I happen to be looking at a radar mosaic for San Joaquin Valley, CA, and I decide to search for one of the towns on the mosaic - Paso Robles. I open a new tab and begin to type the name but not before I could get the space after Paso does Google have Paso Robles as the first instant search term. Did they mine the other page, and figure out I was looking at a CA map of the area. Creepy.
yes, they did. and it isn't really creepy to me. Google using my recent history to provide better service for me is what I want. I could always turn off history if I wanted. That said, they better use it "in place" and not save it on their servers. btw: you can test whether they store your history by switch to a different browser between searches. Also, it might not work in incognito mode. At least, it better not.
hmmm,,,I guess the active Sessions still support assisting your searches. What about if you close the browser and reopen?
Clearing your entire cache generally removes "personalized" ads. I use Adblock and ghostery extensions for desktop, but I still get creepy ads from places I visited months ago for mobile
No. It has to have access to the browser memory. Each device would be a completely different browser Session, as if you loaded both IE and Firefox on your desktop. Since two browsers don't share info, Google wouldn't know the searches belong to you. It is the browser that knows you history, and google just taps into that per browser per device. As in my first post, I say that because that's the way it has always been. For it to know across browsers and devices, it would have to store that info on its servers. Google should not be storing any history on their servers that they would track via your IP address (or something similar). But maybe if you are logged into Google, that would be an option you can turn on and off. Again, you can test this easily, as well.
If Google wanted to "be evil", they could track everything through metadata, but if that was the case,I think more employees would rebel our openly complain about it. Who knows though. Facebook is latching onto anything it can get it's hands on and their employees seem pretty quiet about it.
It knows me that well, when I type in "Paso" it immediatey says "Did you want to write 'p*rn HD videos' instead?". Scary stuff.
Mine shows ads for quantum mechanics and other related academic stuff because I'm such an intellectual.
If your devices are logged into google, then yes, they do. Google allegedly doesnt keep track of search history outside of that. I have all my devices logged into chrome, which allows me to share search history, bookmarks and other things across the board. Its a very nice feature. I then use Firefox as my work/business. (ie: nothing that would embarrass me around the wrong people).
A few weeks ago I was talking to a coworker about Discount Tire. I later went back up to my office and started to look at CF on my phone and there was a Discount Tire ad front and center. And I definitely havn't visited that site or shopped for tires in well over a year.
