Quote:
Originally Posted by jhowell
I have some suggestions for anyone attempting this sort of experiment to help eliminate confounding factors that could influence the results.
Decide in advance how many days you will be collecting data. If you leave it open ended the chances increase of a spurious result.
Select the subject topic ahead of time, but do not tell anyone else what it is or post about it online.
Before mentioning the topic in front of your device monitor your ads for that subject for the number of days that you have decided on. That will be your control sample. You may be surprised to learn that you have been getting ads for all kinds of things that you never noticed because they are on no interest to you. If your test subject comes up then count that as a miss.
Discuss the topic in front of your device. Take special care not to mention the trigger word or anything close to it.
Now monitor ads again for the predetermined number of days and see what comes up.
Realize that the occurrence of a hit could be coincidence. You will need to repeat the test a number of times counting hits and misses before you can draw any real conclusions.
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I might add wearing a tin-foil hat for those few days to avoid the possibility they are shaping targeted ads via telepathy. ;-) Kidding. That does sound like a pretty good experiment.
Quote:
Originally Posted by ZodWallop
This just showed up.
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That's pretty good. But even if we grant that you're totally on the up and up, and that add is due to targeting and not coincidence, I do have to point out again, you talked about veganism here on the forum. That still seems like a more likely source of the data.