Several hours ago, I started to test the integration of AdSense—Google’s ad serving technology—with Brain Terminal.

Google’s system places ads on the page based on the content of that page. It uses combinations of keywords to determine what ads to place. As you may have noticed, this technology does not lead to perfect ad targeting.

If you were to judge Brain Terminal based on the Google ads shown thus far, you might get the mistaken impression that you were looking at MoveOn.org or DemocraticUnderground.com.

Aside from the humorous aspect of seeing a “Hillary for President” ad on the front page of this site—no joke, that was in the very first set of ads placed by Google—it means that the GoogleAds may not be as effective as hoped. I suspect that the percentage of Brain Terminal visitors clicking on Hillary ads will be far less than, say, over at DailyKos.com. Fewer click-throughs means less revenue. Less revenue means a greater likelihood that I will end up trying a different system, such as BlogAds.

I will let the Google AdSense test run its course, and hopefully the targeting will get better over time. (I can exclude certain URLs from the advertiser roster, but the exclude list can only be 200 entries long.) If I am lucky, AdSense will sense which ads have a high click-through rate on this site and will put them into the rotation more frequently. We shall see.

In the meantime, please post your comments about the AdSense test in the discussion forum. Primarily, I’m interested in hearing about browser display issues; it is possible that this new ad code will result in formatting problems with certain browsers. If so, I’d like to be aware of these problems and fix them if I can.

Thanks for bearing with me during the test, and please don’t get too insulted by any of the ads, such as the “How can 59,054,087 people be so dumb” ad now appearing on the front page. Think of it as an opportunity to practice your meditation techniques.