For anyone following this thread, my fascination with the Spam Primavera Incident has caused me to spend much more time digging into the way Google Gmail really works.  So, instead of just being a total waste of time, I end up learning some new things.  That’s a good thing.

The area of Gmail where I was presented the link for “Spam Primavera” is populated by a content placement function called Web Clips.  This content may include content-matched PPC ads (I knew this), Gmail-specific content such as tips and tricks (I had seen this, too), but also “custom content” (something I didn’t really know about).

Apparently, this custom content is sometimes written at the discretion of the Gmail product teams.  Who, somewhat surprisingly, have a sense of humor.  Miriam Schneider, Associate Product Marketing Manager discussed what happened to cause this on Google’s Gmail blog.

“Turns out that when they came up with the idea for Web Clips, they didn’t think it made sense to show these RSS feeds and ads in the spam folder. After all, these clips should be useful and fun, but spam (of the email variety) is neither of these things. Not knowing what to put here, Keith searched for “spam recipes” and decided to make a feed out of the results. As he said, “it was just one of those late night ideas” — probably a consequence of too many said energy drinks.”

So, it looks like this chapter is now over.  I wasn’t seeing a PPC ad, afterall.  Thankfully, there isn’t a company out there that is truly this bad at running an Adwords account (or, at least not showing up in my Gmail spam folder).  Instead, it was Google having some fun.

Think the people at Hormel (the makers of Spam luncheon meat) are getting a bunch of free traffic from this?  Today, their stock is at a healthy $37 a share.  I guess you could credit this on the recession driving people to eat at home more often and purchase more canned meats, but I like to think all these Gmail users seeing new and inventive ways to cook with Spam is also having a positive affect.

On May 27th, I wrote a post about content targeting of PPC advertising on Google Gmail.  Specifically, it was about an ad I saw for Spam Primavera.  It seemed to me that this ad was demonstrative of a few things going wrong at the same time:

• Content match on Gmail was reading the page navigation (the word ’spam’ only appeared on the folder name) instead of only reading my unique content
• The advertiser was opted into content match, but was not controlling it (using negative keywords or advanced match types to limit what the keyword ’spam’ might match to).  Having the negative keyword ‘email’ might have been a smart move
• The idea that anyone would make a pasta dish with Spam luncheon meat is pretty repulsive, even though I understand it is a useful source of preserved protein in some other parts of the world

A long time ago, I followed a thread by Matt Cutts of Google where he talked about that day’s Googleplex cafeteria option, bacon polenta.  The SEO community responded by trying to trump Matt’s top ranking for the niche phrase.  DarkSeoLabs “Google Washed” him from the SERPs.  It got kind of nasty, but very interesting.  So, just for fun, I got in the game too.  I wrote a post entitled “I just want to rank for Bacon Polenta, too” (note, this was before I launched paperclipmarketing 2.0 and decided to wipe out all my historical archives).  I think in it’s hayday, the post reached the second page of search results.

I was thinking about this today, and out of curiousity did a search for Spam Primavera.  Funny, I should find a few posts where other SEM bloggers talked about seeing this same ad, and what it meant for advertising on Gmail. 

So, since I’ve long given up trying to rank for Bacon Polenta, I’ve decided instead to try ranking for Spam Primavera. 

Maybe not as tasty, certainly not as competitive, but still probably a lot of fun.

At this point, text-based search seems second nature to most of us.  Average internet users are becoming more adept at using search applications, and as a result their queries are becoming longer and more specific.  Depending on who you listen to, the average search engine query is now probably somewhere between 3 and 4 words. 

Likewise, text matching algorithms at search engines continue to evolve.  In the war to gain and sustain usership, the quality and precision of search results is believed to drive satisfaction and therefore influence repeat traffic. 

Certainly, the most mature (and also most popular) form of search is text to text.  A user enters a search phrase, and that phrase is matched to web pages of similar or related themes, ranked by “importance”. 

So, what about searches for other media types?  Text to images?  Text to audio?  Text to video?  These variations have proven to be significantly more difficult to develop, employ and gain usage around.  One reason is the inherent inaccuracy of meta data.  Using webmaster-developed descriptive words and phrases to match these files to search queries is troublesome, without the means for further validation.  And, while image, audio, and even video recognition software has been available for several years– scaling it’s functionality to a global level has held it back from being employed on any mainstream application. 

How can the search engines learn more than meta tags teach them?  It looks like a game may be the answer.

Flying low under the radar, Google has been collecting data to improve image search since August 31st, 2006, using a game it licensed from Luis von Ahn.  The game is called Google Image Labeler (Google has a special way with branding).  In it, two users are put together to see random images from Google’s index, and they enter words and phrases that best describe each picture.  When the words entered by both users match, points are awarded.  The more specific the phrase, the more points that are given (’yellow ford mustang’ gets more points than ‘car’).  Simple, but the game is strangely addictive.  There are no prizes, there is no communication between users.  A small amount of egoboo may come from getting to the top of the results, but certainly less than other games on the web. 

Nonetheless, the game generates a ton of useful data for Google.  It gives them a mechanism to generate an independent second layer of meta data to use in validation, without needing to really understand what they are matching.  If webmaster-generated meta keywords are consistent with two independent players of the Google Image Labeler game, they must be accurate to the content of the image.  Serving accurate results drives increased usership, increased usership means more ad serving opportunities, all meaning more revenue for Google.  Smart.  Very smart.

I can’t imagine audio and video are very far behind.  I’ll be watching, and playing along.

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.

Today, Google sent an email to at least some Adwords advertisers that on May 20th, 2008, a new feature will be available for beta testing. 

The feature is a new match-type called “Automatic Matching”.  It will be installed on existing Adwords accounts already in “enabled” status, regardless of their current match-type selections.  Selected advertisers have the option to actively ‘opt out’, but this will require editing the campaign settings to uncheck a new checkbox (which will be prepopulated as ‘on’) in each account.  Will this be able to be set by API call?  At this point, it remains to be seen.

Automatic Matching looks to be the next evolution of Broad Match.  In this iteration, Google will use theming learned from landing page spiders, existing keywords and ad copy (all factors in the current Quality Score algorithm) to expand upon the matching of keywords to actual search queries. 

In addition, Google claims Automatic Matching will adjust itself  based on performance.  This means that the system will spend more where click through rate proves to be highest.  And, according to Google, will aim to generate costs per click (CPCs) equivalent or lower than the ad group’s current averages. 

All very interesting.

So, what does it mean?  This is a logical step toward Google’s goal of Adwords becoming capable of truly supporting self-service advertisers.  Assuming that the system works as intended, and assuming that it works when rolled out on a large scale, Automatic Matching could potentially reduce the need for long keyword lists and time-consuming research and lengthy keyword ideations.  If so, it would be a “win-win” for both advertisers (advertisers could increase their coverage without extra time spent on their account) and for Google (Google gets to monetize a larger percentage of search queries from broad match-types than exact match).

Only time will tell how the new feature will actually behave.  I, for one, will be keeping a very close eye.