Saturday 14 March 2009

Clever Crawling monster?

When you set up a blog, you can "monetise" it.
All this means, is that you allow Google to use some of the space on your pages to add in adverts.
The mone(y) in monetise comes in in the shape of rewards, when your visitors click the adverts on your site. So far, so simple.
Being quite a rational and realistic person, I don't have great expectations from this particular money-making-scheme. There will be cause for celebration if it brings in enough rewards to buy myself a celebratory bar of chocolate.

Now, here comes the part that baffles me and has me in stitches in equal measures:
The whole system is supposed to be "intelligent"!
The theory is that you write your blog, publish it, and then.. the magic is supposed to happen.
Google sends its very clever Googlebots to "crawl" your site. Now, excuse me, but I can't help being unable to shake the image of little mechanical spiders crawling all over my page..YUCK!
They are a part of our new fandangled artificially intelligent brigade (yes, the one that could potentially take over the world, and destroy us, poor human beings).
You see, they are clever enough to figure out what I have written, and then they are supposed to link this up with appropriate adverts, presumably they will be of relevance to the content of my blog.
Now right there, my dear readers, is where the whole thing unravels!
So far, this site has boasted adverts for gay dating sites, double glazing companies, very doubtful miracle medication, and a few more which I really should have noted down but have unfortunately forgotten (I guess it would be appropriate to advertise something to prevent memory loss??).
If you have read this blog before, I challenge you to make the links that those very clever crawling monsters have come up with!

I must say though, this is just another example of the fact that as far as artificial intelligence goes, we really haven't got that far beyond artificial stupidity. So we can all sleep easy at night, because I really don't think we are about to be attacked by Clever Crawling Mechanical Monsters yet. Of all things that might threaten this world of ours, that really is the last thing I'll worry about.

So what will the next linked advert be?
Brain boosters?

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