Contextual Linking and Ads – When the Algorithm Goes for a Toss
Contextual Advertising is a huge market online, with more and more websites accepting the ad programs from various companies owing to the high returns from such ad programs. Google’s Adsense is particularly popular among bloggers and the popular news blogs. Unlike traditional advertising, contextual advertising has been proven to be more effective, since it provides only relevant ads to a visitor and thus, he is more likely to click on the ad as compared to the ones that are static in nature. With contextual advertising, every visitor to a website gets different set of ads.
Contextual advertising, or tagging work by means of specific algorithms written for the same. The system first scans the page which a visitor is viewing, for specific keywords or key phrases. Then, the relevant ads, depending on the keywords, are displayed on the same page, or in the form of pop up windows. Other forms of advertising include hyper linking the keyword itself. However, contextual linking is not limited to advertising only. Yahoo News is a popular news resource for many online. The news portal from the house of the internet giant also makes use of Contextual linking on their pages. But what happens when the algorithm used for the same takes a Coffee Break?
Recently, one avid blogger found out that Yahoo seemed to be promoting pictures of underage girls through links on the news portal. The site carried an article about the Elliot Spitzer scandal. The article had the keyword ‘underage girls’ which Yahoo Shortcut’s contextual linking algorithm picked up and linked to pictures of ‘underage girls’ on flickr, the leading photo sharing site on the web, which is also under the giant’s umbrella.
Of course, this was unintentional on Yahoo’s part and the link was quickly removed. The keywords were also added to their black list and objectionable photos were also removed from Flickr. It was clearly the algorithm at fault, but when something like this happens, who’s to blame? Today, we see more sites relying on such automated tagging and linking, which is implemented on multiple pages.
However, the hyperlinks that are usually created are links to sites which contain public content. As in the above case, all of the pictures that were present on Flickr were uploaded by users like you and me. Here, it becomes necessary that the content or page that is linked to has been moderated in some way or the other. There are countless websites on the internet today that accept content submitted by users. A Flickr search for the keywords ‘underage girls’ returns 428 results even today.
In a similar kind of incident, pictures of Senator Barack Obama were clubbed together with photos from a collection of Osama Bin Laden’s pictures by Yahoo. Here, the algorithm picked up the senator’s photo since he had been to a hearing about the al-Qaida leader. Still, Yahoo apparently rewrote its programming so as to avoid the same again. Also, there have been countless instances of Google’s Adsense algorithm going for a toss. There have been reports on Google’s Adsense displaying ads of luggage next to a murder case where the victim’s body was stuffed into a suitcase.
So how does one build the perfect algorithm? One cannot. The only way is to build a strong algorithm and rise by learning from the mistakes of others and your own. Both Google and Yahoo in this case have then improved their algorithm to serve better content to the users.
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forget context and algos, check out this cuil link – http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/07/29/cuil_launch/
