Do you use / search for information about Docker (the container platform)?

Yeah I've gotten some ultra disconnected bits too.

I'm really curious how those happen.

Wow, that's super random. As an Australian, hope you enjoy Aussie Rules!

Maemo user? :D

That's an interesting point. I wonder if ultra granularity ... isn't really the current state...

At one point it was sure that I was female (am not, have never been) too.... to their credit they figured it out after a year or so, but man the ads. But that was at least a limited run of confusion.

Oh they definitely do this. At least the traditional loyalty-card/coupon-enabled physical targeted ads do add enough random stuff that you find it non-creepy, after they had a few high-profile cases back in the day where they started targeted advertising of baby products to teenage girls, and parents got mad. The kicker was they turned out to frequently be real cases of teen pregnancies.

The have to put in some out of context ads sometimes, just so they can train their system.

For example they may show you an ads about hairdryers after you searched for computer keyboards. There is absolutely no relationship between the two, but Google doesn't know it yet, so they try. After all, there may be a correlation. In the likely event where there isn't, Google will simply stop showing hairdryer ads and show you computer mice instead (a known correlation) or running shoes (another experiment).

You'd think they'd sprinkle in something less ... annoyingly skewed that obscure what I actually want to see.