Accidental Astroturfing

Noelani Sallings is running for the Santa Clara Unified School District Board of Education (and will apparently need a wider-than-standard aspect ratio for her business cards when she gets the job). She needs a lot of help getting her message out, so I thought I'd help her out by creating some ads using Google Adwords.

I wouldn't say the adwords campaign itself is all that directly successful. It's very low-budget and targetted for specific keywords in a specific really small region (which I'm quite sure is fairly inaccurate itself). It gets shown, and has had a few clicks. Hopefully it's been subliminally etched into people's minds as well. But it hasn't brought a lot of people to the bulk of the message.

There is, however an interesting side-effect. Google doesn't seem to be aware of its own ad placement. A google search for noelani sallings yields many results including summaries from pages that had the ad placed on them at the time of indexing. While I do believe it gives the impression of community support, it's entirely unintentional and a bit misleading since these sites really don't have any useful information which may help voters decide what's right for them.

So, Google: fix your bug... but no rush.