Recursive descent
I’ve been noticing an interesting phenomenon lately. You do a Google search for a term — something unique, like a medical condition or the Latin name of a flower. Google returns a bunch of results. In some cases the returned result turns out to be completely irrelevant. That’s fine. Such is life.
But here’s the kicker.
If you do a page search for the unique term, sometimes the only place the term occurs is inside the Google Ads injected into the page!
Let’s walk this through.
The Google search spider comes knocking. It scans the entire page on a site and indexes it — ads and all. A while later you come along and do a search which leads you to look at the page. There’s nothing relevant there except for the irrelevant ad Google Ads stuck in there as filler when its own spider stopped by to scan the page.
By looking at the page, you the user got nothing of value. Google got (at least) two page view hits. One by its own spider and one by you being led there by the search — to someplace completely unrelated.
I bow before the brilliant recursiveness that is integration of search and advertising.