So I have done another experiment - it confirms earlier behaviour (at least on my machine)

I created a new series of folders:
file:///C:/kitchen/whitegoods/appliances/kitchen

The ads that show on the page are now for kitchen sales, whitegoods, namebrand fridges, appliance news.

(Sorry about the specifics but needed to illustrate my point)

So I'm thinking Adsense reads the file path in real time and serves ads based on the keywords of the filepath in preference to the content of the page (which has nothing to do with kitchens).

And I'm not sure about the privacy implications of my file path being sent to Google?

To replicate this I think you'll need to ensure you save the source code so the javascript adsense call happens across the web.

I'd appreciate any comment.

Thanks

With pages saved on your machine, AdSense no longer has access to the page's content to serve contextual ads, all it has is the referrer info the page sent when requesting from the ad servers to load the ad, and with nothing to go by other than referrer (your folder structure), AdSense does its best to serve related ads based on that.

If you are worried about your privacy, turn off java script or stop browsing locally stored pages loading remote code.

By the way the if those pages loaded an image off a website, the site owner too now knows your folder structure and IP.

Thanks Hobbs

Ah yes - the referrer field.

<foil hat slips off head and falls to floor>

Cheers

and if you want to test that behaviour without having to create local files all the time: look out for the adsense sandbox, where you can provide urls for content based ads OR simply one or more keywords.

plus: it's probably not the referer-field google is checking, but the url of the current site ... you can also put another url into the js code loading adsense and tell google to use the content (and possibly keywords in the url) of that url to find ads.

Note to moderators: I'm using the word porcupine in place of "widget" for demo purposes. My page wasn't really about porcupines.

Here's my experience...

I had an instance where I was "testing" a new page design. I copied a template off an existing site (health related). I put up the page, forgot to update some keywords, but did replace the main content with new (porcupine related) stuff. The ads coming up were health related, not porcupine related. So I removed all remaining health related information and it still served the same (now) un-related health ads. Let's say the path was example.com/porcupine/

Another interesting tidbit. After updating the content to be all porcupine related and used this format - example.com/porcupine/index.php it treated it like a new page and generated new, porcupine related ads.

So from what I can gather, when Google isn't aware of a page, it scans it the first time, figures out what kind of ads should be there and serves those ads... for a while at least. I refreshed that page a dozen times and it still showed me health related ads...

We'll that's my $.02.