You don’t have to use Google: there are a few good alternatives, but most of them store information about you, to build the same kind of profile as Google does. In other words, using a search engine is the same as giving away lots of private information about you, your habits, and your life. (Of course they don’t know if that search about the cat was really for a friend or neighbor, in which case the ads are incorrectly targeted, but if no one clicks, they don’t make any money.) So by storing information about you on Google’s servers, the company can know which ads are most likely to interest you.

Google is the biggest advertising provider on the web, and millions of websites use Google Ads. You’ll soon see ads for pet food on various web pages. For example, you may have a question about your pet, and use Google to find the answer. This is why you often see ads related to your web searches. It also tracks the websites you visit, ensuring not to miss anything you do. It creates a unique profile of you, of your interests, your medical conditions (because everyone searches Google when they have health questions), and your browsing activity, and uses this to provide carefully targeted ads. In exchange for providing you with such a powerful tool, Google collects data about you. Your share of that may be small: if you’re just an average person, you may search the web 3-5 times a day, but some of us, such as writers, may perform several dozen searches in a single day when researching articles and books. Google handles nearly 85,000 searches per second, or 7.3 billion per day, or more than two and a half trillion searches every year. If you’re like most people, you search the web a lot. How To + Recommended How to switch search engines on macOS and iOS (and why you should)

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