The most honest ad I've ever seen

I was browsing the homepage over at DownloadSquad when something caught my eye. It was a normal Google Adsense color placement except for one subtle difference: it seemed to know my computer. There was a message in the ad copy that seemed tailored to my brand new HP Pavilion dv9347cl: "*Not recommended for your system." My guess is that whatever they are hawking is not Vista compatible.

This brings up some interesting questions:

• How much information about my computer can advertisers get through AdWords? By simply purchasing an ad, can they gather usage data about all those who view it?


• If the ad could tell that I do not have the right computer, why did it appear at all? I did not click on this ad because of its advisory. I would have been more likely to click on another ad.

If anyone has seen anything like this before, tell me in comments.

EBay versus Google

EBay has pulled all of its AdWords from Google. An informative BBC article blames increasing direct competition between the two Internet giants and reports that EBay used to spend $25 million annually on AdWords campaigns. This practice garnered the ire of some other users of AdWords users (like this one) for their incredibly vague keyword targeting. Google has canceled the most provocative action it had planned: a conference to compete with EBay's annual meetup.

It looks like EBay is preparing its own targeted ad technology and this may just be a convenient time for EBay to make excuses for cutting ties with Google.