I thought I understood how AdSense worked... and part of that
understanding was that while working with local website files... since
AdSense could NOT read those files... it would serve PSAs instead.

Well today I was working on a local webpage file... on Emiliy
Dickenson... and I get an ad below. Now none of my browser pages were
open to anything but local files. But a few hours ago I followed a link
on a post called "Hacking Google" in another group... all about unusual
searches at Google that turn up often hidden directories for PWs and
MP3s. So for the hell of it I tried some of the PW Dir searches to see
if anyone was that stupid. I soon got bored and went back to work on my
website.

As a strong e-privacy advocate I get a red flag warning when I get ads
like this... and don't know what "content" Google is accessing to make
the ads relevant. Was I still logged in on my Google forum account? Is
there some persistant unique ID# cookie that Google uses to profile
like DoubleClick does all to serve us ads? Or can Google read local
files though a 2-way firewall? Anyone have any insights?

Here's the ad. I reloaded the page 10 times and it keeps getting the
same ads.

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www.cyber-trace.info

The ads themselves are just ads placed by advertisers, I'd think some
of them would probably breach Google's TOS, so the only thing you can
do is report them.

As for the indexing side, anything on your webserver that isn't secure
can be indexed by Google.

As to why these ads showed up....got me beat. Could be something in the
coding of the site, I'm not sure, maybe someone else can jump in with
an answer.

_______________________
Duncan Riley
http://www.duncanriley.com
Text Link Ads: the best returning advertising you can have to
complement Adsense: check it out now at
http://www.text-link-ads.com/?ref=2649

I know the ads were paid for by advertisers and delivered by Google. I
see no TOS violation on any advertiser's side.

The REAL question is... since this page was NOT up on the web but a new
page being edited on my PC... how did Goolge decided what content the
ads should have? Now clearly the content was wrong... but it reflected
a topic I'd been looking at a few hours earlier. There seemed to be
some persistant profile of my web activity a la the DoubleClick ad
model as opposed to just serving ads based on page content.

One of the reason I want nothing to do with Yahoo is because their
privacy policies are despicable. They reserve the right to sell any
private info about you they can get their hands on. I hope Google isn't
going the same route.