Surfarama

Greg Linden's post about Findory's new advertising engine is very interesting...the gist is that they are taking Adsenses' contextual ad stock and targetting it even more using their own algorithm to identify user behaviour.

This is big. Adsense is generally pretty well targetted, but to improve on this is a grand achievement. Given the direct correlation between relevance and click through it could make a good business great. Infact there's probably a business in this itself...no doubt many publishers would pay good money to improve the relevancy of the ads they serve individual readers.

UPDATE: John Battelle and Philipp Lenssen have added some good comments about this. Philipp actually describes how Findory are achieving this and it looks like it isn't actually that complicated technically, albeit something only available for 'premium' publishers. Obviously it is their valuable user behaviour data which Findory is mining to provide the additional keywords for Google targetting. Still, this is a snazzy demonstration of personalisation and am sure will prove very sucessful for Findory. I bet Jason Calacanis wishes he could do this.