Your Web behavior is being watched. OK, that’s not much of a surprise. But Piper Jaffray securities analyst Gene Munster tells the New York Times that the ads displayed next to Google search results maybe driven by previous searches.
Ads that a person sees on one Google search may be influenced by what was searched a few minutes earlier. Searching for “scuba,” then something else, and then “vacations” could pull up ads for diving trips, for example.
This small but significant change in Google’s strategy was discovered by Gene Munster, a securities analyst at Piper Jaffray, who this year started a series of tests looking at which ads were displayed in a series of queries on Google’s search engine. Google assigns every computer that visits its sites a unique number — known as a cookie — and records searches and other activities in an unimaginably large file with those cookies.
The company previously said that it had not used any of that information to draw inferences about users for the purpose of selecting ads to show them.
Nick Fox, a director of product management who looks after ads on Google’s search site. He said that yes, indeed, the company is testing the use of more search queries in its ad targeting. “We are trying to understand what the user is trying to do right now,” Mr Fox said. “In some cases, those queries are ambiguous, so you need a little more context.”