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

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: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.

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.

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.

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.