Google, My Best Friend or the Potential Big Brother

I use Gmail for my major, private communications with key friends and loved ones and to receive Blog comments.

I have used it for more than a year. But only recently did I notice the power of the Ad Sense program it utilizes to put what they believe relevant content and links on the side of your sent e-mail. It seems that it scans what you talked about in your email and put some content or topics that you may find interesting and relevant.

I am a marketing professional and using data to drive our message and offer are key of our value add to clients, but Gmail or Google just made me feel what I do is like stone age.

I played with it the other day:

I sent myself an email titled "Film" with the following text in it: China, horror, japanese, smile, cloth, red. Random bits of words came to my mind. Very Asian. I am not very creatieve or imaginative. The sponsored links on the side of that email is not interesting at all, they are related with films: Decorative Window Films, Reflective Mylar Films.

I then sent myself another email that titled "Happy" with slightly change of the order of same text as above: horror red cloth for china and japan. This time I got only one link on the side: Halloween.

I don't seem to be able to tell whether it scans mainly the title or the email text.

The other day when I sent an email to my friend who was shown on TV to be chewing cookies, my simple title of "You dig right into it" and "Your chewing is sooooo....." brought me the links such as "Stop Dog bitting", "Dogs love an indoor Potty". That is about right. My friend was born in the year of Dog.

Well, it makes me relieved a little. Not bad, but they are probably not as smart as I thought they are.

What baffles me is that in one other lengthy email where I talked about my trip to Ottawa, I mentioned a blue coffee mug and attached a photo of I took in a Bistro with that mug looming in the front and many other objects. All the links I got for that email are about coffee mugs. Does the AdSense scan photo image as well and give it a priority over text?

I feel that Google must have a database of every bits of information about every thing we have ever searched for, talked about, frustrated over and talked to someone about. They have the DNA data of our life. One day they will be able to put our pieces and bits of life together and rank them as happy, successful or pathetic.

Google should start the ultimate online matching program.

I will buy their stocks if it is not above $400 per.

I will send my resume to Google the first time I got my greencard and freedom of change of employers.

Somebody said: if you can not beat them, join them.

However, the latest email I sent, actually last night, where I was crying while writing it, was titled "I Hate You For What You Have Done and Will Do" and every sentence of that email started with "I hate you". It was a very emotional email meant to express some strong feeling and fear toward something said by someone I love dearly and cherish tremendously. It was late, I worked too much and was missing him.

I got ZERO sponsored links for that e-mail. I broke the Google Adsense sensing capability by being a woman in love!

Next day I got an email from the recipient of that email saying: maybe we should not continue seeing each other, at least not in the next two weeks (which covers Christmas and New Year).

Somehow I believe the AdSense program is designed by men who are scared with overflowing of female emotions and do not know how to react but withdrawing--yes, the ultimate Big Brother.

The big brother that we love and hate.

Hate and love are interchangable words to me. That will be the one algorithm that Googl Adsense program should have learned to deal with, at least when it comes to the point of recommending anything relevant to me.

I hope you, my readers, read this story and laugh a little.