"Hammerbacher looked around Silicon Valley at companies like his own, Google (GOOG), and Twitter, and saw his peers wasting their talents. "The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads," he says. 'That sucks.'"

I loved this quote, I also had a similar experience. In past I had an internship in a similar role and pursued few projects on mining communities in large social networks. However luckily I got an amazing opportunity of working at med school/hospital affiliated with my university. I now apply similar algorithms, but now I help radiologists and physicians.

Lets hope that in future the methods that are developed for optimizing ad clicks could probably be useful in some other field. E.g. how IBM is now planning to use Watson in healthcare. My guess is that a lot of algorithm used in developing Watson, were developed for ranking Ads. Closer home, I use a 55 node Hadoop cluster for processing 19 Million annotated PubMed abstracts.