Too, too logical

Yesterday, I posted something about a CalTrans crew working (or rather not working) on Seventh Street. Next to that post, Google’s algorithms popped up ads for companies selling traffic cones, signs and for a car rental agency. The logic of the algorithm is something less than logical: it’s not really likely, is it, that people reading a parody story about an idled truck and a absent work crew on an alt-weekly website are going to be in the market for road safety equipment. But key words in the story (“traffic,” “cones,” “congestion,” “cars,” “freeway”) trigger the Google ad algorithm to offer you apparently (but only apparently) related products and services. I mentioned this to a friend who said she’d read a story at ocregister.com in which a bank robber drove a Ford F150. The Register’s website didn’t mess around: at the end of the story was an ad for a Ford F150, my friend said. I did a similar search on ocregister.com and found a motorcycle crash linked to an advertisement for a credit company. The hook? The ad’s headline reads “SMASH BAD CREDIT.” Next to a story about allegations that the OC Sheriff accepted expensive vacations from political backers was an ad encouraging us to visit the Arizona Biltmore. Only one such algorithmic nudge made any sense to me: Next to a recent OCR article about the sheriff’s mistress ran a commercial word about Macy’s big, big Veteran’s Day Mattress Sale.

Tags: advertising, algorithms. mistress, crash, mattress, meta tags, oc sheriff, smash, web logic