A Critical Mass of Advertisers Makes Contextual Ads More Relevant

In: sales & marketing|search engines|user experience

21 Jul 2004

Andrew Goodman:

"I can attest to having been extremely frustrated doing web searches trying to find things like software, templates, standard documents, and legal agreements to help me grow my business.
But when advertisers of such services start to put their little classified ads up next to those keywords, the process gets a lot faster. I still use PDF Factory Pro, for example, because I saw their ad on Google next to a jumble of useless results for my web searches on PDF publishing."

Hear, hear! I find myself actively looking for the ads when I’m doing product/shopping-related queries, as sometimes all I want is to know where to buy the freaking stuff and how much it costs. Someone explaining why they offered the thing for their grandma for Christmas, or an obscure academic paper which happens to include my query’s keywords, is sometimes just noise. It’s all about context.
01/14/05 update: Google search within sponsored links.
05/30/05 update: indirectly related: Yahoo Mindset.

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I'm CEO of an online trade publishing firm in the marketing and defense verticals. We try to make news and data digestible and useful in an environment that is more noisy each day. This personal blog mixes my thoughts and interests on politics, business, software, and more, based on my business and personal experiences. Over the years I have posted items that turned out spectacularly wrong, and a few posts that stood the test of times better. Personal views only.

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