You Google “shoes”, You land on a shoe manufacturers site, said site has either ad’s or user tracking software from Tech Gaint A (Note: Tech Giant A isn’t Google, intact they are arch rivals). TGA sets a cookie on your browser with a UID and makes a note about you having some interest in shoes. Anyway, these are not the shoes you are looking for so you back out and search some more.

The next day you visit “All Sports News” (or something) and they serve ads from TGA. TGA’s ad see’s the UID cookie, checks your profile and shows you an ad for shoes.

So yeah you go, how a news site could serve you ads about something you searched for on Google (or any other search engine) without that search engine selling you out.

Not saying Google are “Holier than thou”, yeah they have their own ad network and will profile what you search and serve you ads based on your search unless you opt-out of everything. Just saying it’s possible that Google didn’t sell them out.