Saturday December 31, 2005

Brokeback Mountain & Target.com Contextual Matching Funniness

I saw Brokeback Mountain. I enjoyed Brokeback Mountain. I didn't see the "love story" that everyone kept talking about though. I did see two guys who liked to cheat on their wives with
each other, though. More of a bisexual lust story, really. Not at all what I expected, in any case. After all the talk about unrequited love, I expected more of an "English Patient" kind of love story, just between American Cowboys, instead of the English Patient and Catherine.

I did make me really want to go camping in Alberta though. What absolutely stunning scenery
they had in the movie. It all looks so fresh and unsoiled. The opposite of the overdeveloped urban sprawl around the DC metropolitan area.

Anyhow, today, my wife and I were working on setting up our baby registry, because that's how we'll keep track of what we need to buy for the little tyke before he gets here.

I was searching Target.Com for "Johnson & Johnson's Baby Shampoo" using the search string 'Johnson Johnson'.

Here's what my results looked like:

Am I the only person that finds those search results amusing?

Maybe it's because I used to work for a company that wrote a contextual matching engine to show products related to news stories. We used to get funny results, too. Like when a volcano erupted and killed people and destroyed hundreds of homes (I don't remember where), the lead matching product was the DVD: Dante's Peak.

I guess there's still a ways to go with contextual matching.