They're not wasting money in showing me that ad, its cost is negligible. They're wasting the money they could have made by showing me a relevant ad. For example, there's tons of books I might be interested in buying, and they might be able to extract that information from my browsing habits. It would be an advantage for me as well, to get suggestions about things I might be interested in.

Showing me nail varnish ads when I already told google that I want to buy some is not even advertising, it's just paid search.

It's hard to infer you want to buy books from a search about nail polish, mixed with whatever else is in your history.

There is also the question of who's willing to pay for ads, and for much are they willing to pay. They have to pick from what's available. I see a lot more ads about stuff that is costly and profitable, i.e. photography gear, car rental, insurance.

Google knows where I live, what job I do, where is my office, at what time I go to work in the morning, and almost every page I visit on Wikipedia. It even knows where I parked the car the last time. Is it possible that with all this information it can still mistake me for a potential buyer of that company's product?

I think that ads tend to be about costly stuff (if that is true) because they have to discount their own low accuracy. You can make money by showing me ads for goods worth only a few dollars, if there are enough chances that I'll buy them.

> Google knows where I live, what job I do, where is my office, at what time I go to work in the morning, and almost every page I visit on Wikipedia. It even knows where I parked the car the last time. Is it possible that with all this information it can still mistake me for a potential buyer of that company's product?

Why would you expect them to be able to? Algorithms aren't mind readers. Just because a human could look at all those individual data points and reach that conclusion doesn't mean a computer could.

So they're able to infer where I work (the address), my type of job (based on search, stackoverflow is my first result in 50% of my searches) and where I parked the car- but they can't infer my role or the company's business?

Obviously not, otherwise they'd be able to tailor a segment directly to you and sell your eyeballs for way more money than 'mere' retargeting.

But you have to ask, why would Google go to all the trouble of being your personal experience curator? Google is not in that business. They are interested in showing you the highest value ad that they can, and obviously that's nail polish.

Because Google gets money from advertisers. Advertisers in turn pay Google because it makes them sell more. So the more Google is able to provide me with ads that make me buy something, the more the advertisers will pay Google. Taking the money of the advertisers and not boosting their sales doesn't pay on the long run.

You contradict yourself.

> Advertisers in turn pay Google because it makes them sell more.

> Taking the money of the advertisers and not boosting their sales doesn't pay on the long run.

Which is it, advertising on Google boosts sales or no?

> You contradict yourself.

No. Please try to understand what I wrote.

No. What you wrote does not make sense.

How is Google figuring out which Wikipedia pages you visit? I just checked with Firefox's Network Monitor and the only connections are to Wikipedia or Wikimedia domains.

Because most of the pages I visit on Wikipedia are Google search results. Internal Wikipedia links are not tracked by Google, but those are somehow less important (they're related to the first page I visited anyway).

Udik and his responders are talking past each other a bit. Udik is talking about Google + their advertisers as if they were a single entity, and it is dumb for "them" to advertise stuff he's not interested in.

However Google and their advertisers are not a single entity at all. It is efficient/smart for the advertisers to do retargeting (although a cap and funnel adjustments would make it even smarter) and it is efficient/smart for Google to take the money and run the ads.

Udik, ultimately and in the long run I agree with your point; smarter advertising infrastructure will uncover the lost value that you are pointing out. However, given the current structure of the advertising market and state of existing tools, neither Google nor the advertisers immediately stand to gain by changing their approach to people like you. We're in a local minimum/equilibrium.