Google ads need political filters?

Has Labour activist and Photoshop dilettante Chris Paul turned to the dark-side? If his Google Ads are to be believed then it certainly looks like it...

Every time Westmonster has visited his site of recent we've been greeted with instruction of 'Don't Vote Labour'. When compared to the rest of Paul's pro-Labour discourse this certainly has a strange salience, but when you see other ads that say things like 'Everybody Hates Chris', or which try to direct you to Margaret Thatcher's favourite Conservative site, you can't help but wonder whether somebody at Google is conspiring against the poor fellow.

Obviously, Paul, or any other blogger that makes use of Google's Adsense programme, has little choice over the exact content of the ads displayed on his pages. All users of the system are told when they sign up is that:

"AdSense for content automatically crawls the content of your pages and delivers ads (you can choose both text or image ads) that are relevant to your audience and your site content, ads so well matched, in fact, that your readers will actually find them useful."

Whether or not Paul's readers will find the Don't Vote Labour site to be useful remains to be seen, but, as the content of the Google Ads is based on the most popular searches from the main Google site, there is always a chance that somebody out there will. In fact, if the most popular Google Ad for the key word 'Labour' brings up the idea of not voting for the party, then this can be seen as a decent reflection of the opinion polls.

Adsense does offer something called a 'Competitive Ad Filter' that allows users to filter out ads from certain companies. With all the political bloggers that make use of Google's blogger service however, perhaps they should consider the installation of an optional political filter for bloggers that don't want to be promoting their enemies...

Written by Oli Anderson on 16 Jun 2008 12:20 PM. Permalink