@raccoon city: That is a bit excessive… First time I’ve seen that. I wouldn’t use that ad banner size if I knew it could inflate that much, but the problem is that everyone gets different ads based on their interests, so it’s hard to know what others are seeing.
Nothing beats Amazon, though. You could buy a sausage-stuffing machine, and then be inundated with ads or whatever listing the 47 other types of sausage-stuffing machines they carry.
What?, like having one is never enough?
But yeah, Goggle’s ads are pretty much rehashes of what I may’ve looked at at GB or wherever. They probably grab any’n’all browser history or just plain track you like one of those cows with one of those RFID thingies stapled to their ears.
Ha, same here. I buy a thermometer and suddenly I’m being shown ads for 100 other thermometers. Amazon’s AI isn’t going to be overthrowing humanity anytime soon.
Hi everyone, I think I just found a way to avoid these annoyances with the Google Ads. Here’s a brief explanation:
The Google Ads settings allow me to choose between showing just text ads or showing image ads, and I’ve always strictly stuck to only text ads so as to avoid risqué images and flashing, blinking, bouncy annoyances for our users. But what I didn’t know is that even with “text” ads, they apparently added during recent years some “enhancements”, which include images and flashing annoyances. I don’t understand how they get away with still calling that a “text” advertisement, but it is what it is. There’s even an option to allow ads to expand beyond their normal size, which is apparently what Raccoon was seeing in the OP. Of course they added these “enhancements” and enabled them by default in a very obscure part of the settings panel. But the good news is that I believe I just now disabled all the “enhancements” so that it will now show strictly text ads, as I always intended. Please let me know if anything changes for you now (it might take an hour or so for the new settings to take effect).
Thanks again to everyone who reported this, and my apologies for the unintended annoyances up until now!