> I find it interesting that at least one search engine (or meta search
> engine, as it were), MetaCrawler, makes some assumptions about what
> kinds of things you're interested in. Apparently, the mere mention of
> the word "sex" in a query is enough to have it consider you a candidate
> for sexually explicit ads.
All of the search engines can target advertising in this manner, and
not just on queries.
If I searched Altavista from my Sparc, over a period of several months
last year, I'd see ads for Solaris maintenance tools, as Alta was
picking up on the browser ID. This targeting isn't that visible at
the moment because Altavista charge _way_ too much for impressions and
have very few ads running bar their own. (In fact, DejaNews just seems
to be advertising DejaNews, too - it looks like the bottom has dropped
out of the banner market.)
http://www.searchenginewatch.com/
is quite good for this sort of thing.
L.
search engine bore.
<L.Wood@surrey.ac.uk>PGP<http://www.sat-net.com/L.Wood/>+44-1483-300800x3641