Last week @claire posed the question “What does Facebook know about us?” It is a worthy question, and one not easily answered. Facebook certainly can automatically glean a number of facts about us, but as her post demonstrates, that does not translate necessarily well into knowing us. Why else would she constantly receive ads for products in which she clearly has no interest? Ours is a brave new world of massive data gathering and data mining, where our personal profiles, in any form, are traded much as one would once have traded baseball cards. Yet for all its ubiquitous reach, this is still new, it is still novel, and it is still buggy, as I will relate below.

I have some direct experience as a customer of Google’s Ad Words program, though this experience is now somewhat dated. Six years ago I enrolled my company as a buyer of Google advertising. The program is fairly simple:

• Assign a monthly budget cap.
• Pick or spell out the search terms where you want your listings to come up first.
• Pick or spell out the search terms where you want your banner ads to appear in the search sidebar.
• Bid on how much you want to pay per click.
• Create your ads, and link them to the appropriate landing pages.

After some automated vetting by Google, your ads are (hopefully) approved, and, depending on your bidding levels, will appear accordingly. Others who have bid higher than you will have their ads appear more often, and in more prominence than yours. You are not billed per ad displayed, but by click-through. I ran with the program for 18 months, and it never paid for itself.