It’s why I always toss in a tag or two that might not be very high ranking internally on steemit but I hope that in some shape affects a search engine result. For quite a while my name + one of my tags would often show me in top ranking in extremal search engines. While I thought the name I created in my own mind was original –it’s not! Sometimes there can be hundreds of thousands of results for search terms but I’m towards the top still.
I still don’t know much about SEO and it really is something I must put some time into better understanding.
I learned most of what i learned from experimentation and one thing i noticed is, if one is log in to youtube, google chrome or gmail results are different. Everything is so tied these days really. Recently, i feel apart from cookies, they may have some means to eavesdrop too and who knows it may already be possible. I joked about it recently but who knows. I bought a pineapple can drink and i was about to drink and discussed or mentioned it to the person beside it and the next video i was going to watch on youtube had a prior ad and it was the same canned pineapple drink that i was drinking and normally most of my ads recently have been related to crypto. Seriously, i wont be surprised. I have noticed that when i am logged on something that google owns, i rank in most things, till i am logged out or go out to use a differnet computer and i will see what's real
I’ve heard many stories similar to that. There was even rumored for a while that advertisers where using frequencies that were out of the range of human hearing that would commutate with other nearby devices for advertisement influencing purposes.
The way advertisement works these days has to be borderline brainwashing these days. I know some people who are so easily influenced by them they seem to have an addiction like symptoms to spending and buying not so needed things when they already are struggling.
I always find it interesting how fast me searching for something on newegg or amazon and that exact item now follows you around for quite a while in advertisements. Even more interesting was when I bought something and the ads for it followed me around till it was shipped a few days later. Then suddenly they stop showing up. As if they wanted to prevent another similar product from showing up and convincing me to cancel my order and buy that product instead.
I have also noticed as you have how tailored search results become depending what you are logged into.
So yes. They are knowing more about us than we know even of ourselves and yes, all that you mentioned is just it. Just it!
Some say they use to influence even election decision-making. With that much information about us, on a general level, they can influence anything. That high frequency thing you mentioned is very possible really. With google especially, they have that much power, looks like they rule the internet. I still use their browser alot though and ofcourse gmail, youtube etc, so how won't they know so much