I'm not convinced this works as it should. I turned of history a while back and have since repeated "remove all history". But I still get these ads related to searches and email that is too obscure to be co-incidence - e.g. Lately I get shown ads (sometimes multiple times daily) for "Foreign SIM cards" as I googled this about a month ago. Especially on Youtube. Anyone else notice this who has turned off their web history?
Are you sure they're Google Ads? If you followed a link from the search results, and that link had ads from another search network, that other network would've associated you with that search term.
or the same scenario, but with doubleclick ads. The FTC(?) agreement for acquiring doubleclick included a clause that they can't mix google account information and doubleclick logging, but as parent said, the sites you clicked through may have had doubleclick ads and associated that topic (or their brand specifically) with your doubleclick cookie. Deleting it should reset it.
Note that disabling Web History in your Google account will not prevent Google from gathering and storing this information and using it for internal purposes. It also does not change the fact that any information gathered and stored by Google could be sought by law enforcement.
With Web History enabled, Google will keep these records indefinitely; with it disabled, they will be partially anonymized after 18 months, and certain kinds of uses, including sending you customized search results, will be prevented.
Perhaps they removed the web history itself, but kept whatever inferences they made, which are associated with your Google account. Which is about as bad as keeping the history, but it's probably completely separate system, which just uses the history for training purposes.
