Behavioral Search & Advertising On Its Way?

cyberianpan writes "Imagine a world where advertisers would be able to predict your detailed behavior online. They would know when you are about to buy a song, a car, a present for your spouse — they would know virtually everything you are thinking. With the acquisition of DoubleClick, Google now has access to the cookies and subsequently browsing history of vast numbers of web users. It would be fair to say that greater than 85% of Internet users frequently come into contact with ads served by DoubleClick. Google could potentially have access to not only the majority of the world's search history but its browsing and e-commerce history as well. The company could know more about web surfers than they know about themselves."

Comments

And?

[Anonymous Coward]

Is this bad? Now instead of being spammed about stuff that i give squat about, i would get spammed with offers that i would bossibly want to buy. Does it matter that they know much about me? In a dictatorship? yes. here? no.

If you are worried that someone would see info about you, remenber that strength lies in numbers. The have insanely accurate information on every person in the western world, what are the odds that they would look you up?

Re:And?

[Lockejaw]

Now instead of being spammed about stuff that i give squat about, i would get spammed with offers that i would bossibly want to buy.

In some ways the targeted ads are nice. I like having Amazon's recommendations, and I've done Google searches just for the ads. On the other hand, I like to be able to get away from it. With both of these, if I switch to something that doesn't include their cookies (like a different browser, or shopping in meatspace), I can get away from their targeted ads.
It's kind of odd that by going out into the world, where the merchant can see my face, I'm more anonymous than I would be shopping online.

Nice knowin' ya, Google

[CelticWhisper]

Long-time Firefox/Adblock user here with something of an itchy trigger finger where Adblock is concerned. I've gone as far as completely gutting graphic-intensive web layouts via Adblock just to get pages to load quicker (Gradients on Slashdot? I see no gradients...) and every graphical ad, sponsor/partner link, or anything else commercial-looking I see usually gets the Adblock Special.

Well, for a long time I was willing to leave Google's text ads alone on the grounds of them being unobtrusive and generally not degrading my browsing experience. They stayed well enough out of the way that it wasn't worth it to me to block them for the minimal improvement I'd see in my load times and the minimal reduction I'd see in corporate crap sullying the pages I'm trying to read. Add to that the fact that the Google text ads were easily enough identified at a glance that they were always instantly recognizable and avoidable and there was never any compelling reason for me to risk harming a few non-profit websites I enjoy by screwing them out of ad revenue.

No more. Visual presence isn't the only factor to consider when determining which ads get the death sentence, though it has long (and for many, I suspect) been the most significant. Google's ads may not be visually offensive, but if they start down the road of Big Brothering me, no PC I touch will ever display a Google ad again. I know Google is a favorite of geeks everywhere, and those who know me know I'm a big fan of a lot of their products, but this rampant near-delirious compulsion to track everyone everywhere for the purpose of shoving marketing in their faces has got to stop. If I want to buy something online, I will seek it out myself, god dammit. This "the ads are relevant, you might find something you like" smacks of "it's for your own good" far too much for my liking.

Developers of technologies like Adblock and BugMeNot are heroes of the common man's internet and should be lauded as such. I think Greasemonkey likely falls in the same category, though I admit to not yet having used it due to a lack of knowledge of Javascript. Any tool to enhance and enforce control over one's own system is unequivocally, incontestably a good thing and I have a feeling we'll need more and more of them to counteract and undermine the efforts of commercial interests who want to sleaze their way to more ad impressions and massively pervasive marketing. Hmm, there's a fun acronym^W canonical abbreviation to accompany MMORPG. MPM. 's got a ring to it.

Re:Nice knowin' ya, Google

[Emporer of Ice Cream]

So, what's the business model for all this great online stuff we like so much, if not ads? Really, for all the people who hate ads so much and feel they are vile, you do realize that it's either pay for content, or view ad-supported content, right?

Seriously - what's the end game if more and more people start blocking ads?

I can give you a hint: if the ration of ad blockers starts to rise, publishers will have to get inventive to recoup advertising revenue to support their operations. That means more annoying interstitials, more advertorials and more advertising masquerading as content.

It costs lots of money to run popular sites, and despite what I'm sure a legion of folks are going to say, people simply do not pay for content online in large enough numbers.

Re:Nice knowin' ya, Google

[ScentCone]

...for the purpose of shoving marketing in their faces has got to stop.

Just out of curiosity, what is it that you think allows sites like Slashdot to even exist? Do you really think that the vast majority of the decent content on the web would be available to (even after you've stripped it down to your liking) if the people that labor to produce what you're looking for had no ability to attract revenue from advertisers? Do you really want to have to subscribe to thousands of web sites? Do you want them to be subsidized with my tax dollars? Should the people who run them operate at a financial loss and only survive on un-announced, invisible patronage and sponsorship? Ads that are in fact more relevent to a given audience are far more effective for everyone involved - the publisher (whose work you seem to value, whether or not you value their ability to provide it to you for the long haul because you want to consume it without it being paid for), the advertisors (who are willing to write a check to the people producing the content you're looking for), and you: the person who seeks out and consumes the content made available by the fact that all of the people involved in creating and presenting it to you can actually eat and have a roof over their heads because advertising works, and subscription models only barely do.

Sites that are completely saturated with cheesy ads fade away for a reason - they're desparate to start with, and they alienate their audience as they're dying off and grasping at straws. Sites that know who their audience is, and which strike deals with advertisors that know they've got a more useful message to send to the right people, are able to show you LESS advertising. The ones that know that, and are smart about it, will thrive - and it does take the sort of technology being discussed here to allow the site to earn their keep without committing suicide through the use of context-less, over-placed, low-earning ads.

Am I the only one...

[Darkon]

...who has never, ever, since they first got online bought a single damn thing via clicking an ad on a web site?

Re:Am I the only one...

[treeves]

Of course not, but all it takes is a very small percentage who do (and muck it up for the rest of us) and it pays off. Just like spam.

Please, who started this cookies=bad thing?

[user24]

"Google now has access to the cookies and subsequently browsing history of vast numbers of web users"
no it doesn't, the cookies reside on MY computer, and I purge my cookies every time I close the browser.

and what's wrong with cookies? nothing! sure, doubleclick can link the IDs together to form a *partial* internet history, but they can do that with my IP address/userAgent combo. I'm sure my adblocker*/useragent/ip forms a fairly unique signature. What does this give google that they didn't have before? As far as I can see, it just buys them a whopping chunk of target audience, but the data? they could have got that themselves, and cheaper.

* by which I mean, have the parent page try to load a bunch of commonly-but-not-by-default blocked images/url/paths. If there are 300 people sharing my IP, it's not likely that they all block the same paths nor that they all use the same version of the same browser. Thus we can generate a fairly unique signature for users behind shared IPs, without having to use cookies. I'm sure there's other info like screen resolution/colour depthat could be added to give greater accuracy. anyway, my point is/was that the cookies are basically useless, it's the target market that google wanted.

Re:Advertising? What are these ads you speak of?

[user24]

funny, I block everything apart from google ads. not only do they *shock* sometimes look interesting, but it's also a nice way to thank the webmaster.

Real title: Corporate Advertising Fantasies

[cubic6]

This article seems very speculative, if not pure fantasy. It assumes Google will somehow turn your search history and ad-clicking history into some kind of predictive model of your brain. The author doesn't really seem to understand any of the technology involved, he repeatedly claims that since Google now owns DoubleClick, they have (legal) access to ALL of your cookies and browsing history. Most of the statistics he quotes are totally useless, for example:

Fayyad (Yahoo R&D VP) proudly says he can predict with 75% certainty which of the 300,000 monthly visitors to Yahoo! Autos will purchase a new car within the next three months.

In other words, 3 out of 4 times, he can predict which of the people visiting an automobile price/review site will buy a car in the next three months. Considering that most people wouldn't go to Yahoo Autos unless they had some interest in buying a car, it's not really rocket science to track users and decide which are the "serious" ones and which are just window-shopping. The whole article is filled with speculation that once Google has access to similar data, they'll be able to accurately predict everything we do online, but what the author fails to deliver on is how they'll be able to make the jump from predicting click-through rates on ads to full behavioral models everyone who surfs the web.

Also, the article feels like it's written by a 5th grade English student with a thesaurus. Run-on sentences galore, wild trips of imagination that aren't supported by the article's sources, and a pathetic lack of proper punctuation besides the occasional period. He even uses a smiley face at the end.

Re:Advertising? What are these ads you speak of?

[Abcd1234]

Meh, just have your browser ask about all cookies. Is it annoying at first? Sure. But a) once you've confirmed/denied the cookies for your common sites, you don't have to worry about them again, and b) it gives you some insight into how many frickin' cookies websites try to plant in your browser.