this post was submitted on 19 Dec 2023
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Not necessarily you or your case, but I'm still convinced that a lot of people just have confirmation bias (only noticing it when it happens and discounting the thousands of otherwise innocent ads). There's also subconscious ad effects, like you were only talking about it to begin with because your saw it somewhere because it's been spreading by weird of mouth from people who initially saw an ad
Most of it is people on the same network as you searching for a thing.
It's not just that either. Google knows who your family is. They know who lives with you because of location data. So any time those people search for anything regardless of whether they're on your home network, they likely serve ads to whole families at a time when one person searches for something.
This has been my theory as well, Google presumably knows when I meet up with a friend for lunch (I don't know if they go to such lengths but they certainly have access to the data to figure it out), if my friend then starts searching for something related to our conversation afterwards, Google could serve me ads about it too, just inferring the topic of our conversation based on that
Doesn't really explain why I was receiving cat litter ads after only speaking with my husband offhand about maybe getting a cat. We didn't already have a cat, so hadn't had any reason to look up any cat care goods ever, and I had never searched for anything even remotely cat-related up to that point. But wouldn't you know it, about 45 minutes later, I was getting kitty litter ads. Very spooky.
Sorry but I want the true story to be that your husband immediately went off and started googling to find a cat to surprise you for Christmas thus you got cat ads (same network like someone else said).
Lmao, I wish but no, no hallmark movie plots here. This was a few years ago, and we now have said cat :) He definitely forgot immediately after I mentioned it until I showed up with a cat one day lol