Tuesday, 04/09/02

This morning I ran across a case where Google's advertising proved slightly more useful than its search results. I was looking for background on creating web privacy policies, and started simple: "privacy policy". It came back with what look like the most linked-to individual examples of the genre: Yahoo, DoubleClick, Sun, Lycos, Everyone.net (some kind of email business), Adobe, Netscape, Intel, WebTrendsLive (an ad broker, like DoubleClick), and Internet.com, aka the INT Media Group, which I think is in there just because of the word "Internet" in close proximity to the search term.

The advertising was considerably closer to what I actually wanted: LawCommerce.com shopping prefab privacy policies, a book called Translucent Databases about some of the same stuff, and a consulting shop called Privacy Innovations, Inc.

I bring it up because the conversion of online advertising into even a moderately useful site attribute strikes me as akin to alchemy. As good as Google is, its ad sales regimen is so smart, it can even pick up some slack in the rare case where Google itself falls down.

In other news, torches. 01:01AM «

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