Targeting opponents the Google way

Posted at 12:43 PM on July 10, 2007 by Bob Collins

This morning, there was a really interesting tidbit on The Caucus blog on the New York Times Web site about how candidates are using Google's Ad Words to target specific search terms. For example, search universal health care and you get an ad for Dennis Kucinich. Search "Iraq" and get Chris Dodd.

With AdWords, you can "bid" on specific keywords and -- if you bid high enough -- your ad comes up in the adbox accompanying the search results. Basically, it's the latest way candidates are using all of the resources of the Internet to try to get an edge, and it's a shade to the more ethical side of just buying up all the URLs of your opponent and redirecting the audience to your site.

So I tried it on some Minnesota searches today:

A search for Norm Coleman turns up an ad for Mike Ciresi, but a search for Al Franken turns up nothing, which is interesting given that -- for the moment -- Ciresi is running against Al Franken, not Norm Coleman.

I tried searching for specific issues, but didn't get much. A search for "Minnesota politics" turned up an ad... for MPR.

If you stumble across any keyword searches with ads for a Minnesota candidate, drop a line.

I suppose the next "dirty trick" will be opponents clicking on the opposition Google ad to bankrupt the candidate, since it's a pay-per-click program.

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