martinibuster - 4:47 pm on Jun 1, 2003 (gmt 0)

I am so glad that this is being discussed. I have been calling people in wholly unrelated industries whose ads have been bleeding into mine, in the hope of educating them about negative keywords and getting their irrelevant ads out of my back yard.

Geez, even Yahoo!'s campaign manager could use some education. I even complained to AdWords about Y!'s irrelevant adwords.

I agree that searchers are lazy or not bright or both. The exact match terms receive anemic traffic, but the [broad keyword term] receives more hits from people looking for what my clients have.

This is even the case for Geo-Targetting: Someone in North Carolina looking for North Carolina Widgets will still search for [keyword Widgets], without adding their locations.

Google needs to make it easier for people to figure these things out.