Chicago - 1:43 am on Apr 24, 2003 (gmt 0)

RBuzz,

Nice post. Lost you a bit in the last paragraph though. Maybe you can expound.

Heini. Thanks. Google indeed is a leader in determining what a page is about from a search standpoint. Now that they have turned the corner in the Ad serving world, a different set of problems present themselves, such as RBuzz suggests. For example, in the search world, RBuzz's excellent example of turkey is not a matter of contextual interpretation. It is a matter of the ALGO. In the search world, mistakes are okay, because the owness is on the searchers (and site owners) not Google to refine the search in RBuzz's example. In other words, what is the searcher really looking for turkey recipes, hunting, the country etc? and Google has no real resposibility in the search world to figure that out. In fact, they can't.

In the ad world, though, everything changes and with googles recent moves in the contextual advertising arena of its site, comes a significant set of responsibilities. The major one is not serving an ad for turkey recipes on a content site dealing with the country of turkey. That would make both the publisher and the user angry. Google doesn't want that, and in the case of the recent acquisition, Google is acquiring what they consider to be the pre-eminent mind share and application infrasture in this space. Remember, for Google, the concept of ADwords is still quite new and not without its problems. We can't expect that Google can mobilize in the contextual advertising space in the position of a leader without acquisitions. That would be far too expensive and unreasonable.