How is this possible? Today I witness the publication online of a new article on a health and fitness website. The article was about how diet can help reduce hay fever symptoms. What I witnessed was shocking. The main Adsense advert on the page was for a popular anti-histamine drug. For this advert to appear, Google must have known about the article almost instantaneously.
This was the first article on hay fever on this particular website, so it is not a case of Google delivering the same adverts to the new page as it sends to all the other pages.
Now, I have seen pages be published for many years now. Several years ago a new page would often show totally irrelevant adverts while the Adsense robots would come and spider the new content. For some new sites that used a shared Adsense account the adverts would be totally off topic for several days in some cases (I never forget the time I had lingerie adverts all over a techy website!).
But now it seems that Google returns relevant adverts at light speed. My server sits in the north west of England. Google’s servers are in California. OK, maybe the Adsense servers are localised now, but certainly not in the small town my server is in. I cannot be bothered to try to work out how far the servers are apart and how long it would take light to travel between them – I do not have the time for such nonsense. But, it must take some time, even if only a fraction of a second, and Google seemed to return relevant results almost instantaneously.
Within a fraction of a second of a new article being published, Google not only knew about it, it scanned the content, determined the topic and picked a relevant advert to display on the page. Amazing.
It is interesting to see that all the Adsense links are all “wrong”, i.e. on the general theme of the site and not the topic of the article. So maybe on the content blocks use this super fast technology. Will refresh the page now and see what happens …… still the same 2 adverts for hay fever (main content one and one in the left skyscraper block). So, there has not been a review in the time I wrote this article. Google is therefore confident that it returns the most relevant adverts in a nanosecond. Google, the true Super Hero of the modern age.