♻ foo test test2

By Adam on December 17, 2008 1:29 AM | 1 Comment | No TrackBacks

No, this is not a test post.

I searched for “foo” on Google as a test search (I wanted to inspect the DOM for something). To my surprise, the first result was… a test advertisement! Seems like even Google isn’t immune to some hacks from time to time:

As I look at the same search page now, the large horizontal is gone, but is now on the right “skyscraper.” Perhaps I caught it at the right time? Particularly bad was that the “ad” link didn’t even point to a valid page—at least test.com could have gotten some hits!

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1 Comment

Brendan O'Connor | December 21, 2008 6:27 PM
i bet it's not a hack per se -- i'd guess someone actually made an ad called "test" because they wanted to see if the whole ad thing was working. and indeed it did. but it probably had a bad clickthrough rate so the system pulled it all by itself (it has a low expected value of revenue)