peloton

[anona]

Well, if you googled the word, I think you may be seen as a potential customer target for a while! I suspect neither coincidence nor serendipity.

[birdy]

I'll bet you're right - I've seen several more ads since then.

[yelnats]

I had cause to search for an email from a friend with a surname of Corney in my Yahoo account. Less than 5 minutes later I was served with an ad for holiday cottages in Corney, Cumbria.

Big brother is watching, as well as Google, Bing, Yahoo etc...

[anona]

JCC searches with DuckDuckGo, because they say they don't track you.

[TRex]

JCC searches with DuckDuckGo, because they say they don't track you.

I've used DuckDuckGo for years for this reason.

[birdy]

Just tried out DuckDuckGoGo  for a couple of topics I've been searching for in the last couple of day on Chrome.  I found it very interesting that one site, with internal links, had the internal links I checked yesterday with Google marked as having been searched.  So does that mean that the site recognized my computer, or is there a more sinister interpretation that They Really Are Spying on Me?

"They" are, by the way.  Since I consider that nothing on my computer is hidden from Them anyway, I've signed up for one of the tracking programs, which pays me a piddling amount each month if I remember to let them know how to pay me.

[TRex]

DuckDuckGo sends your search terms to a variety of search engines and returns the results (more details at Wikipedia). It seems to be heavy on Google, but as far as Google (or any of DuckDuckGo's sources) can tell, it is a request from DuckDuckGo.

Besides the privacy aspect, it eliminates the damnable filter bubble which contributes to polarization of politics (and other fields).

[birdy]

R-M, my brother always refers to the cluster of cars on a highway as "the belly of the fish," which I believe he said was the nickname (French?) for a mathematical concept of a bell curve that was fat in the middle and slim at each end.

And I had a chance to ask my brother what it was, and he said it was a Poisson curve (hence the fish reference).

[Leedscot]

Pat, hope you’ve noticed that this year’s Christmas University Challenge has started.

Jock

[pat]

Yes, Jock, I’ve been watching it. But thanks for telling me. I find that in these so-called ‘celebrity’ editions of quizzes the questions get dumbed right down (e.g. the general knowledge questions in Mastermind) but UC doesn’t seem to dumb them down quite as much.

[Leedscot]

They certainly dumb them down a bit, because I find I can answer a lot more of them in the “alumni” version than in the ordinary ones!

[Linda]

But how many can you solve in 'Only Connect'?  Ridiculously difficult!

[Hobbit]

You're right Linda.  Unbelievably difficult but strangely compulsive viewing.  Sometimes do quite well with the connecting wall but the rest of it I'm usually lost!
Penny

[pat]

I’m best at the end bit of ‘Only Connect’, the bit where they leave all the vowels out.

[Linda]

That's my best part too, Pat.  Very rarely manage to solve the clues on the connecting wall but feel v. smug when I do solve a row!