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?