Wednesday, October 06, 2004

Google AdSense

As you can probably see, unless you're running fairly decent advert blocking software, I run Google AdSense adverts. Just lately I've been getting some rather wierd ads poping up, as the thread of blog postings moves between computing, space and of course scuba diving.

The fallibility of AdSense is actually quite comforting, it means that the fringe conspiracy theorists are probably way off base when they talk about Google having too much power and influence over the internet. Of course, it could mean that Google isn't being evil enough yet. Perhaps if they were much more evil, AdSense would work better...

The nightmare scenario is if Google cross-correlated the keywords from my web searches, my GMail inbox and my blog postings, based on the AdSense keywords, and of course my Blogger login. All of this is possible, even quite practical, for a corporation with the amount of raw compute power available to Google.

But how good a view of me would they get? Amougst other things, one of the wierder ads that have been turning up has been for White Knight tumbler dryers, obviously due to my many recent postings about SpaceShipOne, whose carrier is also called White Knight. Would they think I'm a man obsessed with tumble dryers perhaps?

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