About two months ago, we here at 90ways started featuring ads on our website. They're right over there, in the right-hand margin, tastefully shaded to blend in with our general color scheme. We put up the ads because we wanted to start generating enough revenue to pay our writers.

The way the money flows is this: when we registered for the ads, Google set up a special bank account with our name on it. Then they sent us some code that we baked into our site so that their search technology can read our pages and put up ads that reflect our content. Every time you look at or click on one of those ads, Google deposits a small amount of money in our account -- on the order of a couple cents for a look and a couple of dozen cents for a click. There are other things that affect the amount of money deposited in our account -- such as the amount of time you spend on our site -- but we aren't entirely sure how those things work. Google keeps them secret.

Putting the ads on our site was a matter of deep discussion among the editorial staff, and one which we undertook with some reservations. However, our experience with the ads has, on the whole, been positive, if at times perplexing. The ads have given us the opportunity to puzzle out some of the inner workings of the world's most powerful information management technology, to understand the ways in which we are still learning to use the Internet, and to reexamine through feedback from our readers how consistently we are approaching our mission.

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I wrote a piece about Tibet shortly after we started featuring Google's ads on our site. Though Tibet is a decidedly leftist topic, my approach wasn't the traditional recent-college-grad take on things. Nonetheless, the ads that Google generated to accompany the article were clearly those that would appeal to the type of young, idealistic, liberal audience that would be reading about Tibet. Or at least they were the type of ads that would appeal to them in a these-ads-appeal-to-this-demographic kind of way. So, in that sense, good work, Google.

However, it turns out that most of these ads were just ads for other ads. With titles like "Should George Bush be impeached?" and "What's the deal with Bill O'Reilly?" these ads were intended to get me to fill out surveys; surveys which were, of course, just vehicles to have me look at ads for products or to collect information about me so that I can be added to a list and then sold to advertisers.

The way these survey sites turn a profit is by paying Google less money to advertise through AdSense than they (the survey sites) receive from the organizations advertising through them. The sites achieve this goal in a number of ways (most importantly through keeping you on their site longer than people tend to stay on most other sites), but the relevant point is that someone (namely the people advertising on the survey sites) thinks they are more likely to find people who will buy their products by advertising with the survey site instead of Google (hence their willingness to pay the survey site more).

But wait a minute ... isn't Google supposed to be the best at connecting people with the information they need? And, in that light, wouldn't it stand to reason that Google would be the best at connecting consumers to the products that are right for them?

Google can't get you to use information. It doesn't control or manipulate the way you interact with information once you have found it. It certainly has control over how you get to it (and that puts it in an immensely powerful position), but Google can't make you read an article, look at a picture, or view an ad. A cleverly designed survey or really anything that stirs our passions and provokes our sense of intrigue, on the other hand, can. No matter how good your algorithm, a computer will never have that ability. And so the need for these adworld middlemen looks like it is here to stay.

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One of the other reasons the ads accompanying the Tibet article all concerned George Bush and other polarizing political figures of the day is that those ads were partially generated using old information. Because the content of our site changes every day, Google's ads will not pertain to the information on a given page unless their robot happened to read the site that day (in general, it reads our site every three days). If you look now, you'll see that the Tibet ads are different than they once were.

What's interesting about this is that we specifically designed our site to take advantage of the real-time publishing capabilities of the Internet. The reason our site changes every day is that the Internet let us do that. It's ironic that that very feature has kept Google from understanding us.

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The second interesting series of ads to show up on our site focused on selling services that would help students write college essays and term papers. Not only is this type of service antithetical to the mission of this website (to encourage fun, but intellectually rigorous engagement and debate), but, as one loyal reader pointed out, the essays offered were horrible.

In light of our experience with ads, our question has changed from "should we have ads?" to "should we let Google do our ads?" The true challenge of this question is that we can't give an in between answer (something we are quite fond of, particularly here in the Essay section). Either we get all of Google's ads or we get none of them.

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