Taking the...?

[ffutures]

Gmail's advertising sidebar just excelled itself... for some values of excel. I got a PayPal receipt for some urine test strips I bought for work (we use them as a simple test for proteins and glucose, easier than Biuret's or Benedict's reagent) and the sidebar ads were for the following products:

Top 5 Teeth Whitening
Ketone Test Strips (actually relevant!)
Shelf Data Strips - UK
Fluorescent Tubes
Teeth Whitening
Pay Less Interest (not sure what that one's about or relevance to urine test strips)
Secret Hotels Marylebone (I work in marylebone)
Crest Whitestrips

So one in eight is relevant, one might just possibly be if I wanted a hotel near work, and the rest totally wasted.

They're usually rather more on target than this - e.g. if I get a mailing from an RPG list most of the links will be people like Wizards of the Cost etc. - but this goes to show how contextless common words can mess up a search.

Comments

[curiouswombat.livejournal.com]

Whereas the tiny little ads on the GJ info page has managed to offer me nursing journals and information on diabetes today - even though I don't mention anything to do with my profession in my interests! Spooky?

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

Weird...

[soren-nyrond.livejournal.com]

"Wizards of the Cost" -- I <3 it !!

That one definietly ought to be in the next DWP expansion.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

Old story but true... Their advertising department faxed / emailed an ad for the programme book of the 1995 World Science Fiction Convention in Glasgow that made that mistake, and it got into the book without anyone noticing. Great hilarity ensued. WoTC were NOT happy.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

Sorry, belatedly remember it wasn't the main programme book - it was the "read me" book containing a small version of the programme, e.g. the bit that everyone at the con referred to multiple times a day. I think they used an odd paper size or something, which is why WoTC had to prepare an ad especially for the con and made that mistake.