Google, with its deep reservoir of goods about online behavior, gathered by tracking hundreds of millions of computers, is for the first duration evaluating ways to use some of that data to aim advertising at Web surfers who use its search engine.

Ads that a person sees on one Google search may be influenced by what was searched a few minutes earlier. Searching for “scuba,” thereupon something else, and thereupon “vacations” could pull up ads for diving trips, for example.

that change in Google’s approach was discovered by Gene Munster, a securities analyst at Piper Jaffray, who that year started a series of tests looking at which ads were displayed in a series of queries on Google’s search engine. Google assigns every computer that visits its sites a strange number, known as a cookie, and records searches and other activities in an unimaginably large file with those cookies.

The company had previously said that it

had not used any of that knowledge to draw inferences about users for the purpose of selecting ads to show them.

Google changed its privacy policy a few years ago and warned users that it might capture personal knowledge about them for reasons that include “the display of customized composition and advertising.” Last year, Google started looking at the immediately previous search when considering ads. Google did not need to use its cookies for that considering Web browsers report the address of the previous site visited to the current site being visited. And in the case of a search, that address contains the search terms.

Nick Fox, a director of product management who looks after ads on Google’s search site, said the company was now examining the use of more search queries in its ad targeting. He did not describe how it was doing that. But Web experts said that…

Orginal post by Mike

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