Is Media Partners reading my hard drive?

Got my tin foil hat on

[skippy]

So I am working on a new page locally and all of a sudden targeted or actually miss targeted Adsense ads start showing up instead of the normal PSAs.

The funny thing about it is though the ads are miss targeted (they are for music and movies) the paragraph directly next to the Adsense code does contain the term DVD. The page and my site have nothing to do with that area at all. If I take out the term DVD I get PSAs. Put it back and ads for music show up.

The only place I can think where this is coming from is the google toolbar. This page has never been up. Though I don’t use I.E. anymore the google toolbar is installed and the default preview browser in my HTML editor is I.E.

I have often wondered how Adsense can show targeted ads almost right away. Maybe the toolbar is giving media partners a head start. Not sure what to make of this. I think it is time to go out and buy some more tin foil.

[nsqlg]

impossible Mediapartner "read our hard disk", maybe they try choose ads by filename in referer

[skippy]

Normally I would accept that it is impossible. But really the ads were directly related to a term in the paragraph next to the Adsense code but not related at all to any site I have done in the past.

I could also make the ads turn into PSAs by removing the term DVD and make them come back by replacing the term. That term is the only place that could trigger that type of ad. Nothing remotely close in the file names.

To me it is just very strange.

[morpheus83]

It is quiet strange. Do you use a local web serve for tesing. I use IIS and I have never seen a targeted ad only PSA's.

[jurii]

With local Apache I have also have never seen a targeted ad .

[skippy]

Do you use a local web serve for testing

No just the C drive. I have never seen anything but PSAs as well. One place it could be coming from is I use a CSS table less design and the CSS is on the server as well as the images.

I could see that maybe tripping an ad that was related to the site but still I have never done a site remotely connected DVDs. The ads for this could only be read locally.

[Jenstar]

For a while I was seeing ads, not PSAs on my local drive. They were always anti-virus or spyware related, and those topics have nothing to do with the pages they appeared on (and I have never noticed those ads on any of my sites either).

[Drew3D]

Although it is impossible for Javascript to read files on your hard drive, it is definitely possible for Javascript to read the contents of the page it is contained within and report keywords back to the server. The Google toolbar need not be installed. It is conceivable that Google would use this technique to deliver targetted ads to pages that have not yet been crawled.

For tin foil apparel, remember to keep the shiny side facing outward.

[skippy]

Welcome to Webmasterworld Drew3D
Interesting. Keyword sniffing with JavaScript. Did not know you could do that. That would definitely be one explanation. Maybe they are testing something and that is why only a few people are seeing it.