The Boston Diaries

The ongoing saga of a programmer who doesn't live in Boston, nor does he even like Boston, but yet named his weblog/journal “The Boston Diaries.”

Go figure.

Wednesday, March 23, 2005

Forget disturbing search requests, how about “Disturbing Ad Requests?”

Third day, and already I'm leary about Google's AdSense.

Earlier today it wasn't serving up ads. At first, I thought they took exception to my critical stance towards them, or of the disclaimer I have just below their ads and dropped me. But no, I was still signed up. It's just that for a period of time, Google just … couldn't serve up ads.

How odd.

Then, when it was working again, what do I see? An add for “Diary Of An Anorexic Girl” followed by an ad for “Fleming's Steakhouse” (at least the steakhouse is in Florida and not Massachusetts).

What is it with Google?

I've set up my site so that Google will index each individual entry, and yes, the Googlebot is pulling up individual entries, so why can't Google match the advertising better? I thought the whole point of AdSense was targetted text based ads.

Genres of advertising

From: “Ken Maier” <XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX>
To: “Sean ‘Captain Napalm’ Conner” <sean@conman.org>
Subject: Google advertiser exclusion
Date: Wed, 23 Mar 2005 21:22:17 -0500

Not sure if you know, but you can go into your AdSense account and enter exclusions for the advertisers you don't want to see on your site.

—ken

I know you can excluse particular advertisers through AdSense, but not genres of advertising. So, while I could exclude ads from Weight-Watchers, that still means I get ads for FatBurners-‘Backwards-R’-Us. And if I go down the path of nuking individual advertisers, then I run into the set limit of 200 excluded advertisers. It was more of a way to exclude competitors.

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