Google’s Spiders & Crawlers: Inane
September 22, 2006 5:21 PM
Does anyone pay attention to the “Ads sponsored by Google,” that appear side-by-side on Web sites with content that you are trying to read? Had an odd thing happen just moments ago. I went up to the TVWeek Web site to print out a copy of an earlier column I had written, “Five Years Later, 9/11 Still Hard to Cover.”
Maybe the ads weren’t there before, but I was a little taken aback when I saw five separate Google-placed ads for panic attacks. We all know the Google model. It’s about buying key words for search. And apparently the machines, and they cannot possibly be human, zoned in on one key word in my column: “attacks,” like on the World Trade Center. I never wrote anything about “panic.” Well at least they weren’t ads for “attacking” household mold or atheletes foot.
Google’s stock is now so over-inflated and the company is so over-extended into new businesses,that it’s seemingly not paying much attention to its core business. I see a day of reckoning coming here for the denizens of Googleplex. Agree?
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