That seemed strange, so I did the search [chocolate of the month club] on DuckDuckGo and clicked on the Microsoft ad. I ended up on http://www.amazingchocolateclub.com/?utm_source=MSN&utm_... which has "chocolate of the month club" in the url.
It looks like the "icep_uq" parameter in the ebay link has exactly my search query, [one fruit a month]?
I know you've made "we don't send your searches to other sites" a pretty major policy at http://donttrack.us/ . With these ads, do you know whether searches on DuckDuckGo are sometimes sent to other sites?
Thanks Matt. I removed that block while I investigate, and will report back when I know more. It's obviously not our intention to leak any search results through us.
Edit: still reviewing to make sure, but it appears that it isn't sending the search term via us. In fact, that's why it is going through our server, to specifically strip out the referrer. This appears to be an optional setting in the Microsoft ad center that sends the keyword bid for that ad.
Edit2: that does appear to be it. If I take all your examples and append ssn to the query, ssn doesn't appear in the resulting URL. I'm guessing they just have broad match on for those terms. You probably know as well as anyone that the coverage in the query space for ad terms is pretty wide, so if you search for something near the head you're bound to hit something exactly. I also tried a bunch of other queries, and since this setting is optional a lot of times the advertiser didn't set it and so their bid term is not send back; this is the case for example if I search for google and up at https://www.google.com/chrome?hl=en&brand=CHFX&utm_c...
This was the first time that I've seen MSN ads, so I did a search for flowers and clicked on the ad I got. I landed on the url: http://ww11.1800flowers.com/collection.do?dataset=11385&... which has the word "Flowers" in the url.
That seemed strange, so I did the search [chocolate of the month club] on DuckDuckGo and clicked on the Microsoft ad. I ended up on http://www.amazingchocolateclub.com/?utm_source=MSN&utm_... which has "chocolate of the month club" in the url.
I tried some more esoteric searches. The search [one fruit a month] returned an ebay link http://duckduckgo.com/k/?u=http://rover.ebay.com/rover/1/711...
It looks like the "icep_uq" parameter in the ebay link has exactly my search query, [one fruit a month]?
I know you've made "we don't send your searches to other sites" a pretty major policy at http://donttrack.us/ . With these ads, do you know whether searches on DuckDuckGo are sometimes sent to other sites?