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Comment by Udik | Hacker News Reader

Google knows where I live, what job I do, where is my office, at what time I go to work in the morning, and almost every page I visit on Wikipedia. It even knows where I parked the car the last time. Is it possible that with all this information it can still mistake me for a potential buyer of that company's product?

I think that ads tend to be about costly stuff (if that is true) because they have to discount their own low accuracy. You can make money by showing me ads for goods worth only a few dollars, if there are enough chances that I'll buy them.

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> Google knows where I live, what job I do, where is my office, at what time I go to work in the morning, and almost every page I visit on Wikipedia. It even knows where I parked the car the last time. Is it possible that with all this information it can still mistake me for a potential buyer of that company's product?

Why would you expect them to be able to? Algorithms aren't mind readers. Just because a human could look at all those individual data points and reach that conclusion doesn't mean a computer could.

So they're able to infer where I work (the address), my type of job (based on search, stackoverflow is my first result in 50% of my searches) and where I parked the car- but they can't infer my role or the company's business?

Obviously not, otherwise they'd be able to tailor a segment directly to you and sell your eyeballs for way more money than 'mere' retargeting.

But you have to ask, why would Google go to all the trouble of being your personal experience curator? Google is not in that business. They are interested in showing you the highest value ad that they can, and obviously that's nail polish.

Because Google gets money from advertisers. Advertisers in turn pay Google because it makes them sell more. So the more Google is able to provide me with ads that make me buy something, the more the advertisers will pay Google. Taking the money of the advertisers and not boosting their sales doesn't pay on the long run.

You contradict yourself.

> Advertisers in turn pay Google because it makes them sell more.

> Taking the money of the advertisers and not boosting their sales doesn't pay on the long run.

Which is it, advertising on Google boosts sales or no?

> You contradict yourself.

No. Please try to understand what I wrote.

No. What you wrote does not make sense.

How is Google figuring out which Wikipedia pages you visit? I just checked with Firefox's Network Monitor and the only connections are to Wikipedia or Wikimedia domains.

Because most of the pages I visit on Wikipedia are Google search results. Internal Wikipedia links are not tracked by Google, but those are somehow less important (they're related to the first page I visited anyway).

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