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A comment on After GDPR, The New York Times cut off ad exchanges and kept growing ad revenue. Parent comment

Re:After GDPR, The New York Times cut off ad exchanges and k... by tzs on Wednesday January 16, 2019 @10:25AM (#18921583)
> You be surprised how much less sophisticated Googles and Facebooks ad targeting is!

If Google's ability to discern my interests for ads is as bad as is their ability to discern my interests for news, then I would not be surprised.

I have never been aware of listening to any music by the band "Foo Fighters". I've almost certainly heard their songs in passing, but never in a context that gave me the name of the band.

A friend on Facebook posted a link to a YouTube video called "Dave Grohl brings kid on stage in Kansas City to rock out", in which Grohl, who is apparently the lead of the Foo Fighters, invited a kid from the audience at a Foo Fighters concert up to play a song, and I watched this video. (The kid asked to play a Metallica song, which Grohl and the Foo Fighters knew and played, so I still have not knowingly listened to any Foo Fighters music!)

Google has latched onto this and decided that I am interested in Dave Grohl news. Every time I go to Google News, for the last several weeks, the top of the "recommended by your interests" section is a story about Grohl or the Foo Fighters. Even though I hit the "show fewer stories like this" link for most of them, still they come.

Furthermore, they are almost all negative stories. The one thing they have of me showing any interest in Grohl and/or Foo Fighters, that video of the kid on stage, was a positive thing. But what they are giving me is a parade of stories about Grohl screwing over current or former bandmates, Grohl misbehaving while drunk, etc., from what appear to be trashy gossip publications. Yet a bit of research shows that Grohl is apparently actually a nice guy, well regarded. If I click the link to tell Google to not show me anything else from one of these trash publications...it obeys and just turns to other one to find Grohl gossip for me.

What the heck, Gooogle!?

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:After GDPR, The New York Times cut off ad exchanges and k... by reaperducer on Wednesday January 16, 2019 @11:43AM (#18922337)
I find that after a few weeks of training, Apple News does a much better job of picking stories I'm interested in than Google News. With two exceptions:

There doesn't appear to be a way to filter out sports I'm not interested in, or even all sports.

Apple News has a hard time telling the difference between Paris, France and Paris Hilton.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:After GDPR, The New York Times cut off ad exchanges and k... by JAlexoid on Wednesday January 16, 2019 @12:12PM (#18922615)
To be fair... Paris Hilton can be a Hilton hotel in Paris. So... Even an proficient English speaker can be mislead
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:After GDPR, The New York Times cut off ad exchanges and k... by reaperducer on Wednesday January 16, 2019 @01:35PM (#18923528)
Even an proficient English speaker can be mislead

I don't think so.

A human would understand context. AI isn't supposed to be simple string matching.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:After GDPR, The New York Times cut off ad exchanges and k... by JAlexoid on Wednesday January 16, 2019 @05:08PM (#18925949)
Really? Take anyone that has no clue who Paris Hilton is and without implying what you mean by "Paris Hilton" ask them something about Paris Hilton.
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Re:After GDPR, The New York Times cut off ad exchanges and k... by reaperducer on Thursday January 17, 2019 @11:16AM (#18931950)
There's a difference between "Paris Hilton" and "The Paris Hilton." "Paris" isn't a completely unheardof first name. Again, a human capable of working with context will understand that, as should a proper AI. Simple string matching won't.

Also, there is no "Paris Hilton" hotel. There is Hilton Paris Opera, Hilton Paris La Defense, and Hilton Paris De Gaulle.

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Re:After GDPR, The New York Times cut off ad exchanges and k... by scoot on Wednesday January 16, 2019 @11:45AM (#18922353)
I hadn't looked at google news for a while, so went to see what headlines they'd offer compared to the Apple news app. I wasn't looking for it, or expecting it, but, second headline under "For you":

"Letter from Foo Fighters frontman to Cornwall Council goes viral again"

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Re:After GDPR, The New York Times cut off ad exchanges and k... by CPLX on Wednesday January 16, 2019 @10:53AM (#18921847)
Oddly enough, I recently have been seeing an onslaught of Foo Fighters stories on Google news. I am in fact a music fan and musician who knows their songs but I have no special interest in them. I wonder if something about them triggers some runway like function in Google’s algorithm.
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Re:After GDPR, The New York Times cut off ad exchanges and k... by asr on Wednesday January 16, 2019 @11:13AM (#18922052)
Obviously Google treats "foo" as a placeholder and returns these stories whenever it thinks the user might be interested in a story about a conflict.
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Re:After GDPR, The New York Times cut off ad exchanges and k... by hnuser1234 on Thursday January 17, 2019 @04:01AM (#18929373)
More effective: unsubscribe from any sources that report on the crap. Don't just say you're not interested in the story, say you're not interested in the source at all. After a few weeks of doing this daily, you should have mostly purged it.
[ Parent | on HN ]