I read an interesting article today: New research provides clear answer to debate on dinosaur posture. It’s published on physorg.com, a web site that bills itself as being a source of “Science : Physics : Tech : Nano : News.” 

I tried to read it and got confused:

Scanning down underneath the diagram, I saw “Play Games on Google+” along with a lot of small text. I kept scanning, thinking that the column of text had something to do with playing games. When I couldn’t find the article, I had another look and realized that Google’s ad feces was masquerading as copy, and so successfully that it convinced me the real copy was part of the ad.

Once I did the work of figuring out that the real copy began below the ad, I could read the article. That’s annoying, but it doesn’t make me sad.

What makes me sad is that the pinnacle of our computing power, the massive behavioural engine that is Google Adwords/Adsense, has decided that when someone is reading about dinosaurs, the most profitable thing to do is show them ads for games. Not books about dinosaurs, or even dinosaur games, but games.

We take a generation of incredibly smart people who have been rigorously trained to deliver amazing code, running on a massive computing engine, and when confronted with a human being trying to learn something, they try to distract him with games. Can you imagine Google in charge of textbooks? In my children’s time, textbooks will be immersive experiences, complete with Google’s avatars whispering “Psst! Math is hard, let’s play games instead of studying.” Can you imagine Google making eyeglasses? They would obscure anything educational with virtual billboards for dating sites.

I know that this engine is driven by the money, and the money is in luring people into Google's social thingamajiggy instead of trying to sell someone a book or a course or even a BBC/Discover/National Geographic edutainment special on dinosaurs or natural history.

But you know, the whole point of having values is that sometimes you don't do the most expedient thing or the most profitable thing or the easy thing. That’s what makes them values, you value them more then pecuniarum. Between them, physorg.com and Google value money, and that’s it.

There’s more on the same page, of course:

It’s all the same thing, isn’t it? And it’s all sad.

Maybe the really sad thing is that these ads “work.” But I am not going to blame the victim and say that because people click them and because they make money for businesses that the problem is what people like. Some foods taste good but kill you. Some drugs make you feel good but rot your brain. And some ads lead the curious away from knowledge. I lament the values of the people involved in this bottom-feeding approach to advertising on the Internet.

Perhaps Someone other than Google is involved in deciding that stock market scams and anti-aging scams and auction site scams are the best way to extract value from my curiosity about dinosaurs. Doesn’t matter who it is, my message to all of the people doing this: The choices you make, suck and suck hard.

It makes me sad that we have this much power, and this is how we use it.