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Google Uses Previous Searches to Serve Ads on Current Ones

Google is testing ads that target user behavior, reports The New York Times. Ads a person sees on a given Google search may be influenced by what s/he queried minutes earlier.

According to The New York Times (via MarketingVOX), securities analyst Gene Munster of Piper Jaffray discovered this change in Google’s ad targeting methods, shortly after launching a series of tests that examine ads in its search engine queries.

Last year Google began scouring past searches to gather data for future ad-serving. Several years ago, it added a clause to its privacy policy, stating it could use personal information for “the display of customized content and advertising,” among other things.

But unlike companies like AOL and Yahoo, which interpret “behavioral targeting” to mean using days-old data to serve dynamic ads, Google only incorporates searches from the last few minutes in its algorithm for serving Googlers with ads.

“We are trying to understand what the user is trying to do right now,” said director Nick Fox of product management at Google. Fox admitted the company is “testing the use of more search queries in its ad targeting.”

Sometimes, he explained, “queries are ambiguous, so you need a little more context … you wouldn’t want to go back a month. You wouldn’t want to go back a day. But you may want to go back two or three queries.”

Ad spend in behavioral targeting is poised to hit $4.4 billion by 2012, but its popularity among advertisers has piqued the concerns of privacy advocates, stigmatizing behavioral ad firms like NebuAd and Phorm.

But Phorm, which works with ISPs to create profiles of user interests based on all their searches, argues it is safer for privacy than Google because it does not keep search data that can be traced back to an individual. (Google typically maintains records for over a year.)

Google already controls two-thirds of the search market. Google Analytics, its site analytics service, is popular among even large websites, and DoubleClick, its ad network, is the largest in its sector.

What’s more, when a person uses a number of Google services — including AdWords, Blogger, Personalized Search, or Analytics — all accounts are consolidated into a single identifying Gmail address.

Even with all that in mind, Google is generally trusted by users. It already dominates about 61 percent of mobile search, which is still relatively young. And a Harris survey found most consumers are fine with behavioral targeting, as long as certain security measures are taken.