How are the ads displayed on the G2G Q&A page chosen?

Question

I understand that a free web site needs a way to pay the bills, and I don't object to the unobtrusive advertisements being displayed alongside the G2G questions.  But I have noticed several times that the ads presented just happen to be for products that I was searching for earlier today, on amazon and ebay, using a different computer.  Once or twice I discovered, by looking here, that my wife had been searching the web for something earlier!  (She thinks I have super-human powers, which I guess is OK.)  It makes me wonder how the ad selection process works, and who is collecting what data for what duration?  I think I would have been logged on to WikiTree during the product searches, although I wasn't active on this site.

Answer 1

Hi Dennis,

The ads are through Google's AdSense, so if you were logged into Google on both computers, that explains why you are seeing ads related to searches on one computer, on the other computer. (It may have also picked up your IP address and based ads on that, I'm unclear about Google's settings.) WikiTree doesn't control which ads you see, but you can click on the little blue arrow in the top right corner of the ad to get more information and adjust which types of ads show for you.

Comments

Aha, yes, I do use Google as the main search engine, although I don't "log in."  Would the result be different if I used a different search engine?

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What gets/annoys me is that they advertise for things I've already purchased. For example, I just bought a batch of stock photos for a publication my colleagues and I are publishing. And the ads to the right are not only from the cmopany I bought them from, but they're displaying the images I've already purchased.

This happens with shoes from Zappos as well.

C'mon people! If you're going to customize your ads to my tastes, don't try to sell me something I've already purchased!

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Oh and here's a good one... It somehow knows that I've written some number of posts on G2G about plagiarism, and now it's displaying an ad for an online tool to help one detect plagiarism! ;-)

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I see almost exclusively ads for dating sites on the side of G2G, which is very odd as I'm married and no one in my household would be looking at dating sites. It's weird how Google can be so good at targetting ads sometimes and so bad other times!

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Agree, the software should be smart enough to figure out that I already bought the stuff I was looking for.  And it could have warned me that Jillaine had asked the same question almost a year earlier.  Maybe the seller of the plagiarism tool figured out that latter point!

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How would they know that? You buy something from a site and the entire communication is encrypted. There is no way Google can know anything other than that you searched for something and that you clicked on a link.