Tuesday, October 26, 2010

Google Is Stalking Me

Last week I was doing some research on buy vs. leasing a server/workstation.

Ultimately, I decided to buy one, this one.



I bought it because Amazon was just too expensive (for my purposes) and so was collocating a server (I wanted something a little more beefy than normal). I wasn't about to pay $1000 a month.

During that research, I made it to Storm website (on demand hosting). I'm not sure if I actually clicked on an advertisement on the result page of my Google search or what...but now they are everywhere.

I went to 4 sites today, and here's what I found:

wunderground.com



forum.xda-developers.com



somethingawful.com



linuxquestions.org



addictivetips.com



factmag.com



It's just a tad creepy, but I may be to blame for click on an advertisement (still unsure). Anyone out there experience something like this before?

1 comment:

icarus said...

I have experienced something similar. It's called "retargeting" and it's a very common online advertisement strategy.

If you click on the little "i" on the bottom right corner though, you'll probably be able to opt out from the whole process.

In case that doesn't work, just clear your cookies.

The whole point of it thought, is to provide you with a more rewarding online advertisement experience. One where instead of getting random ads, you actually get something that's useful and of interest to you.

But I'm probably biased, since I recently started working for a creative optimization company ;)