Algo roulette

Y’all know how interesting I find algorithms used for search and for serving ads. (One of the worst instances of the latter actually came from the LA Times; that one is forever printed on my cortex.)

Well, here’s another example that I find deliciously perplexing, served up by YouTube, a Google property:

I mean—are the people who’d listen to Tom Waits and Bette Middler singing a smoldering “I Never Talk to Strangers” likely to be in the market for dating Arabian women? Conversely, are the people interested in dating same likely to be listening to Waits and Middler?

I didn’t click on the link, so I can’t tell if the “dating” site is an iteration of Eastern European women who really, really want to be friends with you. Or what. I just don’t really want to know. I am kind of wondering what, exactly, that algorithm is smoking.

But I’m betting that somehow Facebook is going to be showing me more of similar sites.