One of the things I find silly about Google AdSense is that it often inappropriately matches keywords, resulting in advertisements that either explicitly bad for your web site, embarrassing, or perhaps just silly. I’ll give you a few examples.  I remember a few years ago when a buddy wrote a post blasting Microsoft Exchange, religiously decrying Exchange as a bad product–and naturally Microsoft Exchange was the keyword hit for AdSense, and his story ended up getting coupled with ads for Microsoft Exchange integrators.

Another example — I was reading an online novel, a blog novel.  On the sidebar was an AdSense block, and my eyes gravitated towards the AdSense before I finished reading the first chapter.  The advertisement was for a woodburning fireplace. OK, I thought, there’s got to be a fireplace somewhere in this chapter.  Sure enough, I got the end of the chapter, and there was a brief scene with a fireplace.

It dawned on me that the author’s click-through rate on this chapter is probably quite low, since woodburning fireplaces may not appeal to his readers as much as, say, BOOKS.  And being that it was a fantasy novel, perhaps his click-throughs would’ve been better with ads for fantasy artwork, figurings, or some such.

Google would do well to improve AdSense by allowing webmasters to indicate which keywords correspond to the products or services they’d like to see advertised on their sites.