[TenFour]

I continue to be underwhelmed by the "targeted" ads I am supposed to be seeing. I just now randomly grabbed a website from my bookmarks, opened it in Chrome on my phone, and instead of my usual practice (I usually ignore the worthless ads) looked for the first ad that showed up. It was for Fannie Mae (mortgages). I don't own a home. Don't have a mortgage. Have no intention of purchasing a home anytime in the near future, and can't recall having searched real estate listings or anything like that recently. Was that a targeted ad? I have no idea, but it is typical of what I see. One of the most infuriating things I find on the Internet is that some news aggregators (like Google and Bing) seem to pitch me a lot of rightwingnut news stories, presumably because I am old, white, and male, yet I am a liberal through and through and refuse to read that junk! Another example. I was at a large shopping center and wanted to eat lunch, so I searched for food via Google Maps. For some reason Maps wanted me to leave the shopping center and travel to other parts of town for lunch, and didn't list many of the restaurants I could see as I sat in my car. I ended up choosing one nearby that I could see, but was not listed by Google. Shorter me--someone is wasting a lot of money paying Google for "targeted" advertising.