.

    In short, Alexa, an Amazon-owned search company started by Bruce Gilliat and Brewster Kahle (and the spider that fuels the Internet Archive), is going to offer its index up to anyone who wants it. Alexa has about 5 billion documents in its index – about 100 terabytes of data. It’s best known for its toolbar-based traffic and site stats, which are much debated and, regardless, much used across the web.

    OK, step back, and think about that. Anyone can use Alexa’s index, to build anything. But wait, there’s more. Much more…

    It’s all done with web services. And it might indeed be significant because it could enable small but ingenious players to get into the search market.

    Google Ad(non)sense

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    I’m still trying to reverse engineer the AdSense algorithm. At the moment (23:26, Monday December 12, 2005), all four ads placed by Google on this page are for fire or burglar alarms. Yet nothing even remotely connected to these has appeared on the Blog. Hmmmm… Could it possibly be that when it can’t find any relevent ads, it just, well, picks ones at random? Surely not.

    Inside the Googlemind

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    A little while back, I signed up for Google’s AdSense program, which puts ads down the right-hand side of this page. The idea was not to make money (just as well — to date I’ve earned a grand total of about $10) but to see what inferences Google servers would draw from the Blog content. The results are sometimes puzzling and sometimes hilarious. For example, I’ve just posted something about Rupert Murdoch’s acquisition of community sites for twentysomethings and the first ad is now for “Free Sex Dating Contacts”! The second ad is for an Internet Security Guide. The third and fourth are for search-engine services (presumeably triggered by several posts about Google). Whenever I write about Iraq, there tends to be an ad for something about the CIA. Weird.

    Google tests out Click-to-Call AdWords

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    Someone should call Google and tell them to stop introducing a new service every day. It’s giving rise to cognitive overload in the advertising industry! Greg Yardley picked up on the sudden appearance of a phone icon beside some sponsored links appearing on the right hand side of a Google search-results page. He then investigated further and quotes this from the FAQ page of the experimental service.

    We’re testing a new product that gives you a free and fast way to speak directly to the advertiser you found on a Google search results page – over the phone.

    Here’s how it works: When you click the phone icon, you can enter your phone number. Once you click ‘Connect For Free,’ Google calls the number you provided. When you pick up, you hear ringing on the other end as Google connects you to the other party. Then, chat away on our dime.

    We won’t share your telephone number with anyone, including the advertiser. When you’re connected with the advertiser, your number is blocked so the advertiser can’t see it. In addition, we’ll delete the number from our servers after a short period of time.

    Google Base…

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    … is online. Lots of speculation in the Blogosphere about What It Means. I like the view that it’s basically early Yahoo! in reverse: where Yahoo! had Directory first, then Search, Google now has Search first, Directory second. And users build the directory, whereas Yahoo! had to pay people to do it for them. But it’s too early to say how this will pan out.