Un-LEASH the Custom Search Engine

You'll understand the title in just a moment, when I'll explain the experiment that the Google Custom Search team has conducted, the point they wanted to prove and the means that they chose for the job. First of all, let's get things straight from the beginning: it is about ads, more specifically the ads delivered on the left hand side of the search results page, which many complained that were not synced with the actual search results. In other words, they did not follow the keyword highlighted motif.

Secondly, in order to prove those people wrong and to demonstrate that the ads were indeed what they should be and where they should be, they created three search engines, on which they used the same keyword to find a specific product, as you can see in all the pictures on the left. The word was "leash" (hence the title) and the circumstances it was searched for were in connection with "child," "dog" and "surf".

Point proven, as the first of the three returned ads relating to "child leashes", "child safety harnesses" and more on the specific topic; the second brought ads that related only to dogs, not any other animal in sight, if I may say so; and the third would redirect you, if you were to click on them, to "Surfboard leashes", "Surf leashes", but, surprisingly, the last one was about dogs. Well, point kind of proven, I'm not sure that a search using the keywords "surf, surfing, leash" should be in any way connected to dog leashes (the last result in the third image down)

Indeed keywords are very important when searching for something, but that's not a Nobel-worthy conclusion that they have just come up with. At any rate, it should at least shush the critics and those who said that keywords did not tune the ads delivered.