a few weeks back, NYC-based artist cory arcangel came to town to talk to us. one of my favorite projects he made was the google adsense/kurt cobain suicide note mashup. it’s pretty interesting. while cobain’s letter doesn’t specifically mention depression or emotional problems, the probabilistic methods used by adsense have associated his words with ads for therapies that kurt may’ve found helpful. these placements are made based on some machine “understanding” of the text, and probably prior user clickthrough behavior in similar scenarios.

in that vein, i wanted to open up a contest, to see if we can’t find some awesome unintended google ad juxtapositions.

for example, there is a dutch dating site, farm date, which strives to play matchmaker to the country’s lonely farmers. they had to sue google for some, ahem, inappropriate google ads.

gmail is also rife with potentials, as they try to place ads next to personal emails. entries don’t have to be funny necessarily, sometimes google is just scarily accurate about what it should sell you in a given context…

post any ridiculous screencaptures here in the comments, or describe memories of eerie adsense ghosts of internets past.

i’ll wait some indefinite period of time, and then arbitrarily declare one of the submissions the winner. that person will win a drink, on me. if you’re in the bay area, i’ll gladly buy you that pint in person. beyond that i’ll paypal reimburse the cost of yer bev.