The chance that Google translates the query to match it with ads (so they can make more money) is infinitely larger than those two American advertisers making the effort of matching their ads with Finnish words.

I thought about such a possibility. However, after looking at the search result sites, especially at the last one it looked like the sites behind are purely American. The site behind the last sponsored looked even like a small business American site.

Certainly, there is a possibility for them to target Finnish keywords. However, Finnish market is far not the biggest in Europe (only 5 mln finns here) – I guess it would be among the last European languages targeted by the American advertisers

P.S.
When I decided now to go to the last sponsored link (as seen on the screenshot) it opened the spam-like site. Two days ago the live link opened a real site (a typo in the listed link?) :/

I think the opposite; if Google shows their ads for automatically translated queries, the advertisers have to pay for the clicks (which may be accidental, due to errors in translation, or their service not working in Finland).

So IMO it were the advertisers themselves who put those Finnish keywords.

"so I search for literal translations of ’sand’, ’timer’ and ’clock’."

It is called "tiimalasi"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hourglass

Wow, nice to see an entry related to Finnish language words.

Yes, the equipment you are talking about is 'tiimalasi';
http://images.google.com/images?client=firefox-a&channel=s&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Aofficial&hl=en&q=hourglass&btnG=Search+Images&gbv=2

The AdWords service is fully working here in Finland. When visiting the page
http://adwords.google.com/
with browser language settings enabling Finnish (fi) language you'll see the AdWords main page written in Finnish (i.e. suomeksi;-)

Adwords broad match – brings up some really interesting keywords :-), you just have to track them; sometimes it gives you great ideas that a logical thinking human would never come up with (mostly not).

Contact the site in question and just ask them what they're targeting. I'm sure they'd be glad to share (especially if you link to them :-))

I hate when you type something and get no results, Google says Didyou mean:__________ and you click it and then It gets no results

I would not be surprised to hear Google translates queries to the language set in the user's preferences. If the preference language is set to Finnish, there are no adword advertisements for "hiekka ajastin kello".

Marcin

"I think the opposite; if Google shows their ads for automatically translated queries, the advertisers have to pay for the clicks.

So IMO it were the advertisers themselves who put those Finnish keywords."

It's a well known PITA for us UK based advertisers that many American advertisers just leave everything default in their account, hence targeting their ads to the entire world even when they don't ship outside their own country and have everything listed in dollars. I say PITA because it adds competition to us for those ad slots. By them opting for "target the world" IMO Google is given the go-ahead to auto-match with translated queries at Google's discretion.

If those advertisers have a problem with that, they should just target their actual audience only and go to the small effort of ticking the "US" box.

I vote that Google is able to target ads to spell corrections. Given that ~10% of user queries are misspelled, you'd be serving low-quality ads otherwise.

Here's a query to demonstrate it. If we return zero results, we can suggest a spelling correction and also suggest ads based on the spelling correction, e.g. http://www.google.com/search?q=asdsadfasdfadsffasdf+fluwers can show an ad for flowers.