I love it when you can determine something about the hidden internals of a system only from superficial behaviour.  For example, the idea of being able to detect the presence of a black hole from it gravitational effect on other visible objects like starts struck me as pretty neat.  Anyway, not quite as stellar, but I’ve noticed a curious Gmail phenomena: if you look into the “spam” folder, then for almost every page load, the advertisement that appears above the mail list is for some type of Spam food product (seriously, try it).

More intriguing than the sheer variety of Spam products advertised is how Google’s contextual placement is deciding to put those advertisements there.  It hasn’t come from the contents of the emails, unless I happen to be the only person on the planet receiving a load of spam mail about Spam (oh, the irony, ah-hem) – so the only possible answers must be that either its been hard-coded in (and the advertisers probably deserve a discount), or Google’s contextual system is not only basing its decisions on the content of the emails but the surrounding page structure.

I’m guessing it must be hard-coded, as I doubt any user would want to see advetisements based on the content of spam email – you really never know what it would generate.  Which means at some point they’ve tweaked those adds only to generate advertisements for products containing Spam…hehe.  Monty Python lives on.

UPDATED 12th April 2010: Added [] extra meaning in title.