Google ads mash-up

Something I’ve not seen before: the “view ads about” box on the meta-search engine gada.be. Try it out.

Update: on the face of it this is a really trivial idea (although clever enough in its own way). But if you think about it for a moment, there are some interesting implications.

Because gada.be isn’t a publisher, it doesn’t have the same preconceptions about the value of advertising that publishers do. If the targeting in Google ads is good – and we know from experience that it is – why wouldn’t you want to search just ads instead of content, especially if you were looking to buy something?

Publishers have long published lists of featured advertisers in magazines, but this is not really much of a reader service, more a sop to the advertisers. The fact is, we’ve never invested time in classification of ads to make them really useful in this way, largely because we don’t see them as information. Google (and gada.be) doesn’t have the same mindset.