Sometimes context is not enough. Sometimes smart machines are really dumb.
Want proof?
Take a look at the Google AdSense ads on this post. It’s a post about a book by an online acquaintance about project management. And it happens to have the word forest in the title.
Now, Google’s got some of the smartest machines in the world, performing millions of calculations each and every second, figuring out what billions of pages across the web contain, and matching ads to that content.
Clearly, however, some subtleties are beyond Google.
Two cheers for serendipity, however. Now I’ve got to find out why trees are better than stocks (see the screenshot at right, third ad).
Without, of course, clicking on my own ads.
[tags] google, adsense, funny, context, john koetsier [/tags]
There you have the exact reason why I dumped google ads from my weblog. The machines deciding what fits with which entry could never find anything which did. I even went to the trouble of contact google and asking, and received a reply which stated that I should use complete sentences and paragraphs and plenty of text. I pointed out that my weblog is predominantly text and really does use complete sentences and paragraphs, for ease of reading and to make everything comprehendable if nothing else. I received a reply from someone else stating that it would work if I used complete sentences, paragraphs and plenty of text.
I believe it took me all of three seconds to delete the code for AdSense after I had deleted this particular e-mail.
Pi,
>I even went to the trouble of contact google and asking, and
>received a reply which stated that I should use complete sentences
>and paragraphs and plenty of text. I pointed out that my weblog is
>predominantly text and really does use complete sentences and
>paragraphs, for ease of reading and to make everything comprehendable
>if nothing else.
That’s absolutely rolling on the floor laughing funny. Wow.
🙂