Good Idea! Now find a better one.

Google is known for using a lot of computing and Phd power to solve some pretty gnarly problems. Their algorithms for displaying ads through their AdSense program are ever-changing as Google works to ensure that viewers see the most relevant ads.

But could One Human trump those algorithms and all those Doctorates?

Google weighs a myriad of variables, crunching the data with 10’s of millions of dollars of hardware, to display the most relevant ads and squeeze the highest clickthrough rates possible out of each site.

But I refer you to two popular blog sites: 37Signal’s Signal vs. Noise Blog and Michael Arrington’s TechCrunch.

While TechCrunch uses some Google advertising, they also have several sponsors. And Signal vs. Noise, or SVN for short, uses their own ad network called The Deck to display ads.

The question is this: If Googles algorithm, TechCrunch and SVN all selected the same ad to display on the page, which ad will the readers be more inclined to click on?

In the case of TechCrunch, the companies they allow to sponsor have typically had their products and services reviewed on TechCrunch and received a thumbs up - in other words, they didn’t receive a hollow recommendation.

For SVN, the only advertisers they allow on The Deck, are companies whose products and services are actually used by the authors of the short list of Deck supported sites.

We’re picky about the advertising we’ll accept. We won’t take an ad unless we have paid for and/or used the product or service. Sell us something relevant to our audience and we’ll sell you an ad.

Google simply displays a text or graphical ad deemed most relevant. But no matter how “relevant” the ad, can it compete with a real human being recommending a company, product, or service based on actual use?

Can the recommendation of a computer, even an excellent recommendation, compete with an excellent recommendation of a trusted human, an “authority” on the service in question?

When we search for ideas, for new and better solutions, it’s so easy to simply look for new technology while ignoring that a human, with the right incentive, could conceivebly do a better job.

Google provides some opportunity for a site owner to intervene using competitive filters to screen out ads by competitors. You supply a set of site addresses and Google will make sure that no ad that links to those sites will appear.

But what about more affirmative control? What about displaying ads only when manually approved by the site owner? Or allowing the blog owner to display ads for companies or products that she actually endorses?

The owner of a website has a real understanding of who is viewing that site, far beyond what an algorithm can infer, why not leverage their understanding to improve the quality and relevancy of the ads?

There are People, Ideas and Technology. Google’s AdSense makes great use of technology and ideas to display relevant ads - why not use more of the people, the content producers and owners, to make AdSense even better?