My biggest standing question:
What mix of content and profile-based targeting will be used to target me ads?

My doubts
I’m not a fan of preference based content or ad targeting. I think it will only be effective in a “beats a blank” scenario. This is when the ad or content targeting engine has no idea what to target me, which basically means it has no context of my visit. This should be a rare phenomena since I usually enter a site through a link from Twitter, Google Search, or a news feed from my Pageflakes page. My destination is almost always not the front door, aka www.site_name_goes_here.com. This means that with the right technology, my context can almost always be identified.

Profile-based targeting done right
I must admit though that I do like the way Google is going about this profile based ad targeting. It’s transparent and easy to opt out.

Google should stick to it’s Ace in the Hole: Context
Google has one thing that everyone wishes they had, context. Google knows exactly what context their users are in after a search is submitted. So will Google target me primarily on context and fallback on my profile preferences when context is not available? That is what I hope to answer with this experiment. Stay tuned, but if you have an experience with this new initiative from Google, please post in the comments below.

Personalization, Search, Targeting, Technology