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Comment by nevi-me | Hacker News Reader

5 years later, the system (not just GAdds) remains broken. The same kind of ads that Ground Up refers to, everywhere.

MS Edge's launch page is riddled with these ads, they appear on otherwise high profile news outlets.

The other irritating thing with the tracking. You could look for a fridge, find, buy, receive it. But you'll remain getting ads about fridges for a week. Repeated ads, go to the speedcheck website, I sometimes get the same thing plastered all over the page.

As long as the listicle websites receive traffic, there'll be buyers for these nonsense and scammy ads.

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> The other irritating thing with the tracking. You could look for a fridge, find, buy, receive it. But you'll remain getting ads about fridges for a week. Repeated ads, go to the speedcheck website, I sometimes get the same thing plastered all over the page.

Most people who buy fridges have recently bought a fridge. Having done so is the single strongest signal for “will buy a fridge“ in existence.

The reason for this is that sometimes fridges immediately malfunction and the customer goes looking for another one, which happens far more often than buying one in the first place. Not that this makes it look any less strange.

Not to speak for OP, but the fridge is just one example of millions. If the product involves me doing any research on it ahead of time, or trying to debate the merits of competing products, it's almost always advertised to me ad nauseam post-purchase. One example of many, I bought a subwoofer in August for my studio and have been bombarded with ads for the very same sub ever since, even just this morning.

Edit: I'd also like to see a statistic, re: "Most people who buy fridges have recently bought a fridge". If that's the case, then the fail rate for fridges on the market is egregiously high. You say "sometimes fridges malfunction", but I can't square away that "sometimes" with the phrase "most people" used earlier.

Yep, a few years ago I bought a drone. Months of ads for the same drone that I’d bought. A year ago I bought a high end upgrade monitor and I’m still getting spammed with similar models. Meanwhile over the last year I’ve consistently been buying end mills and work holding stuff for the CNC router I bought at the same time and… nothing. You’d think they’d focus on consumables related to recent big purchases.

Counterpoint (true story): A few years ago I bought a drone, it turned out to be crap, so I sent it back and bought a DJI instead. Just like they track "people who bought A also bought B" I can imagine them tracking "people who bought A are likely to learn from their mistake and buy B".

Fair call if I didn't buy a DJI Spark and then get ads for months for the base DJI Spark drone. Sell me batteries (of which I bought a couple), sell me the R/C unit with the beefy access point and joysticks built in, sell me a long range kit, sell me a headset, sell me whatever other addons! But how many damn baseline Sparks do I need?

I wonder if it’s kind of a scam as products think they are buying ads for people looking for a subwoofer or fridge but the advertiser is purposely grouping them together or is just incompetent.

Maybe it’s just wastage that they can’t avoid.

I’m still getting political letters in my mailbox even though I’ve already voted.

Amazon is amazing: you just bought a guitar tuner? Here's 50 more guitar tuners!!!!!

They know I just bought one… and yet…

> The reason for this is that sometimes fridges immediately malfunction and the customer goes looking for another one…

Probably time to buy fridges with warranty coverage. Which should be basically all of them, as long as you’re not buying stuff that “fell off the back of the truck”.

Crap. I actually did that 4 months ago (it was soooo much faster than the service repair) and now I feel ashamed.

> happens far more often than buying one in the first place

In the absolute worst case, wouldn't it be exactly as often (if every fridge immediately fails)?

Though now I'm imagining someone having a fridge fail and then buying two backup fridges just in case.

> The reason for this is that sometimes fridges immediately malfunction and the customer goes looking for another one, which happens far more often than buying one in the first place.

I don’t think this is true. First, I’m aware of probably 50 fridge purchases and none have immediate failed. Definitely an anecdote but better than your unsourced claim.

Second, if I bought a fridge that immediately failed it would be under warranty and it would be repaired or replaced with the same model.

Third, ConsumerReports.org rates fridges and none of the top brands report this problem.

Maybe it’s just hard for Google/advertisers to distinguish between “recently searched for a fridge”, and “recently purchased a fridge” - and people seeing these ads after they already bought one are just false positives?

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