Context is Everything
posted by
1970s Abraham Lincoln
posted
3/31/2008 5:33:38 PM
Alert readers will note the banner ad at the top of the page, and astute readers will note the apparent disconnect between the content of the site and the content of the banners.
"Why," some may ask, "would you have adverts for John McCain and Newsmax, when you're clearly a filthy Obama-loving liberal?"
The answer is contextual advertising. When you visit the site, a script sends the content of the page to Google, and Google returns a banner ad that matches the keywords selected by an advertiser. So if the "BUNNIES: FOR PETS OR MEAT" guy on Rt 13 North buys an ad for the keyword "bunnies", his ad will show at the top of the page.
We tend to have a lot of content related to national politics, which probably explains the McCain and Newsmax banners. But it got me thinking.
About two months ago, Pussy Ruxpin posted a piece on why (despite being an ardent feminist) she is not supporting Hillary Clinton. The internet being what it is, and search algorithms being what they are, two words from that article, taken out of context, have resulted in the dubious distinction of being on the first page of Google results for a keyword phrase we never imagined. If you guessed that those words were "Hillary Clinton" and "Ruxpin", you were close, but wrong:
Now, there's no way of
knowing what search terms John McCain's internet team is using. For all I know, they advertise on
every site that has a real time list of local Obama events and a link to
donate.barackobama.com. It's probably just a coincidence.
Tags: john mccain's internet team, newsmax, other people with strange interests
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