It is all a question of getting at ones eyeballs.
I wonder if this is a phone/mobile thing. I don't see ads on my computer but I do on my phone and don't see any options on my phone's Chrome browse to turn off personalized ads.
My perspective is as a person who largely ignores the clutter of personalised adds.
Remember the bad old days of the WWW or the Wild Wild Web when the early versions of Windows Internut Exploiter had a very primitive easy to hack .net and flakey .xml/javascript based script engine that constantly got hacked and that allowed pop ups to appear at random from malicious web pages that search jumped your searches and mysteriouls froze the desktop and then changed your browser settings without permission?
Well things have changed a little since then thank heavens, but not much. At least you don't need to go to the store to have your load of internet search caused "viruses" checked and surgically removed from your computer quite as much these days. The days of the endless computer virus scams whether real or imagined are at least somewhat over for now.
If you have an Android based phone and a gmail account you can set your personal add preferences. One of the ways that sites get adds to you specifically is with the cookie monster so if you accept cookies from that site then you wind up seeing their add on you mobile and your home computer if you use google as a search engine and are signed in to your gmail account.
Same thing with the Bing thing and Microsoft, they just clone the methods of google inc and even use the same
"Blink" opensource browser engine on edge that google helped develop for the chromium browser.
Yahoo does things slightly differently and does not cooperate with Microsoft the way that google must to survive in this dog eat dog digital dog fight of the micro giants of computer and cell phone land.
And then there is apple which is allowed to compete but safari is off on a safari all its own when it comes to the web wars of advertisement and the search for willing eyeballs.
Interesting times these days of digital dysfunction and advertisement search jumping in the world of communications on the web.
If you use the web then searching it will inevitably tailor adds to your search habits unless you are living in a cave on Mars and even then the targeted adds are going to get at you eventually.
