Google: Word Worry Wart

From Tom Gross comes a link to Christophe
Bruno’s article “The Google
AdWords Happening” about his experiment with
using Google AdWords to have people see his art. He
bought some keywords so that his ad would show up
when people searched on those words, but ran poetry
instead of an ad. For example, if you searched
Google for “symptom” you’d see:

As the clickthrough rates fell — Bruno’s
aim was to present poetry on Google’s page, not to
get people to click through to his — Google’s
bot noticed and decreased the frequency with which
his ad was served. Finally, his ads were disapproved
and Google suspended the “campaign.”

This actually accords with my own experience with
AdWords. I bought the keyword “Lessig,” as an
experiment, and submitted an ad that began “If you
like Lessig…”; the rest of the ad touted Small
Pieces as a book that Larry Lessig liked. But I
couldn’t get the three dots past Google because they
do not permit “excessive” punctuation. The bot did
let me get away with “If you like Lessig-” but I
then received a personal email telling me that my
use of a dash was ungrammatical. Admittedly, but
that’s only because they wouldn’t allow me to use
the grammatically correct ellipsis.

Methinks they’re a bit overscrupulous…

Categories: Uncategorized dw