In light of a recent post by Mr Mills about seeing undesired ads on Avsim, I decided to experiment. I'm sure this is known to many, but it was new to me and obviously only pertains to those brave enough to not use ad blockers. 

Artificial intelligence is a fancy buzzword for "it's a really big statistical model". Yes, The Google (thanks G.W. Bush) does track cookies in browsers and it will generally try to tailor those ads to your browsing history and/or purchasing habits. For this reason I regularly run 2 separate browsers. One for stuff I'd rather not have tracked (emails, etc), and another for stuff that I don't care about having a tracking history of.

Because it's mostly statistics (averages, means, modes, etc.), the Adsense algorithm can also be trained. If you click more on things you want to see, they will become the norm. Training means doing 2 things:

- Regularly close undesired ads with the blue x that is often in one of the corners. Doesn't hurt to also tell The Google why you don't want that type of ad.

- Periodically click on ads that you are OK seeing. This helps both your statistical profile and Avsim.

Training takes time. On the order of days. But it seems to be working for me thus far.

I train them by using uBlock Origin.