Before this blog went live, it had a few test posts on it filled with Lorem Ipsum. Google's ad servers try to serve ads that're relevant to the content. Most people's content is not semi-random Latin boilerplate, though, so Google's ad selector isn't very good at dealing with that.
Hence, as I write this, my side column advertisements are for hotels in Turkey, ESR meters (not that ESR), a Who's Who biography link for Bernard Tschumi (!?), and a site that wants to make sure people buy genuine Russian vacuum tubes.
I await with interest the free-associations Google will make in the future.
(Google have, of course, no chance whatsoever of beating the in-line "contextual" ad companies. I mean, what could be more relevant to the word "hardware" in a review of a new motherboard chipset than a link titled "HP nc6400 notebook your government agency"?)
[UPDATE: Google are many things, but slow is not one of them. The ads, for this page at least, are now significantly less bizarre. The top one as I write this is for... Google AdSense! Google haven't gotten around to looking at the front page again, though, so those Turkish hotels continue to rule the roost.]
13 October 2006 at 11:21 am
Hey, I always wanted to know what would happen when you spidered lorem ipsum. Did you get any comments from friends about "how they can't read the page as it's in latin?"