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Comment by craftkiller | Hacker News Reader

I've tested this before, and I'd recommend you all do it too. Its very easy: Pick a product you never need/buy/see advertised/talk about. Personally, I live in an apartment in a big city, so I used the word "mulch". Now stand in your empty apartment and talk to yourself about that product. This can be mostly meaningless babble like "I love mulch. I need to buy mulch. Mulch is best when brown." I did this for ~30 minutes.

Now the hard part: DO NOT tell anyone your word, do not type it into anything, its best you don't even mention the experiment to people. If you tell your word to people then they might type it into a computer which would taint the experiment.

Within a week I was seeing ads for mulch.

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Have you tried a control where you instead think of a product and see if you get ads for it, because what you're describing can also just be confirmation bias.

Nope, but that's a great idea. Looks like I've got some thinking to do tonight.

Yep, did the same thing with "Smoked Salmon". I went a step further and decided on this without speaking it about 2 months in advance so that I can get a clear baseline on ads I was getting.

On talking lovingly about smoked salmon, it took 2 days for it to turn up.

I have also seen it happen with folks talking about Jeep for instance.

It would be an interesting test to replicate. The hard part would be to disable the adblocker ...

I guess I could choose like 10 words and draw two to talk about and two controls to think about to notice any selection bias.

Was it the time of the year that most people would be buying mulch?

Yeah, let me guess, you ran your "test" at the end of winter...

What devices that have microphones were in the room with you?

Cellphone, Smart TV, Laptop, Desktop's webcam.

I don't use any sort of voice-based smart assistant like Google Home / Alexa.

Since this experiment, I've been a lot more conscious of microphones. My desktop's microphone and my laptop's microphone both have hardware kill switches. My desktop's webcam no longer has a built-in microphone. My television and cellphone still have microphones without kill switches.

> My television and cellphone still have microphones without kill switches.

If you have a "smart TV" and you have given it an internet connection, you probably should reconsider that.

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