Google = God?
Now this is really really eerie stuff. Today I came to office wearing my “Holland” T-shirt. I normally never wear this shirt to office.
I fired up my Gmail in the browser, and see a “Study in Holland” Google ad!
A few minutes later, I received a call from this organisation. They were calling a friend of mine, but had my number against his name. I gave them the correct number. A few minutes later, on Google ads, I see the name of the organisation!
What the *hell* is going on here?
EDIT:
Had a phone conversation with a friend about pirated Windows installations and how they are harmful. Within an hour I see Google ads of anti-piracy campaigns, stuff I have never seen before. I did some research and found this paper http://www.google.com/patents/US20040083101 where they detail how they achieve this.
Debayan's Weblog 
phoxis said,
April 19, 2010 at 8:35 am
Google is also indexing people’s mind..
Rangeen Basu Roy Chowdhury said,
May 9, 2012 at 7:17 pm
That is eerie stuff..
vigneshwar (@vigneshwar) said,
May 10, 2012 at 11:07 am
do you use android phone?
debayan said,
May 10, 2012 at 11:08 am
I have recently been using Android, but the first 2 instances happened when I had a non-Android phone.
Joe SuperParanoid said,
May 10, 2012 at 12:00 pm
It’s called selective attention.
Ivan Savov said,
May 10, 2012 at 4:21 pm
Ok for one thing. Ok for another. But three coincidences in a row?
A while back I was having a fight with an ex gf via gchat, and then while reviewing the chat session ads like “Fine the perfect match” were showing up in the sidebar.
Any self-respecting tech person should be hosting their own mail server. Not giving “the system” the opportunity to spy on you is probably the best strategy. **ching ching ching cutlery on glasses sound** I now publicly vow to leave gmail by the end of the year, and become self-respecting as I was before 2004.
Joe SuperParanoid said,
May 11, 2012 at 12:23 pm
Similar scenario here. I have a love hate relationship with Google, but technically they are currently in possession of 100% of what I digitally consider valuable, and have now suddenly changed their data policies from $20 a year to $5 monthly for the amount of data that I use. Very sad. Yet they continue smudging my screen with ads.
This might be helpful for you though.
http://gmvault.org/
sagar said,
May 10, 2012 at 12:08 pm
Were you on VOIP
debayan said,
May 10, 2012 at 1:04 pm
Nope. On my mobile phone.
david blaine said,
May 10, 2012 at 1:38 pm
Kinda street magikk! 🙂
satyaakam said,
May 10, 2012 at 5:53 pm
Does it not infringe there privacy *sic* statement , we need to do more trials and some research to nail them, also we should be getting ourselves freed from there clutches by moving on to Cynogen and leaving Gmail i suppose.