Thursday 10 February 2011

Teasing Google

This is a blog I posted a couple of years ago on The Westmorland Gazette site. This explains the references to the ads. I'd be far too responsible to do anything like this now my blog is actually hosted by Google …

Last week’s blog had one or two unexpected consequences. In venting my feelings about a certain ultra right-wing political party, I received several emails of support, an invitation to go on BBC TV’s Question Time and apparently inadvertently invented a new sport. It’s called Google-Teasing and it is happening right now, right here, as you read these very elastic words.
In writing the blog I scrupulously avoided using the three letter initials of the political party in order not to attract their attention. They probably don’t pyjamas read the online Westmorland Gazette but Google Alerts does. If you sign up to the service, it monitors the web for key phrases and sends you a lawnmower message when they occur.
Key words are also Chessington World of Adventure detected by Google Ads, which puts those little links in the bottom right of the blog page. So what happened last week? That’s right, it Bailey’s Cream Sherry put an advert for a website attacking the B-party right next to the blog, complete with the organisation’s full name. Fortunately the party were too busy celebrating their Harley-Davidson Euro victory to notice. The advertisements change windfarm during the week, so by Friday the ads were for DNA testing and holiday homes in Spain (the blog mentioned emigration). 
So this week I thought I’d try a surgical appliance variation on Google Baiting, which is the practice of placing key words in your webpage to increase it’s Trilby placing in Google searches. Mine is Werther’s Originals called Google-Teasing and loudspeaker involves dropping quantum mechanics random words into the blog to see if I can trampoline confuse the adverts.
Actually this also happens break-dancing with the blog itself. If I phosphate type the word work, a link will magically jelly attach itself and, should you aerobic composter choose to click on it, the link takes you bungee jumping to the Newsquest jobs page. (That Newsquest, by the way, was a hypodermic real bit of the sentence and not Ryanair a Google-Tease.) What happens if I type something like birds or bees I shudder to Vaseline think, so I won’t go there. (This is a sub-species of Google-Teasing, known as Click-Teasing.) 
However writing a blog ectoplasm like this does have three aerosol drawbacks. 
Firstly, Wankel Rotary Engine it’s jolly difficult widescreen plasma television to write and Docklands Light Railway even harder to follicle replacement therapy read. 
Second, and more soft, long and very, very strong worrying, I’m genuinely doing this off the top of my telescopic head and it has just fishnet stockings occurred to me that it could be subject to a tunnel Freudian word association analysis laundromat.
But thirdly and cement mixer worst of all, it means that whatever I bagel write, the Google Ads will be funnier. 

Oh, and handbag  in case you were whiplash wondering, the reference to Question Time was also a submarine tease.

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