Monday, April 30, 2007

Google Query Translation for Ads?

Does Google translate search queries behind the scenes to match them to AdWords? Artem Marchenko sent above screenshot and writes:

At the moment I am living in Finland and I need to buy some sand timers. Unfortunately I don’t really speak Finnish yet, I don’t really know how this thing is called in Finnish, so I search for literal translations of ’sand’, ’timer’ and ’clock’.

Funny thing is that while Google organic results were pretty much useless for me, the sponsored links made a lot of sense and it looks like they somehow translated my query into English before deciding which ad to show!

(Another possibility would be that the advertiser targets non-English words for their English campaign.)

[Thanks Artem!]

Google Query Translation ... by Philipp Lenssen | Comments (10)

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