Promotion gone wrong?

Perhaps we got spoiled with Google showing ads relevant to our search, but it looks really weird when a search engine pushes irrelevant results as promoted websites.  Perhaps the degree of weirdness depends on the degree of irrelevance and I just encountered a really illuminating example.

Ynet (EN), is the leading Israeli online news source (WP entry) belonging to the largest Israeli newspaper, Yediot Ahronot (well, perhaps second largest at this point).  Just recently they’ve upgraded the website and added some neat features, but apparently didn’t do such a great job with search.

Yesterday, Veronica was searching for a followup article about a surfer who disappeared in the sea a few days earlier.  She entered the word “surfer” in Hebrew (can be also read as “surfing”), hit the search button, and got the following:

Leaving aside the fact that the default for search on Ynet is searching the web and not the website, the results are pretty amusing.  For those who cannot read Hebrew, the top result with a redish picture on its right is the promoted website.  It could be not as remarkable unless the promoted website would not be a sex website accompanied by a rather detailed of the content you may find there.

And I am asking, what does it have to do with a word “surfer”?  What is the logical explanation for a sex site being the top promoted result in this search?  Can anyone explain that to me, please?