Wednesday, December 3, 2003

Having Fun With AdWords Suggestions

If you have your own Google AdWords account, you can enter any keyword and let Google suggest alternatives. The result list is quite large, and not what you can find in Google Sets.

The results can be inspiring, funny, and offensive – they often contains “adult themes”. It seems pretty obvious Google is looking at real search queries of the past to calculate their AdWords suggestions. Now here are some samples.

“God”

• “god bless america”
• “their eyes were watching god”
• “what is greater than god” *
• “god save the queen”
• “if god was one of us”
• “conversations with god”
• “god is a girl”
• “every time you masturbate god kills a kitten”
• “god called in sick”
• “the face of god”

“Love”

• “i love you”
• “jennifer love hewitt”
• “love calculator”
• “free love”
• “love of my life”
• “we love the iraqi”

“Movies”

You got to try this one (and other terms) yourself if you’re interested... practically no non-adult suggestions to be found in the list!

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* So what is greater than God? Here’s the complete riddle, along with solution:

What is greater than God,
more evil than the devil,
The poor have it,
The rich need it,
And if you eat it, you’ll die?

Answer: Nothing.

Nothing is greater than God, nothing is more evil than the devil, the poor have nothing and the rich need nothing, and if you eat nothing you will die.

Having Fun With AdWords S ... by Philipp Lenssen

Bush Googlebombed Again

Google.weblogs.inc points out that when you type miserable failure into Google, the top result is the official biography of President George W. Bush at the Whitehouse.gov website.

This Googlebomb can be traced back to Yet Another Web Log: “If you have a blog or web site, help raise the link between George W. Bush and the phrase ’miserable failure’ by copying this link and placing [it] somewhere on your site or blog.”
The same weblog announced “Mission Accomplished” on November 28th, 2003.

Bush Googlebombed Again by Philipp Lenssen

Google Inc. Reacts to "Florida" Accusations

Regarding the major Google update of last month:

“Wayne Rosing, vice president of engineering at Google, said the change is part of the Silicon Valley-based company’s efforts to provide high-quality search results.

“This particular change affected more people, but our testing shows there was a significant quality improvement for our users,” said Rosing. (...)

Talk of an initial public offering has helped fuel allegations that Google made the ranking changes to pump up its all-important advertising revenues ahead of a stock sale.

Rosing said there is no truth in such charges.

Google’s advertising and search businesses “are completely separated, there is no linkage between the two,” Rosing said.”
– Lisa Baertlein, Change to Google ranking system irks merchants (Reuters/ Forbes.com), 12.02.03

I asked Google Answers Researchers about their opinions on the latest Google update. Of the six researchers sharing their views, most felt that garbage (sites trying to cheat themselves into a higher ranking) had been removed for a better SERP, while some also thought the results were partly worse than before with less relevant results making it to the top.

Google Inc. Reacts to "Fl ... by Philipp Lenssen

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