(Note: In this answer I'm specifically referring to job ads only.)
To be completely transparent here: The system has pretty much no idea of the concept of "your work/office" as opposed to "not your work/office". We just care about your given location at the time of the impression.
If you're using the same account at both locations, then the only differentiating factor will be the location itself. There may just be more high paying jobs closer to your current work location than there are near your home.
I guess in theory, they could be displaying more ads during the U.S. standard workday
We don't do this intentionally, but we do get more traffic during the weekday than the weekends, so technically we serve more ads on weekdays as a result.
Always assumed it would be based on account, not computer, or IP address
Generally it is. Our targeting is based on your Stack Overflow browsing history. If you're not logged in, we use a cookie to keep track of what you're looking at. Kevin's blog post goes into a lot more detail about how we do that.
Your IP address is solely used for getting an idea of where you are (GeoIP data).
Basically, what we do is try to come up with a number that represents our idea of how likely you are to click on a given job ad. The factors that go into coming up with that number are:
- Your Providence profile
- Your job matching preferences
- The targeting information the employer has assigned to the job
- Your location (based on your IP)
- The job's location
- What jobs you've already seen
- What jobs you've already applied to
All those things go into calculating that final score for a given job. We then use that score and a bit of randomness to pick N jobs (2 or 4 depending on the size of the ad) and then show those to you.
One of the things on our roadmap is to put this information up somewhere publicly accessible (and easily discoverable) with more detail. We strongly believe in being open first and foremost, and realize that the job ad portion of Stack Overflow is a bit of a black box (or in this case, blue or orange). We're not entirely certain when we'll be able to get to it, but we will!
