The Effect of Name Searches on Ads

The ads were for a company called Instant Checkmate, which sells public records. The ads appear when you do a Google search for the first and last name of a real person. Some of them are neutral, like looking for Molly Sweeney; others seem to offer up arrest records. Many in Tanner started doing lots of name searches to see if they could find a pattern to the ads. And we began focusing on Latanya versus Tanya. If you had Latanya with a last name, you got an ad suggesting that you had an arrest record. But if you typed in Tanya with alast name, you didn't.