Wal-Mart: Creative Advertising

By now, this incident has been reported on to death.

If you click on the link to the DVD of the Planet Of The Apes TV series, you'll see on the resulting page no link to "Similar Items". It appears that Wal-Mart either fixed the "bug", or it's hiding that link until the categorization and logic behind "similarities" is fixed.

This is what it used to look like. Complete with the "Similar Items".

Okay, this is can't be an intentional racist display on the part of Wal-Mart, right? As someone who does a bit of programming, I know that coding keyword search algorithms can be difficult. And seemingly unassociated items can be linked together with the right set of keywords.

For example, the results set of a search of "Planet Of The Apes" at the walmart.com site includes links to this book and this book, both concerning race. This makes sense, since the titles of the books contain the keywords in the search. However, searches of "similar items" under each book doesn't lead to anything that would seem to link to biographies of prominent black people (there are many items listed, and I didn't have time to do that kind of tedious research).

For more on the technical aspects to this gaffe, I give you this (scroll to the block quoted stuff under the More Walmart post.

Thanks to firedoglake and Steve Gilliard (The NEWS BLOG).