Online ads targeting your Internet history?

When visiting some web sites, especially those newspaper sites in my case, the ads around the main content are very closely tailored to my previous Internet history. Although it is not embarrassing yet, I can see a scenario that an awkward ads showing up besides an article I try to show during a presentation (my of my rules on presentation is to only show screen shots, not the web sites directly).

Anyway, I finally decided to do something about it.  It turns out that most of these ads are somewhat linked to Google, who makes this a quite easy and painless process.  All you need is to go to Google's ads setting page, and opt out both Google ads and other web services who use Google's ads server.

You may also stop Google from tracking your web history (a separate process from the ads).

Thanks the following web sites for providing above tips:

Stop Google from tracking your search history

I'm Being Followed: How Google—and 104 Other Companies—Are Tracking Me on the Web

Why do ads follow me around the web?

Prevent chrome always go to other country's google site

Google is the homepage for Chrome and most other browsers on my devices.  It's simple, use little data, fast to load, and useful. 

An annoying problem started to show up while traveling outside the country and afterwards.  While traveling, Google automatically detected, likely through IP, that I'm in a different country, so the Google page and associated search results are tailored to that country. Since I disabled some of the cookie functions (don't know what, need to figure out late), it still used the other country setting for some time even after I returned. This becomes very annoying especially the country specific search is usually useless to me. 

A quick Google search landed me to this site: "How to always use Google.com and stop Google from sending you to country specific website [Tip]".  Basically, you just type www.google.com/ncr in the home page setting (or just in the URL).  The "ncr" part means "no country redirect", according to the source. 

It worked great!