For Google's AdWords, relevance takes time

From CNET News.com: Dodge's Challenger is a modern muscle car. The Challenger explosion 25 years ago was a tragic moment. Other than the name they don't have much in common, but for several hours Friday morning, Google's AdWords system considered them linked.

That's just one example of a weak spot in Google's famous AdWords system, which turned an interesting Stanford science project into the world's most powerful Internet company. Simply put, it takes some time for the AdWords system to determine whether an ad triggered by a search query is truly relevant to that query, meaning that in times of breaking news or a sudden spike for certain queries Google often serves completely irrelevant ads, such as the one promoting the Challenger's Hemi engine above news stories about the 25th anniversary of the Challenger space shuttle disaster.

A week of study of Google's "hot searches" as measured by Google Trends--a compilation of search terms whose query volume is disproportionately rising at a given hour compared to their usual frequency--provided numerous examples of how AdWords can require at least several hours to obtain enough feedback to properly rank ads.

Breaking news stories about the death of fitness guru Jack LaLanne triggered an ad for The Cord Bug, an accessory for car owners in cold climates that need to keep their engines warm overnight, in the most prominent slot. After a five-foot long monitor lizard was discovered wandering around a Southern California condo complex and showcased on morning news shows Wednesday, Google News served computer-monitor ads for several hours alongside search results.

This is probably not an issue on incoming CEO Larry Page's immediate to-do list, as Google continues to make quite a bit of money from relevant ads on the majority of searches. But it does speak to the thorny problem of determining relevancy in real time: it's not just a search problem, it's an ad problem too.

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