Ads From Yahoo Are Based On Your Own Queries

Perhaps you've asked yourselves how is it possible that whenever you search something on Yahoo, the ads you're literally hit with are related exactly to what you've been searching. The answer is Yahoo Impulse, one of the search engine's services that allows it to record the users' queries and post ads to match them.

But let's see how the system works. For example, a user who searches for the term "credit card" will be tagged as someone who is interested in the broader "financial services" category, and then that user will be served graphical ads, such as banner ads, from participating advertisers in that financial services category, while he is in the network of Yahoo sites, said Usama Fayyad, senior vice president and chief data officer at Yahoo, according to the IDG News Service.

Yahoo Impulse tracks queries through users' Yahoo cookies and serves up the subsequent graphical ads for 48 hours afterward. This is a not a new service, being around since about four years ago, but up until three months ago, when the service has been changed, ads were triggered for only a 1-hour period after the user's search session.

And if you wonder who gave Yahoo the right to do this, the answer is very simple: none other than yourself. Thus, according to the search engine's privacy policy, accepted by every person that uses the company's services, Yahoo "automatically receives and records information on our server logs from your browser, including your IP address, Yahoo cookie information, and the page you request. Yahoo uses information for the following general purposes: to customize the advertising and content you see, fulfill your requests for products and services, improve our services, contact you, conduct research, and provide anonymous reporting for internal and external clients."