Google changed the landscape of free email services when it launched Gmail (formally released on February 8th, 2007 following several years of incremental rollout by invitation only, although to this day it is still officially in beta status).  They were able to offset the cost of offering 6+ gigabytes of storage (up from an initial 1 GB) by placing Adwords advertisements all around the pages, themed ads matched by content relevance.  That forced Yahoo, MSN, and others to ease their own size restrictions (some going to unlimited free email storage) in response.

The basis of Gmail’s advertising success has been its ability to match the theme of actual email content with ads from its network.  Google has a very thorough and well-written statement of their policy on this topic.  Nevertheless, this had the privacy experts in an uproar, who didn’t want Google “reading” people’s email. 

I was thinking about this topic today, while I was browsing searchenginejournal.com and read an article about several changes Google has to consider making because of pressure from sources such as California State Senator Liz Figueroa asking for Google to stop “scanning people’s email”. 

In my opinion, this is a total misunderstanding of the technology and it’s benefits.  Google isn’t indexing emails.  Nobody at Google is reading your email.  Derivatives of the same master matching algorithms appear all over the web, both in search and on the publisher side in content ad spaces (think Google Adsense) and Gmail doesn’t really know any more about you than these applications.  For such services to remain free, the providers need to cover the costs.  To do so, they will use advertising. 

In reality, many if not most people feel that contextually-themed advertising is less intrusive or at least less objectionable than banners or popups written to appeal to the broadest audience.  Content relevance adds the appearance of service personalization which makes advertisements more targeted for the individual user, at least more so than an ad for 3D Aquarium Screensavers. 

At least, that’s what this technology is supposed to do.

Today, as I pondered the situation, my Gmail home page displayed an ad to me that was obviously matched not from my email content, not from my folder setup, but from Gmail’s own page content. 

Spam Primavera - Toss with linguini, serve immediately

I have to admit, I was really surprised.  First, I was surprised that Google’s matching technology wouldn’t disregard their own page content.  There was plenty of unique content on the page that would allow Google to target an ad appropriate to me.  Secondly, I was surprised that in this day and age anyone advertising to the keyword “spam” in reference to food wouldn’t use negative match or other tactics to prevent their ad from showing on pages like this.  And, lastly, I was surprised that anybody would think of tossing Spam luncheon meat with linguini.  Ewww.