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No, because the relationship is between Google and you. The advertiser doesn't know the criteria that leads Google to show the ad to you, they just pay Google to know what they are doing and deliver relevant leads.



I know exactly the criteria google uses to show the ad to someone, because that's what I buy when I buy keywords.

That google found those keywords in some poor souls email, and I don't have access to the email, doesn't make it any less the case that google is selling that poor souls info to me.

Edit: New policy. I won't respond to responses when my comment is negative. HN is rife with people who are just down voting anything based on ideology, or in a lot of cases, straight up hatred and bigotry. (IT's not question Google zealots hate Apple, and are irrational in this.) I won't be the queer in your game of smear the queer. I don't care how rational the response is.

I'm not saying you downvoted me, just that I'm done putting effort in when it's the comments are literally rendered unreadable and censored by people who don't care about rational discourse. So why participate?


That doesn't seem all that different than advertising in the yellow pages to me. You have to ask the customer how they heard about you, but if they mention the yellow pages, you're pretty sure you know what they were looking for, because you picked the section(s) you advertised in.

To my knowledge, Google doesn't tell you where the keyword was found, or even if it was an exact keyword match or something they deemed similar enough to show (but I'm by no means an expert in Adwords).

At some point you just have to accept that when you call a plumber, the plumber going to have a pretty good base to assume you need a plumber, and this is releasing some information to them. Without that, communication would be impossible.


> I know exactly the criteria google uses to show the ad to someone, because that's what I buy when I buy keywords.

No, you know exactly the criteria Google requests from you when you buy the ad. That's most likely a subset of the criteria Google uses to display the ad (which can include things like the past performance of your ads / of similar ads, in different contexts, for different kinds of users and probably all sorts of stuff I'm not thinking of).




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