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

Advertising? What are these ads you speak of?

[Silverlancer]

I have a bunch of extensions (Adblock Plus, CustomizeGoogle, Greasemonkey with Disable Text Ads, etc) and I don't think I've seen an ad, text or image, in weeks. What are these ads people speak of? ;)

hmmmm, really?

[Anonymous Coward]

The company could know more about web surfers than they know about themselves

Could it tell me where I left my keys?

Re:hmmmm, really?

[Rob T Firefly]

Check behind the living room couch. Also, buy the new Timbaland album.

Re:hmmmm, really?

[cyphercell]

Also, buy the new Timbaland album.

No wonder he's posting anonymously. :)

Except

[Gr8Apes]

What about people that do searches for their relatives? Or their pets? My dog has glaucoma. I'd be troubled greatly if my researching glaucoma medicines (dogs use the same medicine as people for this disease) caused any sort of reaction from anyone other than a pharmacy to offer me lower priced drops/pills. (Hey, check this guy out - he's researching glaucoma medicine and new cars - no cheap loans for him or insurance!!!!)

I'm doubly glad for adblock and *doubleclick* :)

Re:Except

[Grashnak]

What about people that do searches for their relatives? Or their pets? My dog has glaucoma. I'd be troubled greatly if my researching glaucoma medicines (dogs use the same medicine as people for this disease) caused any sort of reaction from anyone other than a pharmacy to offer me lower priced drops/pills. Just be glad you weren't searching for "incontinency" and "huge tits".

Adblock?

[Zaiff Urgulbunger]

So if I use adblock to block say *.doubleclick.net/* , does that mean that I'm safe from the thought-thieves?

Re:Adblock?

[Beetle B.]

I appreciate that these posts are tagged as humorous, but it is a serious trap that I've found many people falling into. AdBlock does not protect your privacy (as far as I can tell). The cookies are still there. Use Cookie Safe.

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

[cuantar]

I'll add some links! Get Adblock Plus here: http://adblockplus.org/en/ Get Filterset.G Updater here: http://www.pierceive.com/ With this pair of extensions, you won't ever see ads again, and the blacklist will update itself automagically.

This is good news

[Colin Smith]

So instead of taking a year trekking round the world to "find themselves", people could just ask Google.

Re:This is good news

[TodMinuit]

Why, in my day, we asked the NSA and that's the way we'ds likes it!!!

Re:This is good news

[rolfwind]

Yes, but did Google have to buy doubleclick for this functionality? Didn't google maps help people find themselves before?

Whew!!!!

[poadshaw]

Good thing I use http://www.msn.com/

*puke*

It'll be easier to shop for others

[Turbowaffle]

Maybe soon Google checkout will know when it's my wife's birthday, and tell me "No no, don't get her that, get her this instead" when I add something to the cart.

Hmm.....

[Mockylock]

So they know about the endless hours of porn I watch? Hopefully not the midget porn though, right? I mean.. I was discreet about that. There weren't any ads I clicked on or anything.

Well, now I know my secret is safe.

Oh wait.

Re:Hmm.....

[Remus Shepherd]

So they know about the endless hours of porn I watch?

Why else would they be constantly emailing you porn spam?

Geez, ever heard of commas?

[sean.peters]

If you believe this is impossible then you would be wrong as there are a few companies who have access to enough Internet data to make this privacy lover's nightmare a reality and believe it or not a relatively new science called behavioral targeting is taking the online advertising world by storm.

Holy crap, I think we need to undertake an emergency mission to airdrop some punctuation into this guy's office. That sentence was just about incomprehensible.

TrackMeNot

[Anonymous Coward]

TrackMeNot is a Firefox extension that protects against search data profiling by issuing randomized queries to popular search-engines with fake data.

If you want to read my mind by analyzing my search queries, I hope you're prepared to sift through a mountain of noise.

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.

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.

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.

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

[beckerist]

The Filterset.G updater, while nice (and updated!), I've found to be much slower than the Adblock Plus filtersets you can install straight from the plugin. Since Adblock had no such updater, it was a very nice additional feature, but it's memory footprint isn't worth the extra ~5 filters a month (IMO) for AB+.

Your sig

[CelticWhisper]

I am a programmer. I am paid to produce syntax not grammar. Deal with it.

Then how can you possibly be pro-grammar?

Sorry, sorry, I couldn't resist. Oh god, not the cabbage again. *ducks*

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.

It's all good

[jeevesbond]

All this shouldn't be too difficult to work around. Google watching my every move? Nope: I use Scroogle! Then there's Tor, it's a bit slow sometimes, but if you don't like it run your own Tor server and help the network speed up. :) There are also all the other ad/cookie blockers mentioned by others here.

The only possibility worrying me is our government overlords demanding people give up the right to use this software in the name of anti-terrorism/anti-paedophilia. Until that time people have a choice whether they're anonymous online, which is good. The people who don't know how to remain anonymous can either read up or pay one of us IT chaps to tell them.

Re:Only the ignorant ones

[owlnation]

So what will happen (and probaly already has) is that the people who do not know any better will form the basis of what "surfers" do.

As the previous poster says, it's pretty much only Joe Sixpack and The Sheeple that are going to get tracked. Hands up any slashdotter that's not using adblock and flashblock etc on their home system. (Those with hands raised please leave your geek id cards on the table on your way out.)

Predicting what Sheeple will do is easy. They eat (to excess - then diet), have sex, breed, like cars or fashion, watch sports as if they were the Circus Maximus, believe News Corps propaganda is "news", feed on the RIAA's outpourings like SOMA, drink, veg out in front of American Idol, and are far more interested in Britney and Parisite than politics or anything that actually matters. You don't really need any new technology to predict the interests of these kinds of "surfers" - it's pretty much basic animal instincts all the way. When McDonalds produces Soylent Green, they'll eat it and like it, even in the unlikely event that they know what it is.

Sheeple - it's life Jim, but not as we /.ers know it.

(As an aside, if no-one's yet formed a band called "Joe Sixpack and the Sheeple", can I suggest that someone does.)

On top of the fridge...

[Isochrome]

http://pics.nerdnirvana.org/v/technology/myhouse_g oogle_com.jpg.html

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?

[Beetle B.]

You guys are missing the point.

AdBlock blocks ads. It does not block cookies. Doubleclick is still tracking you unless you refuse to allow their cookies. To handle that aspect, use CookieSafe. NoScript would perhaps also increase privacy (I've seen doubleclick scripts on sites).

The solution is whitelisting enabled by default

[AmiMoJo]

I whitelist all cookies. Basically, all cookies except those on my list are deleted every time I close my browser. I do this with the aid of the CookieButton Firefox extension.

This needs to be set as the default behaviour in browsers. Add a button which lets the user decide to keep data from a particular site. Put it over as "let me stay logged in to this site after closing Firefox/IE".

Of course, they still have my IP address, or would if I didn't block *doubleclick*. However, thanks to mass adoption of NAT an IP address is hardly very useful for identifying a single person, as legal courts are staring to realise.

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.

Likely?

[Bearhouse]

Well, the legal team at Microsoft would like you to think so, based on their recent attack on the deal: http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/technology/tech-goo gle-antitrust.html?_r=1&oref=slogin With apologies for the shitty link format

Advertising has always been targeted.

[AmiAthena]

It's just becoming more accurate. I actually find it slightly refreshing, because this type is less insulting. Let's say I wax nostalgic and flip over to Lifetime to see The Amy Fisher Story.(We'll assume I've been drinking.) Just because I'm viewing "television for women" doesn't mean I want to see 3 ads for Lysol Disinfectant Spray and the Gerber Life Grow-Up Plan during each commercial break. I do happen to be a woman, but I'm not a soccer mom, and I feel like I'm being pandered to when they shove that down my throat. ("Buy these housecleaning and childcare supplies, little lady!") On the othere hand it IS a good channel to run the ads featuring tampons for your heavy-flow but active days, and women who spontaneously discuss how "fresh" they feel. Similarly on target would be certain commercials during, for instance, The Man Show. There's a lack of feminine hygiene awareness in those commercials; some demographics are relatively easy to peg.

Others are not so clear. According to some statistics somewhere, if I'm watching Comedy Central at 2 a.m., I'm probably a young straight male. I'll accept that more males are watching than females, but I find it hard to believe that the numbers are skewed so heavily in that direction that I need to see several hundred Girls Gone Wild ads in 90 minutes. I have perfectly good boobs of my own and don't need or want to be asked to buy videos of drunken girls flashing a camera; I could go take off my shirt and hop in front of a mirror if I really just had to see some bouncing titties. (Not to mention the wonderful world of free online pr0n, which is better than those videos anyway.) I wouldn't mind Comedy Central knowing that I am watching reruns of South Park if it meant that they would show me only ads I might be interested in, or at the very least don't make me want to throw things at my television.

Obviously, it's not an exact science, and there will always be a certain amount of junk in with the rest, but I think it's nicer to be pigeonholed more a little more accurately. Like if they narrowed it down even to me being a female in my mid-twenties, instead the current assumption that I'm 18-35, and probably a guy. Or maybe take it one step further, that I'm a female but not much of a girly-girl, and I don't want to Bedazzle my favorite pair of jeans.

These were all examples from TV/Old Media, but there's a lesson there for New Media. A 36 year old may buy more like "18-35" than "36-45", and that's worth knowing. [semi-random rant]Even if I wanted to enlarge it, I don't *have* a penis. Stop promising me 3 inches. Stop it, stop it, stop it. You're polluting our internet tubes. All those enlarged penises tend to get stuck and clog up the works. I'm sitting here spamming refresh on the Random Kitten Generator, (which BTW is the cutest site ever) so maybe I would be interested in kitty toys or adopting a cat? A subscription to Cat Fancy magazine? As it turns out I'm not really looking for any of that, but it's an educated guess, and my kitten pictures wouldn't have to navigate so much penis congestion to get to me. I think we can all agree that's a good thing.[/rant] People aren't buying things from sites they don't go to or even look at. I actually look at the ads Google returns with the search, because sometimes it's what I'm looking for. I stop ignoring things when they stop being irrelevant and intrusive. For this reason, advertising that targets individuals rather than broad groups of people arbitrarily lumped together is bound to have positive results.