Yesterday, I started seeing "Your shopping cart is lonely! Come back to Zappos and finish your order!" ads on 14850 Today, and soon realized it was because Zappos was buying Google AdSense ads to be shown to people who happened to have an incomplete-order cookie set in their browser. Clever! But misguided, as I switched to a different Zappos URL the other day to get at my VIP account, since they still haven't figured out a way to just recognize that you're a VIP customer and give you free overnight shipping if you start at the main page. I was even impressed to see that my shopping cart was intact on the other site, and I completed my purchase. Guess it didn't clear that cookie, though.

Then, last night, I started seeing want ads for truck drivers from trucking companies, and truck accessory and truck stop ads. I wondered if it was because we had an article about Route 79 being detoured, but eventually figured out that it was because I'd Googled truck route mapping sites to answer a question on Twitter. Google must now think I'm a truck driver, and is going to keep showing me these ads.

What does seem to be related to our content is the Harvard alumni credit card offer showing up on our "Cornell women's hockey aims to pack Lynah for Friday game against rival Harvard" article. :-)

In fact, I'm seeing the same ads on other sites, too, and have clicked through a couple on sites I feel I should support. Naturally, I'm not going to click them on our site. I'm often tempted to follow an ad to see where it leads, but that's against the rules!