> And even these ads weren't that bad. What made Google successful was showing ads you wanted to see. I'm searching for a bottle of wine, and ads for bottles of

> And even these ads weren't that bad. What made Google successful was showing ads you wanted to see. I'm searching for a bottle of wine, and ads for bottles of wine were shown to me. Even at that time, Google hardly ever showed me ads that I wanted to see (even though in former days, Google's ads were less intrusive than they are today): as I sometimes mention on Hacker News, most advertising networks have difficulties to "pigeon-hole" me into interest groups - many interests of me are somewhat niche. For example many Google searches that I do are about scientific topics from my areas of expertise - this is a rather hard topic for advertisisers (though it is plausible that it might be a lucrative topic for anybody who is capable to monetize on people like me). On the other hand, if (rather accidentally ;-) ) Google's advertising/interesting sorting algorithm actually "finds" some interest of me which can be "monetized" via ads that try to sell me something, it's the common case that I have already bought such a product recently - in such a situation I clearly don't need another piece of the product. The reason for this is simple: after I bought the product, I have to understand some of the product's "complicated convoluted details", so a lot of Google search queries are of the type "[product name] [potential problem that I have with the product]". Thus, I do a lot more Google search queries for the product after I bought it. It should be obvious that for the ad to pay off for the advertisier, it should be shown before I buy the product - thus Google has to be capable of interpreting the quite weak signals that might show that in the future I might want to buy such a product, and not the strong signals that Google sees in the weeks after my purchase.