So my friend Andrew Commander wrote a blog post about how to “steal” a bike. In searching for funny images, he searched on “bike thief” and here’s what he got:

Notice what Google has suggested. Further, click on their suggestion and get this…

Worse, Google Suggest is filling your mind with unholy thoughts. Type in “nigg” and get this…

I might just be searching for the definition of niggardly– which means petty or reluctant to spend– a completely legitimate, non-racist search. But in the case of “bike thief”, Google is actively recruiting me to be a racist, even though it’s some algorithm that notices these particular terms go together. In the same way, if you look at Planet of the Apes on Walmart.com, it suggests Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream”.

Perhaps that’s collaborative filtering gone wrong, where the system tells you what items go together based on what real people are doing– no moral judgment involved, just matching user activity streams.

This is even true with PPC, where advertiser load up a bunch of keywords (called dictionary uploading) and just plug people into search.

At conferences, my old fallback was to do a Google search on “used condoms” and “nuclear weapons”– and up pops an ebay ad– “Looking for Used Condoms? Bid on Used Condoms now! Find great deals & huge selection”

In the same way that Google’s algorithms will just match user data together, PPC advertisers will just upload every word in the dictionary and bid on it– never mind how silly it looks when you apply Dynamic KeyWord Insertion into ad copy. By the way, ebay has removed a lot of my favorite demonstration searches, but “used underwear” still works. And if you search on “used condoms”, you will still see ads from local.com and RefurbDepot.com– can’t imagine what they would have to offer. They should have “used” as a negative keyword, but that’s another post on PPC tactics.

So is it really wrong if the system gives you back what you’re most likely, statistically, to want to see? After all, you can’t blame the mirror if you don’t like what you see in the reflection.