We’ll have to see how relevant the ads become. As Q.E.D. pointed out the “Ferrets” thread in GQ is already relevant. That’s the first thread on any of the forum front pages I’ve seen with relevant ads. It was created on September 22nd so there is hope even newer threads can have relevant ads. I know of a lot of threads that Google has crawled but they are older threads and probably not viewed that much. I suspect Google decides whether to crawl a thread or not by how much it has been linked to from outside the SDMB. Google calls this concept Page Rank and it is a core principle of their crawling strategy.
We could look at it as fodder for debunking. May be kind of fun to Pit Magnet therapy as they advertise it. (Remember, “Always look on the lighter side of life”)
Yeah, but that would involve going to the site linked (presumably via the objectionable ad), and taking a look at what they’re saying. Something I’m not willing to do. How do we get those counter-productive links replaced by links to Jame’s Randi, or the Skpetic’s Dicitonary? That would be an ideal solution.
Which would, in fact, benefit the SDMB without hurting you and would either provide a good laugh or a shake of you head at the state of the world, and those are fodder for discussion. It’s a win-win!
Sure would, IF they had as much money as the guys who prey on the mentally deficient. I suspect both are about as hand-to-mouth as the SDMB, though while you were at the Skeptic’s Dictionary you could click on THEIR ads.
Except that success with click-thrus from here would have the effect of encouraging these charlatans to place more ads with Google, thus making them more pervasive. Also by labeling them “sponsored links,” the appearance is that the SDMB (and the SD column itself) is promoting such crap. That’s why I called them “counter-productive.” They detract—and to me, objectionably so—from the stated mission of the SD.
In my opinion, the benefits are far outweighed by the deficits. In fact, those of a less capitalistic mind than myself, could argue that the SDMB has “sold-out,” by accepting revenue ultimately derived from the very thing it purports to eradicate.
Here’s an interesting data point: I was just in a Cafe thread on C. S. Lewis, and all of the ads at the bottom were Narnia-related. In other words, relevant. But after I posted and came back to the thread view, they were all back to mailing lists. Do Google’s spiders consider it to be a new thread, needing a new spidering, after every post? Or is this because the URL had a different form (post-based instead of thread-based indexing)?
To reply to myself: I just went back to that thread, via the forum listing, and the Narnia ads are back, with myself still as last poster. Presumably, this means that Google has the URL http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=336183 listed in their index, and therefore knows what ads to attach to it, but they don’t have a listing for the URL http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?p=6623420 . This would seem to indicate that even once a thread is established and has relevant ads, if you post to it and automatically return to the thread, you’ll always get the default mailing list ads (or whatever the default du jour is). I also wonder what will happen when the thread hits two pages… Will it then appear to be a different thread and need to be re-spidered?
If the second and subsequent pages have not been crawled via the specific URL format you are viewing them as then Google will deliver non-relevant ads. From Google’s perspective it is a page they know nothing about.
I was in another thread in GQ which already had relevant ads with only four posts (Yay!). And even after I posted and returned to it, the ads were still relevant, even though Google couldn’t have seen that form of the URL before. So it looks like Google is smarter than we thought… Even if it took them a while to catch on.
Has anybody checked a multipage thread yet? There aren’t that many, but there could be a minor problem. On the forum thread listing, the URL for page 2 of a thread looks like this:
(This also means the forum link for a later page doesn’t change color even though I’ve accessed it with the thread link, which makes it a bit difficult to keep track of how far I’ve gotten in a thread. It would be nice if both URLs were exactly the same.)
(Remember, “Always look on the lighter side of life”)