The Ad Is A Spy

Unlike most people on the internet, I understand the importance of advertising revenue for a website, and I don't use AdBlock. I don't mind seeing an ad, and sometimes they are quite humorous.

While I really don't get hardly anything out of it, I do run ads here and on the AnacondaSoftware DevBlog. My goal with that decision is to ultimately just get enough to pay for the hosting, since I don't do any advertising on any of my other main sites and it all comes out of my pocket. I haven't achieved that level yet, unfortunately, but nonetheless they'll remain. 

So for now, they ultimately serve my humor directly. And the funniest thing for me about them is watching a page to see exactly what sort of ad links a page ultimately ends up to when it's crawled by Google's system. Instead of generic entries about spelling and whatnot, interesting things pop up. 

Since the Spiral Island introduction has been there long enough for indexing now, I thought I would take a look and see what it got on the selection of four when I loaded the page. Not surprisingly, two of them just run directly with the spy theme and talk about CIA training. A third one combines that with the talk of Amy's hyperopia, giving us an ad for "spy glasses".

The last ad, though, came out of left field. The entry's titled "How to make electricity", and links to information about solar panels for the home. Yet there's certainly nothing in the entry about electricity, and barely anything electronic. Even deriving it from solar directly is a stretch, because the only variation on that in the entry is the word "sunlight", which exists only once. 

So I have absolutely no idea how that ad got there, so, to finish off the overall theme of the page, the last ad itself must be a spy.

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Date posted: 07 August, 2009
Tags: advertisement anecdote spiral_island writing
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