No AI required. Needs smarter advertisers, though! (Score 1)

The stupidity of the adverts is the responsibility of the advertiser, not Google... though Google does start to winnow the supremely stupid adverts - because they don't get many clicks. Adverts with few clicks will eventually get dropped by Google as being irrelevant to search users.

The system works by advertisers saying which words they want and any exclusion words. Only... most end users and a depressingly large number of agencies have no idea about using the exclusions. And Google makes it hard to identify the searches for which the advert was shown, but are irrelevant. Additionally Google will extend a search term if the advertiser has selected "broad match". Broad match is the default.. and it means that Google tries out similar search terms to see if anyone clicks. If users do click, then that search term is implicitly added. So the main problem in the "extensions" example is that the advertisers tell Google that they wanted the advert to appear whenever anyone used the word "extensions", but neglected to add "-file" or "-filename" or "-name".

Contrary to the impression given, Google does not offer behaviourally targetted adverts. Just search terms. Differences in adverts between two users usually comes down to geotargetting, and the complex effect of budgets.

Yes; I use Google and Yahoo to advertise for clients, and for our own stuff. IMO, it isn't an AI. It's a smarter system allowing more precision by advertisers, than Yahoo. Yahoo can't tell the difference between "car covers" and "car cover" (one is insurance and the other is a tarpaulin derivative) - Google can tell the difference and also see the difference between "covers car" and "cover car" (if it is meaningful) and may extend "car cover" under broad match to "auto cover", "car insurance" and "auto insurance".

I'm pretty sure that, with a team of programmers, I could replicate what Google AdWords does. Basically, user keys in search term, Google looks for adverts in the geoterritory that should appear against the search term, orders them by bid value (and click through rate), and finally checks that the advertisers budget permits another advert to be shown (by rate throttling if needed). If a user clicks, transfer to the advertiser supplied URL and rack up a fee for the advertiser.

No AI involved. Lots of fast web fronted databases, though.

Cheers, JeremyC.
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Merjis: internet marketing by geeks : http://merjis.com/