Directories
Yahoo directory (1994)
Did Target Really Predict a Teen’s Pregnancy??
. . .
A few months after Pole’s presentation, [NYT] reporter Charles Duhigg interviewed me… he asked for interesting discoveries … I rattled off a few and included pregnancy prediction, pointing him to the online video of Pole’s talk … and introducing him to Pole… One year later… Duhigg published a front-page … article, sparking a viral outbreak that turned the Target pregnancy prediction story into a debacle. (Siegel in Piatetsky 2014)
A Cadillac driver … said he was denied auto insurance by seven companies… When he asked an agent why, she advised him to pull his LexisNexis report. He discovered six months of his driving activity, including many instances of hard braking and hard accelerating, as well as some speeding… When he finally obtained car insurance … it was double what he had previously been paying. (Hill 2024)
Was deployed, though Google abandoned removal of 3rd-party cookies. (Whitwam 2025)
Describe the major shifts in Web search & advertising.
What were the major shifts in Web/advertising history?
. . .
Social
Social graph
FB:Ads (2007)
FB:Platform (2007) & Open Graph (2010)
Allowing app developers access to the social graph.
Which led to…
Cambridge Analytica
FB:Spons. Stories (2011)
FB:SS Results
TBG Digital reported a 2 billion impression test showed FB:Sponsored Stories “ad units received a 46% higher click through rate, a 20% lower cost per click, and an 18% lower cost per fan than Facebook’s standard ad units.” (Constine 2011)
Back and forth
Eventually, both returned to their corners: Google dominates search & FB dominates social. And TikTok uses “Spark Ads.”
AI search is the new frontier and battleground.