Silicon Alley Insider - Nicholas Carlson | October 31, 2008 10:28 AM

VentureBeat landed a copy of an email Google sent to its AdSense publishing partners. The Twitter-friendly version: “Times are tough. We’re doing the best we can to get you paid. Don’t leave us.”

Here’s the whole email:

Dear Publisher,

We understand that the recent economic turmoil has created a lot of uncertainty in the lives of AdSense publishers. During these difficult times, we’re continuing to invest in innovations that improve publisher monetization and advertiser value in the content network.
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International Herald Tribune -Published: June 27, 2008

By Saul Hansell

Google, with its deep reservoir of data about online behavior gathered by tracking hundreds of millions of computers, is for the first time testing ways to use some of that data to aim ads at Web users.

Ads that a person sees on one Google search may be influenced by what was searched a few minutes earlier. Searching for “scuba,” then something else, and then “vacations” could pull up ads for diving trips, for example.

This small but significant change in Google’s strategy was discovered by Gene Munster, a securities analyst at Piper Jaffray, who this year started a series of tests looking at which ads were displayed in a series of queries on Google’s search engine. Google assigns every computer that visits its sites a unique number — known as a cookie — and records searches and other activities in an unimaginably large file with those cookies.

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