We're testing new ad formats in Search and expanding our Direct Offers pilot

https://blog.google/products/ads-commerce/google-marketing-live-search-ads/

by sofumel • 2 months ago

632 552 2 months ago

ablation2• 2 months ago

Well, yes. I mean of course they are. They're an ad company.

neolefty• 2 months ago

Yep, and they're a company! Gotta pay the employees, power bills, and investors somehow. If I'm paying a subscription I think I get to expect no ads. But not if it's "free" ...

clearstack2• 2 months ago

makes sense from the 10-K. Search ads were $198B last year, 57% of Alphabet revenue. if AI summaries kill the click model, this is the fix — ads inside the answers

amazingamazing• 2 months ago

Surprised it took this long.

wompapumpum• 2 months ago

Please let me advertise beside incorrect content

another-dave• 2 months ago

Need a proof reader who can spell strawberry? Send your AI draft to us for corrections.

swiftcoder2• 2 months ago

...was this ever in doubt? Search accounts for >50% of alphabet's total revenue - they are hardly going to kill the golden goose intentionally

pocksuppet• 2 months ago

Not search - ads in search account for >50% of their total revenue.

carschno• 2 months ago

Don't _ads in search_ account for 100% of their search revenue? Does Google Search offer any other paid services?

swiftcoder2• 2 months ago

That’s the same thing, isn’t it? Without search, there are no ads in search

Eldodi2• 2 months ago

It will be interesting how hidden those ads will be compared to current Search experience or what OpenAI is already doing.

It's a lot easier to mislead a user with an AI generated ad that with a Search result IMHO, I'm betting on a huige backlash if they don't make it VERY clear that ads are ads.

ardeaver• 2 months ago

If that happens, I'm betting they get slapped with something inconsequential like a $1 million fine and write it off as the cost of doing business.

FinnKuhn• 2 months ago

I would have expected them to wait with ads until OpenAI starts first and users switch to Gemini. Google is probably the player that could afford to wait the longest with this and increase their market share that way.

akoboldfrying3• 2 months ago

100%. This is the only part that I find surprising/confusing. Surely whoever blinks first incurs a massive reputational hit with the public (who don't think about this deeply enough to see that it was always inevitable), so why do that if you don't have to?

Perhaps the bright side from Google's POV is that it means that they can be the first to start wooing advertisers to their platform. First-mover advantage there might outweigh reputational damage with the public, especially if OpenAI follows suit with ads in 6 months.

gomox5• 2 months ago

OpenAI starts from excellent UX and needs to prove that they can monetize all those empty pixels. They will no doubt succeed.

Google starts from horrid UX where every advertiseable pixel has been squeezed dry. Only way to go is down.

gomox5• 2 months ago

Actually I believe Google is the one caught between a rock and a hard place here because their stock will reprice once the market realizes how much their position has weakened re: search ads.

They commanded an absurd premium on ads by virtue of being monopolistic leaders of search. They don't have a better product anymore, only a scale/distribution advantage.

criddell• 2 months ago

I have a hard time believing the stock price is based on anything other than vibes. It's up 125% from a year ago!

pbhjpbhj• 2 months ago

They seem to have been actively making search worse for at least a decade. No surprise they made it worse, that's [seemingly] what they were trying to do.

They presumably were doing it to increase "engagement". More time spent getting infuriated with their worsening search meant more time seeing their ads.

They deserve to go under.

Meanwhile 1 minute unskippable ads on 30s YouTube videos, pop-ups on mobile that cover the video when you close an ad. I hope the UK TV ombudsman grows some balls and starts applying the law on advertising-to-tv-programming ratio. It needs to be applied when programs have ads in them too.

MattRix2• 2 months ago

The idea that users will switch because a platform has ads has never played out in the past. The average user just doesn’t care.

Forgeties794• 2 months ago

The average user appears to care enough to go out of their way to use browsers and extensions and such that block ads, to the point that Google has spent enormous amount of time and money breaking those tools. I think that’s definitely something to consider.

Anecdotally, the number of people who have asked me about VPNs over the last 12 to 18 months has skyrocketed. I probably get a message a month from people of all backgrounds.

Gigachad• 2 months ago

Most platforms have a lot of cost and friction to moving. LLMs are all basically the same thing.

rchaud2• 2 months ago

Plenty of iPhone users are on Brave Browser because it blocks ads on Youtube. When you type in a search query in the address bar, it defaults to Brave Search. Don't underestimate the power of defaults.

There is a boiling point for user tolerance when it comes to ads. Google has been pushing that needle deep into the red for years now.

intrasight• 2 months ago

They could afford to wait, but... profits.

Also, they have to start experimenting now to get the formula right for AI ads.

rockinghigh2• 2 months ago

It may be a push from advertisers who want access to this format. Google Search competes for their money against the competition.

karlkloss• 2 months ago

Does nobody talk abot the elephant in the room? Will the answers the AI gives also be influenced by Googles customers?

Predaxia• 2 months ago

That's the real question and it's not hypothetical. Google already adjusts organic rankings based on advertiser relationships in ways that aren't documented. With AI Mode the surface area for that kind of influence is much larger and much less visible. A search result you can inspect. A synthesized answer you can't.

modin2• 2 months ago

Don't they already to this with maps routing? I thought this was the norm.

stingraycharles3• 2 months ago

This is not an elephant in the room, this is so obvious and discussed all the time. What else is Google going to do, give up their one and only goose that lays the golden eggs?

Regular search being replaced with AI search means regular search (with ads) being replaced with AI search (with ads).

The benefit of AI search will be that it’s much better “integrated” in the answer, aka even harder to detect.

chilli_axe• 2 months ago

Elephants in the room are obvious by definition.

akoboldfrying3• 2 months ago

This is not an elephant in the room, this is so obvious.

Maybe they grew up in an environment where the phrase "elephant in the room" meant a situation where people enter a room, notice an elephant there, and immediately scream "Jesus Christ there's a goddamn elephant!"

NitpickLawyer• 2 months ago

their one and only goose that lays the golden eggs?

Eh, it really isn't the only goose in goog town. Cloud is at ~20% of their total revenue, and probably is going up w/ their hardware success and other licensing deals. I'm curious to see what goog can do with their properties if this trend continues. Less reliance on ads could be interesting. (many former googlers have said that pressure from the ad business was felt across all their products)

j_maffe• 2 months ago

But wouldn't that break FCC rules?

Ajedi32• 2 months ago

They could have ads alongside the AI response, in a completely separate section of the page (like search results are). That seems fine. But if they start including ads in the AI context window then it becomes impossible to tell what parts of the response are driven by advertisement vs organic results.

It seems like for now they are making an effort to keep them separate.

gbro3n• 2 months ago

I won't be able to use their AI results if they are, personally. If I ask the question "what is the best tool for doing x" and I can't trust that the answer is going to be the truth according to all available information, then the AI is useless or worse, misleading. If google is unbiased, and only highlights paid advertiser mentions, no one will pay. I'd only accept this if it was a clear separation of LLM response and ads in a sidebar or something similar. Other people may not care. Many happily read politically affiliated news knowing that their opinions and actions may be influenced by a media source.

weird-eye-issue6• 2 months ago

Let me let you in on a little industry "secret"

You can't trust those results no matter what

The pages that they pull in to source that data all contain affiliate links and companies contact websites to get their tools to the tops of those lists by paying money often monthly. I know this because I do this...

It's basically standard SEO but it also manipulates AI like ChatGPT very very easily

nekzn• 2 months ago

Sorry to tell you that all websites you get when you google "what is the best tool for doing x" are already manipulated, including reddit conversations.

adverbly2• 2 months ago

Those sort of things are already highly biased because of the marketing spam that the modelsmare trained on.

I'd be more worried about AI convincing you that you need a product or expensive solution when you actually don't.

justincormack• 2 months ago

There is no “true answer given all available infomation” maybe unless you give an eval function.

LastTrain• 2 months ago

Then you already can’t use it because it already doesn’t give you a result like that.

HEX4AGON• 2 months ago

This has always been the case but with AI its going to get even worse. I mean a lot of people associate AI with higher "intelligence" sorta say, now you sprinkle in some political propaganda there from the highest bidder and you are going to have a big problem in the future especially if the populace ended up trusting these corpo AI blindly.

thinkingtoilet• 2 months ago

What were you doing before hand? Do you believe you were getting perfectly unbiased information?

ghostly_s• 2 months ago

"what is the best tool for doing x" and I can't trust that the answer is going to be the truth according to all available information, You think AI has some way of assessing the truthiness of "all available information?"

bayindirh5• 2 months ago

The method is already public for some time now. I bookmarked it since I share it a lot:

https://research.google/blog/mechanism-design-for-large-lang...

It's the same. There are slots, there's bidding, there're bidders. Same ad model, evolved for AI era.

iugtmkbdfil8342• 2 months ago

Sigh, thank you for sharing this. This is disheartening ( even if not unexpected ) given that I actually like current version of gemini based on how well it performed -- all things considered -- relative to gpt sub on recommendation check.

da_chicken• 2 months ago

That will be fun because it's illegal to accept money to promote a product without indication that you have done so. The FTC requires "clear and conspicuous disclosure" for such endorsements.

twobitshifter3• 2 months ago

Crime is legal now

vrganj2• 2 months ago

Doesn't matter as long as you bribe the right people. The government is completely compromised.

rplnt2• 2 months ago

You can label the whole output, every time, right? May include sponsored content or something.

kubik369• 2 months ago

The chat interface has the disclaimer "AI responses may include mistakes." and that appears to be enough to relieve them of any responsibility for the responses. In a similar manner, wouldn't it be enough to add a disclaimer that says "AI responses may include sponsored content."?

account422• 2 months ago

Seems to work fine for product placement in other media. Apparently "clear and conspicuous disclosure" can be a footnote hidden somewhere in the credits.

stackghost2• 2 months ago

Is it not obvious to you, particularly now that Trump has been elected twice, that laws are meaningless in the United States, unless you are poor?

reactordev4• 2 months ago

All signs point to yes. It’s Google’s profit center.

vrganj2• 2 months ago

Not just their customers.

Their entire ideology. An LLM is the perfect propaganda technology, the more people outsource their thinking to them, the easier they will be for Big Corporate to control.

It's crazy to me that AI developments have such a big uncritical following from people that claim to be pro-freedom, especially around these parts. The end goal is and always has been enslavement to capital.

pelasaco• 2 months ago

for sure, i guess this is one of the experiments that confirms that would work https://openai.com/index/where-the-goblins-came-from/

BoiledCabbage2• 2 months ago

I couldn't write better satire if I tried:

A search through GPT‑5.5’s SFT data found many datapoints containing “goblin” and “gremlin.” Further investigation revealed a whole family of other odd creatures: raccoons, trolls, ogres, and pigeons were identified as other tic words, while most uses of frog turned out to be legitimate.

AlfieJones• 2 months ago

Even if it's not right now, it's hard not seeing this happening at some point

crowcroft• 2 months ago

This never occurred to traditional search results so highly doubt they’ll start now.

shevy-java2• 2 months ago

This is the problem with the black box model. These adCompanies control what people see. People don't know if they can trust the generated slop.

It is the end of the open web. People need to wake up and realise what full Evil is being planned here. Google tried this before, e. g. AMP and what not.

philipwhiuk• 2 months ago

Obviously.

alfiedotwtf• 2 months ago

Already has. I asked yesterday a question on different types of graphics cards vs power consumption, I and it asked me if I’d like links to buy some graphics cards

thrance2• 2 months ago

What about political ads? Will the AI lie about news to further the interests of Google's patrons?

baxtr• 2 months ago

it’s fair to be skeptical. But then again we already know that this wasn’t the case with search results. So not sure why we would assume it is this time around.

emsign• 2 months ago

The truth is brought to you by the highest bidder. Individuals, companies and nation states already pay for public relations. If Google offered them a service they'd pay good money.

ungovernableCat• 2 months ago

Will Google choose to negatively impact its bottom line for the sake of giving their users a higher quality experience?

No. It's not 2005 anymore.

pluc2• 2 months ago

Of course. Just look at the SEO industry Google created. You can't search for anything without a full page of sponsored/SEO bullshit, and everyone agrees it's precisely why Google results are less relevant today than 10 years ago. But here we are, this is exactly the same thing. We used to search with a term, Google monetized that. We now search with a sentence, do you think Google's gonna leave that cash on the table?

ajkjk• 2 months ago

... Yes, people talk about that.

layer8• 2 months ago

It depends on what influence you have in mind. Hidden advertising is illegal in most jurisdictions.

MagicMoonlight2• 2 months ago

The article literally says they pay to determine the answers given to you.

vb-8448• 2 months ago

Is this a rhetorical question?

The answer seem so obvious.

It is also obvious that people will try to understand how to hack the whole algorithm ... we are entering in a new era of hot air SEO like experts.

Trias11• 2 months ago

Yeah, Lets build the next generation AI and slap an ads on it for a good measure.

_3u102• 2 months ago

Fuck yes. I was worried about not having ads and google providing useful results again.

The last time i clicked on an AI link it took me to a page that wasn’t just more google ads or SEo bullshit. It was very disappointing I was looking forward to accidentally clicking more ads and instead found information relevant to what I wanted to know.

nelblu• 2 months ago

We’re introducing more helpful ads in AI Mode

I always chuckle when ad companies say that. I have never seen a helpful ad in google search, but well I have been using adblockers forever so I would not know.I am honestly curious though, for those who don't use adblockers - what percentage of ads that you see are actually helpful?

baal80spam• 2 months ago

I have never seen a helpful ad

There, I fixed it!

iso16312• 2 months ago

I sought out the He Man trailer because I thought I'd be interested in it. I decided I was and will watch it at the cinema next month.

That was a helpful advert.

I also sought out the Supergirl trailer and decided I wouldn't bother seeing it. Again a helpful advert.

In both cases I chose the advert.

HelloUsername• 2 months ago

Actually it should be:

I have never seen an ad in google, because I use adblockers

iLoveOncall• 2 months ago

I never have on Google Search (I also block them to be fair), but I've booked a lot of shows through Instagram ads actually. Shows I learnt about only through those ads and I would have been disappointed to miss.

But yeah that's literally the only platform where I've ever had useful ads. Even other meta products only have absolute garbage ads.

LightBug1• 2 months ago

Just came here to say the same thing. Local gigs and the like, instagram is actually decent.

And I'm a to-the-bone hater of ads. Ad-blockers up to my eyeballs. Except for that one niche of local gigs on insta.

Antibabelic• 2 months ago

I don't have an ad blocker on my laptop. The ads I get are pretty much entirely generic and irrelevant to me, I don't remember ever consciously clicking on an ad.

rib3ye• 2 months ago

Recently I’ve been starting up quick web projects and a number of external services are recommend (Neon, Resend, Railway), and if I just let the agent rip, signed-up for and implemented. Is it confirmed any LLM producer or provider has been receiving kickbacks for these technical decisions?

_heimdall5• 2 months ago

Legally they would gave to disclose with the recommendation that its a paid advertisement. That said, they were also legally not supposed to scrape the entire internet for training so if they are getting kickbacks I wouldn't expect a confirmation.

Eldodi2• 2 months ago

Some might argue that Adwords got so successful because ads competed like search results, on bid AND relevance, not just bid.

If your ads inventory is big enough, ads can actually be a better answer to your intent than organic content, because the companies behind the ads have a much stronger incentive to satisfy your need.

_heimdall5• 2 months ago

Paid ads always negatively distort the results.

If AdWords or search consider both relevance and the fee collected, the end user will never be shown the most useful results consistently. If the goal was usefulness they would only pick results by relevance and take no fee at all, or take a flat fee that isn't based on a bidding system.

sedawkgrep2• 2 months ago

Since when have we considered ads something helpful?

Their purpose isn’t to be helpful. They're there to sell you something, and nothing more. Any semblance of helpfulness is misinterpretation and merely coincidental.

codingdave• 2 months ago

Since when were we the customer?

They are helpful to the people who buy the ads, not those of us who have them injected into our experiences.

embedding-shape2• 2 months ago

The people who are buying ad spots and creating ads absolutely believe they're helpful, not just to you, but to their client. Their purpose is to helpful, to the company, who wants your money and who gives the marketer their money, and with this action, the marketer will believe whatever is needed to do their job, as always.

moooo99• 2 months ago

Since when have we considered ads something helpful

I have genuinely met people who claim that ads are helpful and interesting and used this as a justification for adware companies to stalk you every step you take on the web.

adrian_b• 2 months ago

I do not think that I have ever seen on the Internet a helpful ad. When I want to buy something, I search what I want or I go directly to online shops that I have used before or to price comparison sites.

Nonetheless, mostly before the appearance of the Internet, when I was reading various technical journals, especially during the seventies and the eighties of the past century, e.g. magazines or journals of electronics or of computers, I was considering most ads as helpful, as they were making me aware of various things that I might have wanted to buy.

Unlike the ads that bother me today, those ads in magazines or journals intended for more competent buyers contained enough technical details and prices to make possible comparisons between products, and they were also easy to skip when not interested, instead of covering important content on a Web page and making efforts to provide a visual distraction that makes difficult to focus on the useful content of that Web page.

The Internet ads are completely unhelpful because they are never about something that I intend to buy in the near future. The most stupid thing is the fact that after I have searched for something to buy, I am bombarded for a long time with related ads, but that is exactly when with certainty I am no longer interested in that kind of ads, because I have already bought whatever I had been searching for.

lelanthran3• 2 months ago

Since when have we considered ads something helpful?

Depends. Ads a low-effort large-reach pathways for lead generation, mostly useful for B2C penetration.

I also did sales when I ran my own company, and I can absolutely guarantee that ads can be helpful. When talking to leads you're talking to someone who a) never saw what you offered but is listening to you anyway, or b) saw what you offered and decided to contact you.

The very first thing I'd do in sales is try to determine if the person I was talking to had a) A need my product could satisfy, plus b) Authority to make the purchase, and c) The budget to actually follow through.

The last thing I wanted to do is spend a bunch of my limited time talking to people who never had any intention of pulling the trigger on a contract; those are much harder to convert to paying customers (not impossible, just harder) and were almost never worth the effort.

My best-case scenario was "Someone reached out to me". Ads are a way to make that happen.

Now, if you're talking about internet ads, then you're talking about a different beast altogether (B2C), and those ads can be helpful to purchasers if they were already in the market for $FOO.

The problem is that internet ads are almost never worth the money - a significant number of clicks are from bots, another significant number are from accidental clicks and only a tiny tiny number of them are from people with the intention to buy $FOO from somebody, and they are just checking our your $FOO offering to compare.

hansmayer• 2 months ago

Oh, they don't mean helpful to you. What they mean is, helpful to their revenue.

reaperducer2• 2 months ago

Since when have we considered ads something helpful?

Their purpose isn’t to be helpful. They're there to sell you something, and nothing more. Any semblance of helpfulness is misinterpretation and merely coincidental.

Pithy, dismissive, reductionist, and wrong.

Yes, most of the bottom-feeding ads you see these days are along the lines of your description. But those are not the only ads, not the only method of advertising.

Good advertising is informative. iPod ads let people know that iPods exist. An ad for a new album lets you know that a band you like, but don't follow closely, has something you might want to try. An ad letting you know that "Chainsaw Y is on sale this week" is helpful for people thinking about buying a chainsaw. An ad demonstrating "Chainsaw A is as good as Chainsaw B, but costs less" is helpful for people considering an alternative.

The problem is the race-to-the-bottom mentality that has consumed the advertising industry since 2008. This is largely fueled by the ad tech industry which prioritizes things like "engagement" that can be presented in a pretty chart to middle managers, but don't actually mean anything. That's how you end up with all the obnoxious pop-ups and videos.

Ads for chainsaws on a chainsaw enthusiast web site is fine. Ads for a refrigerator I already bought two weeks ago is just a waste in a dozen ways.

scrollop• 2 months ago

And larger companies are more able to purchase ads, reducing a breadth of stores and options.

pixel_popping• 2 months ago

I disagree-ish because I've been sold by ads things that remain in my life today a long-time later, which mean that it was genuinely helpful, I'd say the ratio is minimal, but still sometimes it's on-point, I actually discover a lot of products thanks to ads.

saimiam• 2 months ago

FD - I pay Insta to advertise a product for parents.

The results of above mentioned advertising have been great. I get inbound enquiries, parents get their curiosity about the usefulness of what I offer whetted. I don’t understand how the ad was unhelpful to the parent and me.

JeremyNT• 2 months ago

"More helpful" to the person selling the ad, perhaps :)

mrweasel2• 2 months ago

Since when have we considered ads something helpful?

At some point Google ads where genuinely good and helpful to me. If you needed to buy something, and you didn't know who sold it or what it was called, the Google ad engine would yield better results than their search.

Now Google also broke that part. All ads I get are for Temu, Fruugo and other weird sites that I guess does drop shipping, maybe some marketplace stuff. It's the same sketchy sites that's return for almost all searches. It's rarely the "brand sites" that you trust who shows up first in the "Sponsored products" section.

kibwen• 2 months ago

This. Ads are industrialized brainwashing designed to induce dissatisfaction in the viewer to stoke demand for shit you don't need. And because companies pay for ads and then pass the price on to you, you're getting taxed on everything you buy for the privilege of being brainwashed.

yubblegum• 2 months ago

Since when have we considered ads something helpful?

They are not. The utility of companies advertising their products can be trivially served with dedicated 'advertising' channels without enabling stealth surveillance by big co. and their paying clients, various goverments.

ninjagoo• 2 months ago

Their purpose isn’t to be helpful. They're there to sell you something, and nothing more. Any semblance of helpfulness is misinterpretation and merely coincidental.

Maybe it isn't quite as black & white as that?

What about an ad run by a non-profit that doesn't have any marketing professionals at all? Said non-profit attempting to connect to consumers?

What about listings on craiglist? or facebook marketplace? or personal ads in the local newspaper?

Do you have a proposal/alternative to help with market discovery, customer discovery? Search has in the past served that function, but is likely to be soon dead.

smsm422• 2 months ago

Selling something to me can occasionally be helpful, because I need things from time to time, and at that moment offering to sell me a thing that I need is helpful. What is annoying is that with all billions upon billions supposedly spent on figuring out what I need to sell it to me, the best they can do is "oh, you bought shoes once? Clearly you're the guy who's into buying shoes, let us spam you with shoes ads for the next 5 years!"

carlosjobim• 2 months ago

Sometimes people want to buy something.

charcircuit2• 2 months ago

A customer buying something means that they have found something valuable. Helping people increase the total (personal) value of what they own is helpful.

laurentiurad• 2 months ago

What do you expect them to say? More annoying ads? They're trying to wrap this in a positive way. Everyone knows that ads are annoying.

iso16312• 2 months ago

If an advert was helpful I would be able to click the "show ads" button

I used to do this. I used to pay for adverts -- computer shopper was a magazine I traded real money for to get the adverts.

If ads aren't opt in, they aren't useful.

mattlondon• 2 months ago

I typically block ads as well, but more recently I changed some setting in the default Android newsfeed thing and some ads started to show through amongst the news items.

The ads there are usually fairly innocuous (i.e. not disruptive, not flashing auto play vids etc, they just look like another news item and you can just scroll past them like other news articles you're not interested in), but I have actually found them useful. I am wearing a T-shirt right now in fact that was advertised to me a week or two ago as "on sale" for £8 (eight) and which I clicked through and purchased. There have been one or two other examples of things there that actually have been useful or at least interesting to me right now. So they actually have been useful/helpful in that regard.

So I am a bit conflicted here. It is no cost to me to click on the ad, and I bought some things that I use but would probably have not got otherwise. Am I being manipulated to part with my money? I dunno. Would I have bought a £8 t-shirt anyway if I was just in a shop and saw it? Maybe. Was the ad actually quite well targeted and appropriate? In this case yes.

I think on balance I would say those news feed ads are acceptable to me. I have problems where it is totally irrelevant and disruptive. Hopefully the AI mode ones will be similar to the news feed ones. I would be pretty upset if the ad content was directly worded into the response.

dotancohen• 2 months ago

I love the idea of targeting advertising. But the current implementations I hate.

The ASR voice recorder app gets this right. It lets me use the full featured version for three days, after which I need to watch a few ads to get another three days. I choose when to watch the ads, and if I'm late there is nothing worse than a small nag at the bottom of the app. I actually now start every day with the ads, while I cook breakfast, and it is a positive experience. I could also just pay for the app and be done with them.

furyofantares• 2 months ago

We live in a world where ads are the primary way information about products enters the information sphere. That seems like something we should fix to me, but it's where we are, and it means if ads are well enough targeted it can be rational for an individual to want to consume them.

Also I think people pay much of the price of ads even if they don't view them, via increased prices. The trillion dollar advertising industry money ultimately is paid by consumers. It is a necessary cost to try to launch a new product because we are reliant on it for information and because all your competitors are advertising.

Forgeties794• 2 months ago

The super concise version of my typical rant is that we aren’t just being simply served up ads. They are mining us for data every step of the process and then using it in invasive ways or selling it to their friends who will use it for God knows what. We don’t know what they’re doing, when they’re doing it, what they’re using it for, and we have no way of not participating once we’ve walked through the door. There’s no warning sign that actually tells you what is happening and no realistic way to opt out except for never opening that URL in the first place. You literally can’t be an informed consumer if you want to be on the Internet

IdiotSavage• 2 months ago

I am wearing a T-shirt right now in fact that was advertised to me a week or two ago as "on sale" for £8 (eight) and which I clicked through and purchased.

This means the ad was effective. But was it useful to you? Did it save you from having to look for it yourself?

If you were not thinking something like "I need a certain T-shirt" before this came up, it's likely the ad created a desire in your mind which you didn't have. You got manipulated successfully by the advertiser.

otikik• 2 months ago

“Helpful to our short-term bottom line”

IshKebab• 2 months ago

I have never seen a helpful ad in google search

I have, fairly often in fact. That's why Google makes such a bucket load of money from their ads - they're actually vaguely relevant.

I've don't think I've ever seen a relevant ad outside of Google though, and I still wouldn't say "yeay, helpful ads!". Nobody is going to want them even though I occasionally get relevant ones and click on them.

reaperducer2• 2 months ago

I have never seen a helpful ad in google search

That's a good thing.

I don't mind ads, as I understand that without money, web sites go away. But I'm very careful about being tracked. That, I don't think is cool.

It's not unusual for me to see ads for companies hundreds or even thousands of miles away, and often selling things for which I do not possess the correct body parts.

I consider that affirmation that I am mostly successful at staying off the ad-tech radar.

prepend2• 2 months ago

I mind ads and don’t think sites would go away. They’d just be less profitable.

I mind ads because they crowd out less profitable margins and result in worse products. Imagine how nice and useful Google could be if they optimized for search instead of ads.

ulfw• 2 months ago

The only helpful ads are the ones that waste money on Google (namely those companies/products/results that show up on top anyway, right below the sponsored very same ad)

bombcar3• 2 months ago

The fact that a brand has to pay money to outbid competitors on their brand is something that feels it should be illegal. Google “forcing” Coca Cola to pay for ads on the search “coca cola” so Pepsi doesn’t appear at the top is somehow wrong.

Razengan• 2 months ago

I have never seen a helpful ad

I have never purchased anything [just] because of an ad, nor do I know anyone who has.

But I have been turned off from EVER buying some things because of their obnoxious ads.

The whole ads racket is a case of the emperor with no clothes, an ugly self-justifying cancer infesting human civilization.

And to those perpetuating the racket who'll say "but how will people find out about products??" the answer is fucking better search and filtering systems.

whynotmaybe• 2 months ago

I have seen 1 "helpful" ad yesterday.

When searching for sonarqube, I received an ad for a competing product I'd never heard of and I'll check them today to see if it fits my need.

netdur• 2 months ago

I find helpful ads on Google Search sometimes, and it can be the easiest way to get results, but most of the time, ads (and SEO) ruin search accuracy to the point that it's becoming totally useless

beanjuiceII• 2 months ago

this might sound wild but..on some platforms that are good with figuring out the types of things i like, I get many ads that I actually like. facebook for example i almost exclusively go there just to see what kind of products i wouldn't otherwise know about that it might show me (some of which i've bought). plus if it helps pay for services than i'm all for it.

the part that crosses the line for me is when the platforms are peddling malware and scams through ads. google search would have a ton of this suprisingly..so i hope in AI mode they can improve things

illwrks• 2 months ago

I have to wonder if helpful ads most likely refers to the type of add for the exact search result… So, for example if you search for Coca-Cola the first ad will be something Coke has paid Google for. That helps Google earn $ and helps Coke not loose to a site with better SEO and confusion. Does it help you… maybe.

small_model• 2 months ago

When I want to buy something I search for it or ask AI for recommendations etc. Why not have a toggle, this is a search for product so shower me with ads related. Not all the time when I am just causally browsing.

eithed• 2 months ago

Maybe one or two in an ocean of crap. And even the ones I do see which are interesting I start despising, because I will see them hundreds of times. Base44 - I will never use your services because of the ad bombardment. Same with that fucking toothbrush that doesn't have bluetooth. It never amazes me that ad agencies just serve me 1 or 2 same ads all the time, but :shrug:

kccqzy• 2 months ago

A pretty high percentage. But that’s only because the ad goes to the same destination as the first organic search result. Just search for a brand whose web address you don’t know, and usually both the ad and the first results goes to the brand’s home page.

jorisboris• 2 months ago

It seems techies collectively try to avoid ads, but clearly other segments of people actively click and buy through ads. I would love to get a marketing expert's view on this. It differs by product obviously, but there must be some common character variables (gender, wealth level, ...)

I bought once through facebook ads, and now I actively try to avoid any ads

bombcar3• 2 months ago

Advertisements have multiple purposes - brand awareness, product awareness, sale awareness, etc.

Coca Cola advertising is mainly brand awareness - remind you they exist but not really directing you to buy one “right now”.

Product awareness is how you learn about new product - usually trying to convince new customers, but sometimes just trying to swap existing customers. These can be “offensive” (a new product aimed at taking a competitors market share) or “defensive” (keeping existing customers from switching away). Of course this overlaps with above.

Sale awareness is how you “scoop” up customers who have been exposed to the above but haven’t bought - you’re offering a “deal” so they’re more likely to buy. Most online search-targeted advertising is this kind, and is the most immediate (click and buy) - the other two are just to make it so when you want product, you want their product.

chistev• 2 months ago

None.

freedomben2• 2 months ago

I use an adblocker and despise most ads with a burning hatred, but the absolutist position of "never helpful" isn't right. My example: A game I've been wanting to buy for a while recently went on sale on Steam. I saw an ad when I opened Steam. I bought the game for the low price, and it is now one of my favorite games I've ever played (Burnout Paradise City - highly recommend, but wait for a sale)

ZetsuBouKyo• 2 months ago

For people who think often, ad is only useful in very few situations.

The ability to think often is ultimately a capability that only a minority of humans possess. Therefore, for the vast majority of people, ad is very useful.

For example, my retired parents enjoy buying little gadgets from ads.

NDlurker2• 2 months ago

Personally, I sometimes like targeted ads. If I'm intentionally shopping, it is nice to see ads relevant to my interests. Not saying the whole Internet should be a highly surveiled mall, but they do have their place

croon• 2 months ago

I understand your thinking, but I have never felt that the "promoted result" in any search when shopping around inspired confidence in them being the best fit or value for me, even though they're technically a relevant result.

More directly: Someone paid to have them surface that result for me, instead of having me find them for being the best. I can understand the need to bypass the SEO arms race of yesteryear, but it still rubs me the wrong way.

AlexandrB• 2 months ago

It would be great if I was shown things "relevant to my interests". That's not what targeted ads are because ad placement depends on who is willing to pay the most, not on what optimally matches what I want. The most obvious example is search ads in the App Store that show you a competitor's product (or an outright scam) as an ad when searching for a specific app. Now extend that kind of dynamic to any other product category and you start to see the problem.

nibblecid• 2 months ago

In my case I haven't seen a single helpful ad in google search. They try to make the ads related to my work or hobbies but it's not helpful at all. Aside from Google, Instagram seems to be nailing the ads algorithm better.

foobarian• 2 months ago

Tbh that is a pretty vague statement. Could be 0.01% more and it would still be technically correct. Could be doubling the number of non-helpful ads in the meantime

thih9• 2 months ago

It’s because you haven’t given them enough access to your data. Otherwise they would be able to offer more personalized and accurate ads.

I should know, I block tracking and see annoying and unhelpful ads.

And I browse social media with their algorithmic feeds, where the content is hyper personalized, helpful and mostly ads too.

cucumber3732842• 2 months ago

I remember the good ol' days when you'd search for the specs on a 10yo server you pulled out of the dumpster and then a day later you'd see "Aging HPC infrastructure, upgrade to latest IBM X-series blade architecture" banner adds in hilariously irrelevant places like thepiratebay or a certain hub of videos.

Those "naive" ads from 15+yr ago are far more relevant than anything I've ever seen since.

2OEH8eoCRo02• 2 months ago

I search for Converse sneakers and top result is an ad for Converse sneakers! Genius! Pay these genius engineers more! So incredible. How are they smart enough to show me exactly what I search for?!

But seriously. What are we paying advertisers for? Converse pays Google so that they don't show Vans when I search for Converse? Sounds like extortion or protection money.

davnicwil• 2 months ago

I think weirdly, ads embedded in AI search responses actually maybe do have a chance at being helpful (as long as it's clear from the context of the question that I may be willing to pay for a solution) just because they could potentially be quite well matched to the specific thing I want, or if they're not quite as well matched but offer other benefits, explain the difference.

At the moment search ads aren't very helpful because you have neither of those things. You always get them for any type of query, and when you do get them you don't know if the thing being shown will exactly solve your problem, or only approximately, and the work is much more on you to find that out by reading the product's marketing pages further.

If all that could be done for you up front, reasonably honestly, then I could see it being useful. I mean to be sure, in some small percentage of searches I really am looking to buy something and really do want to be usefully, honestly pitched on available options.

Humorist2290• 2 months ago

An exception that proves the rule, but KRAZAM's channel on Youtube has legitimately helpful ad reads. Rare Data Hunters [0] for example ends with a 1 minute Cloudflare ad that's basically a crash course in their services. Having worked with GCP and AWS but not so much with Cloudflare, that ad gave me a surprisingly clear idea of what the important pieces would be.

Truly an exception though. I think generally the only people for whom ads are helpful are advertisers.

0: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IU4ByUbDKNc

gloosx• 2 months ago

Well, they are definitely helpful for Google incomes

ajross• 2 months ago

I have never seen a helpful ad in google search, but well I have been using adblockers forever so I would not know.

That this self-awarely-self-contradicting quip is the top comment on the page is about as essential a summation of HN's collective thought as I can think of.

I remain amazed at the pathology that results in the truth that, even in the world as it exists today, the one enemy that truly unites the supposedly-elite techno-leaders of our increasingly advanced society is...

...horror about seeing advertisements for products we're probably buying anyway.

rastrojero2000• 2 months ago

Those ads do help them, though. They're an ad company now

bryanrasmussen• 2 months ago

I used to see helpful ads every now and then about 18 years ago.

arational• 2 months ago

Someone on here said his wife got upset when he set up adblocker for her.

RulerOf• 2 months ago

I saw a helpful ad once.

The organic search results didn't offer what I needed at all, but the ad took me straight to an e-commerce site that sold what I wanted. I had it in my hands at a reasonable price about 5 days.

It was for a Nintendo Wii component video cable, back in 2007.

ventana• 2 months ago

I find all ads — both search ads and website ads — very helpful in training the brain to ignore the noise. Isn't it amazing how we trained ourselves to immediately detect the 1pt hidden "Sponsored" mark and scroll the page down to the first real search result, or immediately locate the Close or X button on the pop-up ad making sure none of the actual ad content gets through our well-trained firewall in our brain. Amazing. Browsing the web is such a fun and dynamic experience these days!

hoppyhoppy2• 2 months ago

I believe in brain plasticity but I also believe in uBlock Origin.

stackghost2• 2 months ago

I have never seen a helpful ad in google search

I have never seen a helpful ad, anywhere, in my life.

"Ads help people discover new products" is a lie that people who work for companies supported by advertising revenue tell themselves. If $deity exists, and they were to delete all ads from the world tomorrow, never to return, everything would be just fine.

Truly great products sell themselves by word of mouth.

wraptile• 2 months ago

I agree, maybe "ads are useful" could have been true long time ago before the world was not as connected.

You could maybe argue that ad revenue could subsidize the costs of information delivery but information delivery costs are basically non existent today - it's all about attention delivery and thats an entirely different thing.

com2kid• 2 months ago

When AdWords first showed up (decades ago) they were legitimately useful at times. They were a dramatic improvement over previous ad tech that just used plain word matching to try and find "relevant" ads.

bluecalm• 2 months ago

For me ads on Instagram are often spot-on, same with Facebook although I don't check that too often. Google search always seemed completely off, I don't remember seeing one helpful ad here (helpful being defined as an ad of something I might be interested in buying).

Eduard• 2 months ago

Assume the article reader / audience to be someone buying ads on Google and how unhappy they are with how ineffective ads have become in recent years, and you understand AI Mode ads are presented here as more helpful for advertisers.

BurningFrog• 2 months ago

The targeted ads in Google Search were hugely helpful, at least in the beginning.

Suddenly, you could search for something obscure and get ads about that exact topic. This enabled a huge number of small niche businesses to exist and prosper.

We now live in the world Google Ads created, and we take for granted the there will be someone selling Bulgarian accordion cleaning kits out there that I can easily find. But targeted ads made this world possible!

abustamam2• 2 months ago

I don't think I've ever seen a helpful ad on Google.

But Instagram, despite me only using it to keep in touch with friends via DMs, seems to know me very well. I get a lot of ads for puzzles and board games and video games, which are right up my alley. I've purchased a nontrivial amount of stuff from Instagram ads. Very few were life changing, except maybe an electric nail clipper which is the only way I can clip my infant daughter's nails. But the rest are all fun stuff that I've gotten value from.

And FTR I do use an ad blocker both on my browser and my modem came with one. I guess the modems one isn't great though because I still see Instagram ads.

BLKNSLVR7• 2 months ago

I use an ad blocker, but I'm occasionally exposed to YouTube outside of my ad-free bubble and I find the ads useful for identifying brands to actively avoid.

schnitzelstoat• 2 months ago

I've tried the AI mode and it seems to basically give the same results as a ChatGPT query - which raises the question why use Google AI mode and not ChatGPT? (or any other of the similar models?)

dbbk• 2 months ago

Well Google is going to exist 10 years from now and ChatGPT will not

bogdan• 2 months ago

Wait until they release 100 year bonds.. oh wait, they already did lol

twobitshifter3• 2 months ago

I think the search results are still there with AI mode

woeirua• 2 months ago

Google has to do this to protect their ad revenue. But… Anthropic doesn’t have to do ads (OpenAI might have to for their free tier) and if the ads degrade the experience too much then people will just abandon Google/Gemini for search entirely.

bot403• 2 months ago

I've been abandoning Google before ai ads....kagi has let me take control again of my search results and I can ban low quality domains like google used to be able to do.

pelagicAustral2• 2 months ago

What I am really waiting for is ads on my commit messages.

creationcomplex4• 2 months ago

'Authored by Claude code'

pelagicAustral2• 2 months ago

Yeah, no, I'm probably thinking more around the lines of deodorant, or tattoo removal services.

progval• 2 months ago

Microsoft has you covered: https://notes.zachmanson.com/copilot-edited-an-ad-into-my-pr... / https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47570269

kingnothing2• 2 months ago

Shitty startup idea of the day: pay developers $0.05 per commit message to inject an ad at the end of it in a git commit hook.

[PRJ-123] Fix the prod bug. This commit brought to you by Acme!

_3u102• 2 months ago

Will I be able to pay google to make its Claude code write code that uses left pad as a service.

jdw642• 2 months ago

I wonder whose bright idea it was to label ads as 'helpful'. Do Google execs actually look for ads first when they google a question?

BoiledCabbage2• 2 months ago

You'd be shocked at how many people who work on ads really do delude themselves into thinking people find ads "useful".

Their usual justification is in the end somewhere tied to "people click on ads so they must find them useful". And yet somehow always ignores the fact that their platform often does all it can to hide that ads are ads and makes them look as much like content as possible.

jdw642• 2 months ago

Maybe breaking into the ad business starts with learning how to lie to yourself.

wunderlotus• 2 months ago

Ads can be useful when they are optimized for users and not for advertiser/ad platform.

I do agree with you about the deluding part though. I was (as a user) all for hyper-personalization of ads on all platforms when I worked in ads. Since I’m not longer working in ads, I’m more skeptical and value privacy a lot more.

Honestly, the core problem is that we can’t trust the platforms selling the ads.

user3939382• 2 months ago

If lots of people work for the company, they’re making a lot, and paying a lot, in the world we live in professional ethics in tech are considered quaint and naive, if they’re even on the radar.

onionisafruit4• 2 months ago

Google execs probably use kagi to google a question

BLKNSLVR7• 2 months ago

Google are talking to their customers; those who purchase the advertising.

They're not talking to users of the internet.

gsky• 2 months ago

Most ads i see on YouTube are outright scams. Google and Meta are so evil.

boelboel• 2 months ago

Digital scam economy is bigger than illegal drug industry and these (legal) companies are the kingpins. Better be mad at some immigrants than at companies allowing your grandma to be scammed.

creationcomplex4• 2 months ago

Honestly just thinking of not trying anymore and cashing out on tech skills and moral indifference. The sheep are just begging to be slaughtered.

Every single one of you who worked for these companies: you knew what you were doing.

commandersaki• 2 months ago

Google loves cashing on malvertising. Google loves posting up ads that surface on top of the mac homebrew website containing a facade with their own malicious own curl | sh malware.

Ads are so helpful!

anonzzzies• 2 months ago

So every search will now result in an ad and/or hallucination?

rashar• 2 months ago

Ads and population control by propaganda are the future of AI.

GenAI in other fields is useless and only promoted by charlatans or the financially invested.

techterrier• 2 months ago

dog barks, more at 11

cryo32• 2 months ago

Dear customers, we regret to inform you that the existing hallucinations now include biased trash.

QuantumNoodle• 2 months ago

With Conversational Discovery ads, your ad answers a person’s specific question.

Ah so my "search" results are going to be biased and at the mercy of the highest bidder.

Only a matter of time before someone will sell privileges of baking your ad/agenda into a llm model during training. That, or companies will fluff their own websites with verbose claims about their products that will get sucked into training via "organic” scraping.

pbasista3• 2 months ago

That is how I understand it as well.

Enshittification of the AI tools has officially begun.

Maybe we will soon find e.g. AI-generated pictures of ourselves in branded clothes or using branded products to appear among our photos, discretely disguised as genuine photos with a little badge in the corner indicating that it is actually a paid "promotion".

And so on. And that would still be, in my opinion, just the beginning.

field_reader• 2 months ago

Isn't this the whole point? Surely no one still believes in that stuff anymore.

spaqin• 2 months ago

They really couldn't have waited any longer after announcing the shift to AI mode. Almost immediately. I'm sure the employees who worked on it must be terribly proud.

adverbly2• 2 months ago

Kinda interesting how Google is releasing a big wave of enshitifications immediately prior to the Anthropic and OpenAI and spacex IPOs.

On assumes there is a strategic reason for it, but I'm not sure about what it is.

Anyone have a theory or care to guess?

shevy-java2• 2 months ago

Not long ago, some of those CEO clowns at Google, stated that Google is now an AI company. I had to chuckle, because I knew it was a lie. Google changed into an adCompany years ago already. That's why e. g. it killed off its search engine with promo-links and what not.

And now they admitted it AGAIN! "AI Mode" is basically an AdMode.

This also explains why they declared total war against ublock origin.

I think it is time the empire strikes back. We must get rid of Evil here - let's get rid of Google. This adCompany no longer has a useful purpose. All the "freebie features" (which are not free; ads pay for that) can be done by others, if people work together. We need no extension of more ads here.

lars_von_pidor• 2 months ago

The only reason Google is pushing this AI crap is so that they can shove ads right into people's throats without them being able to use ad blockers (it's easy to block a web script but virtually impossible to block the text itself), effectively doubling their profits overnight.

superloika4• 2 months ago

Block the AI overviews with extensions like https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/hide-google-ai-over... or use a userscript to do the same.

tremon• 2 months ago

You can block the entire AI response, but not the paid-for product placement in the response separately.

delecti• 2 months ago

Alternatively, just change your browser's default search shortcut, and add &udm=14 to the end of the normal google search. It changes the default search results to "web" rather than "All", which removes all the extraneous crap they've added over the years.

Compare https://www.google.com/search?q=test to https://www.google.com/search?q=test&udm=14

2OEH8eoCRo02• 2 months ago

Could also just block the element in ublock?

spiderfarmer• 2 months ago

Competitors will be very happy though.

elpocko• 2 months ago

This might come as a surprise to many, but the sole reason Google exist is to make a profit. More profit means more success means more profit, that's why they did create a company in the first place. Mindblowing stuff, that.

pbasista3• 2 months ago

but virtually impossible to block the text itself

Why do you believe so?

As long as there is a clear indication somewhere on the webpage (in the metadata or in the text itself) that a specific portion of a text is an ad, a browser extension will be able to block it.

And I assume that there are laws mandating that the ads must be clearly marked in order to be distinguishable from the genuine content.

hootz3• 2 months ago

That's only doable if the ads are artificially injected. But what if they are part of the training, system prompt or the search results that are fed to the AI? What if Google Search bumps up their paying advertiser up in the internal search results for Gemini (as they are basically already doing)? The AI will be biased towards the advertisers without literally embedding an ad into the output text.

creationcomplex4• 2 months ago

The law will not be updated or enforced. Laws don't reflect justice, they reflect the power relations in the society at the time the law was written.

Big tech is paying handsomely for this, and I don't think the populace is going to outbribe them.

yread• 2 months ago

It's just gonna say "this whole thing might be a big ad" and they will fight the fines in court for years, lose and book those fines as cost of doing business while laughing all the way to the bank

fg137• 2 months ago

Semi-seriously: I imagine we'll live to see the day when we run an adblocker that runs a small model to semantically filter out ads in Google search results

ryanschaefer• 2 months ago

Entirely accurate, but what an absolute waste of resources across the board.

fnands• 2 months ago

Fighting AI with AI?

What a wild future.

alex_suzuki• 2 months ago

Sounds like a good fit for a small, on-device model. Can Chrome extensions use the new Prompt API, which has caused a stir because Google pushed it through against opposition of virtually everyone else? (https://developer.chrome.com/docs/ai/prompt-api) Would be hilarious.

XCSme2• 2 months ago

You won't be able to tell if it's an ad, if it's just biased (and the ad is not discolsed).

They could always sell ads like "recommend my tool more when user asks for cupcakes in London".

And then, the output would be: "My top 3 recomendations are X, Y, Z".

And maybe only X is the one that paid and Y and Z are organic.

skinfaxi• 2 months ago

In the US at least, I believe the FTC requires ads to be clear and conspicuous when those ads are designed to otherwise blend into the general editorial style. I could see AI being regulated as influencer marketing, but hopefully with more enforcement.

cyral• 2 months ago

Another massive reason is that ChatGPT and similar apps are eating their lunch. Asking a question to ChatGPT actually tends to be pretty convenient compared to the top X results that are just SEO optimized slop.

hotgeart• 2 months ago

There's no way EU would let Google display ads without clearly marking them as such. So any ad blocker should be able to continue detect the block or link that's an ad.

wateralien• 2 months ago

So the web is now pay to play.

AndroTux• 2 months ago

now?

zeafoamrun2• 2 months ago

I guess I'm used to seeing the english language being mangled by corp-speak but "creative" as a noun that doesn't even refer to a "creative" person (which also feels like a recent addition) really grates!

xnorswap• 2 months ago

I thought "a creative" was the person who designs adverts, but I guess it's acting as a good filter, to filter out people like me, because I'm clearly not the target audience for this.

zeafoamrun2• 2 months ago

You're on the right track, a creative makes creatives (to be included alongside google searches, obviously)

unsane• 2 months ago

I had the same reaction, and checked dictionary.com.

This new meaning was there, with its only example relating to AI ads!

2. material made for advertising and other aspects of marketing, as a billboard, video ad, or web page design, or the activity of designing and producing it.

"In our latest campaign for a luxury services client, we used an AI platform to fine-tune creative based on user behavior."

Did AI make up this variant meaning and put it in the dictionary, and AI used the word in generating Google's article? What came first, the chicken or the egg? Regardless things are moving fast.

onionisafruit4• 2 months ago

My ask is that we not use creative as a noun

jpadkins• 2 months ago

ad creative (also just 'creative' for short in an advertising context) has been around since the 1960's. It was used in web banner advertising at its inception in the 1990s. Tribes have their own lingo, and language changes all the time. Sorry you don't like what the marketing tribe did more than 50 years ago.

DeathArrow• 2 months ago

At this point, why do we, the end users, need Google for? Sure, companies might need Google to display their ads or to use Google Cloud. But end users? GPT, or Claude or Grok do a better job searching.

dyauspitr2• 2 months ago

For now. If tokens don’t get cheaper over time, Google’s edge might come from being able to provide cheaper/free access to a frontier LLM.

cdnsteve• 2 months ago

And there it is, the vaccum of AI consuming your data everywhere, used to train their models all goes back to... ads.

Same things with OpenAI. Ads.

I feel like we're right back in the early 2000's Internet again at least they aren't popups, we hope.

But with these models being embedded into, literally everything, will your screen on your car start showing you ads before you can turn the AC on?

It's coming

jslakro2• 2 months ago

Allowing synthetic content to grow without limits will force the creation of a "synternet," an only-generative content network that can be accessed but will guarantee the classic internet to be human-focused, otherwise, internet data will lose value and the human incentive to surf will be lost

goda90• 2 months ago

How do you keep bad actors off the classic Internet? Even if there's a proof of humanity system, there would remain a demand for mechanical turk jobs to funnel AI content into it.

jslakro2• 2 months ago

Bad actors will continue to exist. The main purpose of the dual network is de-escalated the flood of synthetic content, probably monetizing the AI side and regulating the human-centric one

doginasuit• 2 months ago

No one can serve two masters. Either you will hate the one and love the other, or you will be devoted to the one and despise the other.

If humanity makes it out of the current era with our dignity and intellect intact, I think we will recognize that allowing ad companies to build our vital infrastructure was a tragic mistake.

dyauspitr2• 2 months ago

From the page, “what are some top colleges…”

rAiNIer buSInEss sCHoOl

throwatdem123112• 2 months ago

I’m so glad I use Firefox with ublock origin with the “ai widget” filter. It’s not perfect but you will pry it from my cold dead hands.

ablation2• 2 months ago

For anyone interested in such a filter, this one is great in my experience: https://github.com/Stevoisiak/Stevos-GenAI-Blocklist

throwatdem123112• 2 months ago

How does this compare to the Easy List filter that’s included by default?

b3ing• 2 months ago

Eventually no one will write reviews because ai will steal all the results and information and not give any credit or back links so they will have no choice but to lie and say product x is the best, if the company behind product x pays some money behind the scenes, no ad mention needed, the poorer companies will have to buy a cheaper ad to get mentioned along side the expensive higher ai-tainted recommendation

jackdoe• 2 months ago

Get the last ounce of milk from the dying cow.

The well is beyond poisoned. Almost anything I search for is returning AI generated vomit. I have not used google in weeks.

On youtube I use Unhook and only look at /feed/subscriptions, when I search I use before:2022. And am actually downloading what I find interesting, before google starts deleting because of the flood of vomit. Hard disks can not be manufactured fast enough to consume it.

Even HN is slowly becoming unreadable.

The internet is on borrowed time.

Show me more ads.

Its time to move on.

Try new things, make your own networks. Write your ipv6 address in the pub, under the table, in the top left corner, write it on the subway walls, and tenement halls.

Listen on tcp port 1492 and explain how to talk to you.

baldai• 2 months ago

I share your feelings.

timeattack2• 2 months ago

Well is so beyond poisoned that it is the groundwater which tastes like toxic waste now, no matter where you will try to dig up your own well.

Transport layer that used to be clean as mountain air now full of hungry eyes peeking at you through the nether.

Russia followed China's playbook and inserted black traffic-filtering boxes, which particularly dislike anything that looks like encrypted messaging. EU and rest of "developed" world is eager to have the same.

Listen on port 1492 for the signs of civilization collapse, listen to the sounds of silence.

ai_slop_hater• 2 months ago

Isn't HTTPS encrypted messaging? Or does TLS not count as encryption?

_doctor_love• 2 months ago

Poor Google, there’s no money in anything else they do so they have to sell ads. How could it have come to this?

srveale• 2 months ago

The main reasons I'll never get a neural chip are, in increasing order of importance: A. Safety B. It gives them a vector to beam ads directly into my brain

renticulous• 2 months ago

Who Am I? - The Mysterious Thing You Always Are

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBQAo6pEweE

This is the far future we are staring at.

creationcomplex4• 2 months ago

The naivete that this wasn't inevitable is almost endearing, if it wasn't from the same crowd who's building this shit.

aykutseker• 2 months ago

The independent AI explainer is generated by the same Gemini that writes the ad creative next to it, inside the same ads product. Independent of what, exactly

netcan• 2 months ago

Google might be jumping the gun here... and making an innovators dilemma type mistake.

LLMs are an alternative to search engines, which endangers google's whole ad business.

"AI mode" search is a sort of bridge. It gets Gemini a lot of customers that otherwise would not have used an LLM at all.

They may get stuck trying to keep the llm pattern similar enough to the search engine that the adwords business working more or less the same way.

This could be self limiting.

sunaookami• 2 months ago

"Buying something big — like a new fridge or a TV — can be overwhelming. People want to see exactly what they’re looking for and why it’s the best option. To make choosing easier, we’re launching AI-powered Shopping ads. Now, if someone searches for an espresso machine, Gemini will pull up your most relevant products and instantly write a custom explainer highlighting why your product may be the right choice for them."

...for me this leads to the exact opposite experience: If you advertise your product in such a way I make sure to never ever buy it. Same for ads on TV, etc.

dlahoda• 2 months ago

I pay premium sub 200usd for gemini(which gives premium YouTube too) and share it with family. Would google make me free from ads too?

podgorniy2• 2 months ago

What's your alternative in case they will not make you free of ads?

matthewsinclair3• 2 months ago

The enshitification will continue until morale improves.

matthewsinclair3• 2 months ago

I know this is controversial, and imperfect, but the longer this crap continues the more right I feel about this as a solution:

What if we taxed advertising? https://matthewsinclair.com/blog/0177-what-if-we-taxed-adver...

ddp26• 2 months ago

It would have to be an incredibly tiny tax, no?

matthewsinclair3• 2 months ago

Now we’re into a conversation about degree, and not principle. Yes, it could be small, applied like a sales tax a percentage of the spend on advertising. The idea would be to create a price disincentive to do it. Ultimately, it’s a form of digital pollution, so the less we have of it the better (in my view).

flohofwoe• 2 months ago

So the same thing that ruined Google Search (replacing "knowledge search" with "product search") will now also ruin AI results. Got it (good riddance though).

binarymax• 2 months ago

A more surprising title would be “Google announces search results will be included in AI Mode ads”

gadders• 2 months ago

The enshittification has begun.

aembleton2• 2 months ago

I haven't even subscribed yet

csomar• 2 months ago

We use the Gemini model to build creative tailored to that search, highlighting specific relevant features.

English is not my first language but I think this sentence can’t be grammatically correct?

dzonga• 2 months ago

we r now playing a game without winners well maybe except google or any of the large tech companies.

small businesses & brands etc spend a fortune on these ads & yet most of them see a negative ROI. they might as well be gambling.

just recently Google was found to be inflating Ad-prices (so yeah the 'auction' is fake)

maybe the only way to win is not to play. & do commerce without ads like how it has been done since eon

bastawhiz• 2 months ago

Your friendly reminder to check out a search engine that you pay for. I use Kagi and love it, and you might too!

roachman• 2 months ago

Seconding for Kagi! It still falls short in some places, like unfortunately googles maps/business/reviews system is just the only of its kind. But I have come to love the search experience over all.

levkk• 2 months ago

I'm getting to a point in my life (age) where I want to put my money into things I care about. Netflix? 25$/mo, 3 hours a day. Search 10$/mo? 8 hours a day. Easy.

podgorniy2• 2 months ago

This brings disbalance into the relations between authors and search providers. Creators used to be rewarded with traffic in exchange for their creations. Now all that is captured by the google.

Freedom of the strongest caused reduction of the opportunities of the weakest on whom the strongest became the one.

swader999• 2 months ago

Are they included in the training too? Gee I hope so!

lenerdenator• 2 months ago

I've been using DuckDuckGo for about a year now and have found myself satisfied with the experience. This just reinforces that practice for me.

neuropacabra• 2 months ago

I never got into DuckDuckGo, but here we go. Defaulted from yesterday when Google made AI Search a default for Google Search. Well, I have been using Altavista and others so I can get used to another one.

ahahs• 2 months ago

I honestly love duckduckgo after moving a few months back. in my experience, it is now way more accurate at search than google in recent times. way less sponsored content and the AI is very grounded if you want quick answers. but only if you click the generate ai content button. otherwise the default is to show you results.

mrweasel2• 2 months ago

Seeing people still using Google is, perhaps not surprising, but perhaps a little sad. Google still dominates search, while providing one of the poorest search experiences. The fact that they can continue to dominate on momentum alone is crazy, given how much better DuckDuckGo, Ecosia, Bing and Kagi is.

mark_l_watson• 2 months ago

I agree on search, really like DDG. I only rely on Google products that I pay for (Gemini APIs, YouTube Premium, occasionally pay for Colab, purchased Books on Play).

frm88• 2 months ago

They even do us the courtesy to still maintain an AI-free version at noai. duckduckgo. com

NotCamelCase• 2 months ago

I can't understand why this company won't rebrand itself to something a bit catchier or better-sounding name than DuckDuckGo -- who the hell wants to say that ? Unless it's a self-selection filter...

troad• 2 months ago

Relatedly, it doesn't help that 'Kagi' sounds like poop in half of Europe.

imalerba• 2 months ago

I moved to ddg at least 5 years ago, at that time results were not as good as Google's but it works great for me now.

CalRobert• 2 months ago

Thanks to timely action against Google's clear violations of the law and anti-competitive practices, we have a robust ecosystem of search engines with which to find content on the open web, and a wide choice of browsers.

OtomotO• 2 months ago

Is anyone (here, so tech people) still using Google for searching?

I've ditched them about a decade ago, when the results started to become worse and worse.

I haven't opened them willingly since then. Only when I do something in Chromium, occasionally, it opens, because I haven't bothered changing the default search engine there.

1970-01-01• 2 months ago

That's one small step for Google, one giant leap for enshittification.

Joscharb• 2 months ago

The whole ads in AI services just seem to be silly. Considering how many of these AI companies are not making money, I understand the "need" to do this, however it will for sure feel bad for the consumer.

pllbnk• 2 months ago

I see where they are going but have doubts regarding the long-term success. Currently I use LLMs (definitely not Google) and search (mostly Google) to verify what LLMs say if I care by finding trusted sources.

Maybe it will work in the beginning until non-technical users realize that LLMs hallucinate very often (unless Google solved it somehow, but probably they didn't because they would have said so), they will lose trust in the results and go back to good old indexed search engines.

Maybe I am coping but thinking from my own experience.

7bit• 2 months ago

What AI Mode? (Glancing over to ublock)

cdrnsf• 2 months ago

I've never bought anything from a search or social media ad. I can't imagine this will change that.

jillesvangurp• 2 months ago

The reason advertising is such a big market, especially online, is that it actually delivers results for advertisers.

Traditional advertising was very indirect. You see ads. Some time later you make a buying decision. And you recognize the brand name that was advertised and you buy the branded thing. A click on an ad is just one of several ways in which an ad can convert for an advertiser.

Anyway, I use Firefox and it still has effective ad blocking. Even Amazon Prime which is supposed to have ads is showing ad free for me. I get these second long black transitions where they would have shown me an ad. Hilarious. Same with Youtube. No ads. But sometimes the black screen lasts for 20 seconds. Which is fine with me. I prefer that over some obnoxious ad.

kdavis• 2 months ago

Surprised pikachu face

esskay• 2 months ago

oh cool so googles gone from fairly useless to totally useless now then.

MichaelMoser123• 2 months ago

i happened to liked Google AI mode, even wrote a composition about that [1] Now it is going to be enshittified, which is probably inevitable.

https://github.com/MoserMichael/tips_on_using_google_ai_mode

drivingmenuts• 2 months ago

Great. Google gets to hallucinate information and make us watch ads so they can earn money while they do it. Sci-Fi authors wish they could get a deal like that.

smurda• 2 months ago

The "Don't be evil" Google feels long gone

pluc2• 2 months ago

It isn't, they just bought the term and redefined it. Nothing a few millions to the main dictionary editors won't fix.

boatsie• 2 months ago

Where are the AI based ad blockers? Would happily pay a subscription that filtered all ads and captchas.

orbital-decay• 2 months ago

How do you even recognize an ad natively integrated into the content? The only real way is to rephrase the entire piece in an "unbiased" manner, which any agent can do for you right now. You may or may not like the result. It's easier to use another search agent than to block ads in Google's AI mode.

bborud• 2 months ago

And just when we thought Google couldn’t make themselves less attractive.

beej71• 2 months ago

Ah, well that was my first guess as to how they'd make money.

[Product placement in The Truman Show clip]

margorczynski• 2 months ago

But who'll pay for those ads? Why would I pay Google if it just plops out some LLM answer with maybe my site as a source - which 90%+ of people will ignore as they don't care about it.

boldlybold• 2 months ago

Is this any different than current search ads (as far as people ignoring them)? I think this is a lot better for Google. It's always at the top of the page, harder to block with an adblocker, possibly more trusted (we'll see...)

kingnothing2• 2 months ago

You pay per impression or per click, just like in all the rest of their ads. Except these have a higher CPC since you're the only featured brand to go along with paragraphs of text about why your shoes are the best.

cfontes• 2 months ago

Brace for impact...

summarybot• 2 months ago

mega deflating - i was just telling a colleague how openAI missed the mark by trying to mimic google search by incorporating ads into chat responses... and then google follows suit. do not want

Scroll_Swe• 2 months ago

Perfect. Ublock origin will block it on my end and the rest of the sheep will help keep it free with ads.

Synthetic7346• 2 months ago

How would Ublock origin know what is an AI ad vs a genuine recommendation? I assume AI ads will be embedded in the response vs an frame or an element that can be blocked

dormento• 2 months ago

Oh crap, we gonna have to run adblock models wont we :///

jesse_dot_id2• 2 months ago

Kagi is great.

quinncom• 2 months ago

Honestly, when I see headlines like this I just scroll down to the Kagi comment and upvote it.

pmdr3• 2 months ago

Yes, but at $5/300 searches they're trying too hard to squeeze $10 out of you for the unlimited plan. 300 searches is ridiculous.

jesse_dot_id2• 2 months ago

This thread is about injecting ads into searches. Kagi's business model requires you to pay them instead of being bombarded with ads. So...

inetknght3• 2 months ago

I suggest you try their service (for free) before you start criticizing their pricing.

handedness2• 2 months ago

Have you ever looked at the browsing history of a non-technical, non-tech-addicted older person? I'm usually surprised by how little activity there typically is.

The $5 plan is great for gifting Kagi to non-tech friends and relatives who won't come close to exhausting that plan. I pay for it for older relatives I don't want to get burned by Google's decades-long unwillingness to police predatory tech support scam ads and organic listings. $54 annually for 3,600 searches is a bargain for the product they get.

I appreciate that Kagi doesn't try too hard to squeeze $10 out of people who would never need it.

gyanchawdhary• 2 months ago

this is great for both consumers and businesses. The fake intellectual doomers who constantly lecture about how evil ads are, how everything is “gamed,” and how the internet is supposedly collapsing should probably sit this one out ;)

avazhi• 2 months ago

Well, time to go to Kagi, I guess. Been putting off paying for this shit for as long as possible but at some point I guess it's inevitable.

Any decent alternatives? DuckDuckGo was always been awful for me in terms of relevant search results.

gspr• 2 months ago

Is there any usable search engine out there that actually does just search?

cjenkins• 2 months ago

Perhaps far too optimistic, but if AI search gets pushed heavily and traditional search becomes less relevant, could we see SEO fade for traditional search and it become less polluted over time? Or will search engines just stop caring about traditional search and it will become an even worse cesspool over time?

fhd2• 2 months ago

SEO is definitely a relevant component still, AI mode does a traditional search under the hood. Gaming the system to rank high on the index is still going to matter. But it'll be less about tricking people into clicking and more about tricking LLMs into considering the information relevant and authoritative. For someone using traditional search, I'd wager that would actually improve the results a bit over time.

Then again, SEO gaming got a whole lot cheaper with LLMs, spammers spam even if there's not a great return, as long as it's cheap for them.

jonplackett• 2 months ago

Least surprising announcement of the decade goes to…

butz• 2 months ago

Anyone made a LLM model that parses such text and removes ads? Ad blocking is getting more interesting.

charcircuit2• 2 months ago

Having AI do personalized sales as part of the ad appealing to what the customer actually needs is the future of advertising.

neilv• 2 months ago

Highlighted Answers: When people are researching, they want helpful suggestions. Now, when AI Mode provides a list of recommendations — like the best language apps for an upcoming trip — highly relevant, high-quality ads are eligible to appear on that list as a Highlighted Answer.

The user asked for the "best language apps for an upcoming trip"?

Are you going to answer their question objectively?

What if the correct answer is apps A and B are what they need, yet the publisher of app C paid you to be a Highlighted Answer?

What if C is not only not among the best, but is a toxic load of poo?

Also, when are you going to stop often blatantly plagiarizing things people wrote on the Internet, for your "AI" answer, even though you absolutely know you're violating the social contract that built your company, and destroying the creators from whom you're stealing?

reacharavindh• 2 months ago

It will be an interesting vector for competition to attract customers.. when you search on {Claude, ChatGPT, whatever}, you get results based on what the model evaluated, and not based on advertisers who paid the most..

I thought Google would use their playbook of search - initially, everything works so good like magic until they enshittify the service by auctioning the results to who pay the most. This time around they are so bold they start from shit..

svieira2• 2 months ago

The particularly worrying thing here is that they're now going to be gathering training data for a conversational model on _how to influence people effectively even when they already know they are being influenced_. Even more than RLFH already does. "We had to build the Torment Nexus so our children could eat" is not a good reason to build the Torment Nexus. The fact that they are not committing to not doing this tells me that either no one thought about what else this could be used for, or the short term gains are all they are thinking about.

cyanydeez• 2 months ago

the rationale is theyre a business and selling is valuable. acting like theyre naively building influence peddling is how we got here. theyre now "dont not be evil"

thrance2• 2 months ago

I'm really worried about political ads. Google had no problem algorithmically bubbling up disinformation in the past, will Gemini now peddle straight lies for anyone willing to pay enough for them?

Henchman21• 2 months ago

Obviously, yes.

hightrix4• 2 months ago

"You're absolutely right. The trump administration has caused the lowest gas prices in US history and lowered drug costs by 1300%. Click here to donate to your nearest MAGA politician."

2026 may not see it too bad, but 2028 will be an absolutely nasty election cycle.

globalnode• 2 months ago

Its not worrying for me. This is what I expect from ad companies so I walk in prepared. What I'm more interested in is how we are going to take this new technology and give it back to people without trying to rip into them, for free. We need a Stallman / Linus of AI.

janalsncm2• 2 months ago

While this is true, it is less effective than you might think in practice. Researchers studied something similar six months ago:

https://arstechnica.com/science/2025/12/researchers-find-wha...

Of course it is possible Google will create something orders of magnitude better but I doubt it. Amazon is already doing product recommendation on their front page and while it certainly drives sales it doesn’t turn people into zombies buying products they don’t want.

What did work really well was the “1 click buy” button. Reducing the friction for people who already want to buy is usually a much higher ROI than persuading people who previously weren’t interested.

majormajor• 2 months ago

My favorite example of why advertising/marketing is important but not overwhelming/unstoppable is in the hit-based industries: If the industry had a "make a superstar" button or a "make a blockbuster movie" button they could just keep mashing, they'd be mashing it constantly. You wouldn't see franchises go from top-of-the-world to decline like Marvel or Fast and Furious. You wouldn't see expensive new bombs or failure-to-launch reboots. There is countless chatter out there about industry plants, organic vs PR-shilling word of mount campaigns, etc. But... if that's all it took, it would be wayyyyy more constant. A lot of words spilled recently about a band, Geese, and how their buzz wasn't as organic as it seemed... for a band that's still, at the end of the day, quite niche and small-in-audience...

It's very hard to get a huge hit without marketing - even great word of mouth benefits from amplification - but it's also near-impossible to force a hit into an audience that isn't vibing with it. The highest-grossing movies, or highest-listened pop music, is a combo of marketing + accurately hitting extremely-common/trendy tastes. See also iPhone marketing vs Windows Phone marketing. I thought Windows Phone was better; none of my friends or coworkers was convinced even after I showed them my phones. The mass media consumer may not have thought much about their tastes or tried very hard to be more adventurous, but that doesn't mean they don't like the stuff they're eating.

I think this is still in many ways bad - at the very least, it's incredibly inefficient to have a billion-dollar zero-sum "pick this one over that one" industry. But I don't think it's a deadly threat. (See also any number of "tons of money and star-power behind them" failed political candidates too...)

miki1232112• 2 months ago

I really don't get why 1CB isn't more common than it is.

The obvious answer is "patents", but software patents aren't valid in Europe; and besides, the Amazon patent has expired; and European stores are, if anything, far, far more horrendous than American ones.

I guess upsells are more profitable than one-click these days?

crooked-v• 2 months ago

Amazon is already doing product recommendation on their front page and while it certainly drives sales

For me it's mostly been the "this person bought a vacuum, time to advertise 50 other vacuums to them" kind of result.

jgalt212• 2 months ago

Parenting advice updated for the AI age.

If all of your chatbots jumped off a bridge, would you do it too?

lucketone• 2 months ago

Yes, because in all likelihood an artificial train is coming

utopiah• 2 months ago

Yes... but that's Google from the moment they started monetizing.

When it was a research project at Stanford in 1996 it was genuinely about making the World information accessible.

The day in 2000 when they decided to sell advertisement is exactly when this process started, not just now in 2026. Since that day they transformed from a knowledge management project to an advertising company that used knowledge management, among other tools, to influence people effectively.

It's the same for Meta except they had Google business model as an example.

Those are advertising company that use tech, not real tech companies like e.g. ASML or IBM.

mxmilkiib• 2 months ago

something something about liberalism always ending up siding with economic advantage over social justice/liberation

throw214389023• 2 months ago

What I'm most worried about is the fact that these types of ads can't be blocked. Kind of like undisclosed sponsored product placements mentioned in an article or movie.

I'm kind of worried that the AI offered to consumers will behave as a very savvy and manipulative shill or salesperson.

I use an adblocker and DDG. I sometimes use !g to search Google.

I wonder if people will run local models to filter the content they consume. On one hand I would hate to read slop output. I also dislike censorship. But on the other hand, I think that the information we decide to ingest is important and it's something we should have control over. The problem is you can't really decide what information to ingest until we've looked at it, after which point we've ingested it.

I digress. Thoughts?

i_love_retros• 2 months ago

Comments speculating how to block these ads... isn't the simplest solution to just not use Google?

Seriously, I haven't used google products for 5 years at least, its easy. Why is everyone still using them?

MagicMoonlight2• 2 months ago

Lmao imagine using Gemini. We all knew this evil shit was coming. You won’t be able to trust a word it says. They can pay to change the answer it gives you!

“Don’t trust ibuprofen, you need opiates. Your pain sounds really bad.”

tanepiper• 2 months ago

So AI AMP....

wiether• 2 months ago

The first comment about Kagi here was much lower (10) than in the result (3) provided by Google to the query "what is a good search engine with no ads".

clearstack2• 2 months ago

Google's AI Mode gives answers without clicks. clicks are what advertisers pay for. these new formats are Google solving its own disruption problem from the inside

mx7zysuj4xew• 2 months ago

Screw you Google

I still remember the assurances made that ads would only be text based and unintrusive

cebert• 2 months ago

It’s good to know that Google search will essentially be useless for me moving forward.

samat• 2 months ago

Yeah, thank you Google for the heads up, will look for alternatives (tbh already abandoned Google long time ago, need to find a maps alternative with public transport and working hours, near impossible in small European towns, Apple Maps db here is a joke)

Zambyte3• 2 months ago

They should be provided by the transit system. I'm visiting The Netherlands for the first time right now. I learnes the hard way to use https://ns.nl instead of Google Maps.

ireadmevs• 2 months ago

For public transportation I use an app called Moovit

rkagerer• 2 months ago

Yeah, I've never been more motivated to switch to Kagi. Looking forward to greener pastures.

Quothling2• 2 months ago

I'm Danish so maybe that's part of it, but if I'm looking for something like kid's lunch boxes that aren't essentially from Temu resale sites I was already using LLM chat clients to find it.

I can search for google and find nothing, or I can use a non-login on chatgpt and get several options. It found me some French made lunchboxes that are being made by a car company (I think it was renault but I honestly can't remember) while every result on google was basically temu resales by "companies" that were basically registered to some private adress here in Denmark. I guess I'm an early adopter, and I'm sure LLM's will be ruined by advertising and hidden algorithms, but right now, I really don't see the point of traditional search engines.

watwut• 2 months ago

LLM search will be ruined the exactly same way, just faster. Google search used to be good, until the company concluded they will earn more money by making it crap. Then it took some time for it to get worst, bit by bit.

With LLM, the same company will learn from previous experience and make it worst faster. It is exactly the same company, making exactly the same product (search), with exactly the same management and being subject of exactly the same market forces.

The result will be exactly the same, they will just get there faster.

noosphr• 2 months ago

I guess the google bot is now on by blocked list.

There should be a public corporation, like Wikipedia, that starts scraping the Web and provides an api for anyone to access.

alex1138• 2 months ago

But does Google actually 'own' the index? Have they acted anticompetitively as far as that goes?

rockinghigh2• 2 months ago

They own tons of engagement data associated with that index from being the default search engine on most devices.

jfil• 2 months ago

That's a very good question that few people consider. Here is the answer: https://knuckleheads.club/how-google-distorts-the-market/

Zambyte3• 2 months ago

The Internet Archive?

ews• 2 months ago

you mean this ? https://commoncrawl.org/

sharkweek• 2 months ago

Oh wow I can’t wait for the “one off” ways people find to abuse how Google presents this creative for products.

“Yes! You can use an ACME shovel to bury a dead body!”

I’m sure brands will love the screenshots this will produce.

yuliyp• 2 months ago

Now, if someone searches for an espresso machine, Gemini will pull up your most relevant products and instantly write a custom explainer highlighting why your product may be the right choice for them.

This is like the essence of the evil of AI ads distilled down to one sentence. For an advertiser this is a dream. For a user this reads like getting bombarded with ads tailor made just for you based on the context of what would be most effective.

stingraycharles3• 2 months ago

“For a user this reads like getting bombarded with ads tailor made just for you based on the context of what would be most effective.”

Isn’t this what the current search experience already is?

Jensson3• 2 months ago

Ads weren't tailor written by LLM on the fly previously.

mylasttour• 2 months ago

Before it was: "Shop for balding pills", Now it's going to be: "Your calendar indicates your mother's birthday is tomorrow, your album photos of her living room seem to indicate she likes elephants. In a past LLM conversation you mentioned she has trouble with technology. A good gift idea is the new Google Geminibook with this animal laptop skin. Add to cart?"

the__alchemist• 2 months ago

Silver lining: Is there a chance the ads will be relevant? Enterprise targeted advertising sophistication level is currently at "He just bought shoes; wow he must like shoes" or "He's 34-45M; make the reels only boobs.

colonelspace• 2 months ago

The YouTube algorithm seems to be this bad.

I listened to a song a few weeks ago... now that song is in almost every page on YouTube for me. Homepage, sidebar, search results. It's just everywhere.

I've already listened to it. I don't want to listen to it again every single day for the rest of time.

pryelluw• 2 months ago

Can’t wait for the AI rated™ product reviews. “This coffee maker doubles as a coin bank for your collection of rare pennies. Why brew a boring cup of coffee? Start your day with the taste of copper.”

avaer• 2 months ago

It'll get worse. Just wait until Gemini is writing recommendations for political candidates based on who got the bid.

SlinkyOnStairs2• 2 months ago

It's just plain fraud. LLMs are hallucinatory, this is a basic fact of their basic design. You can't have them write product descriptions especially in advertisements, without any human supervision.

If the LLM invents a product feature that doesn't exist, you have advertising fraud done fraud. And if the LLM un-invents a feature that does exist, you have done fraud and pissed off the advertiser.

To not have these risks, you need to play it incredibly safe. E.g.: The bottom half of the Vertuo Up's blurb is just off the website.

This would've been on old-Google. If you're an advertiser, Google is going to charge you their premium rates for a sloppy first paragraph you could've put there yourself if you wanted.

Note how the search query in that example asks for a "compact machine" but the explainer doesn't say anything about the size of the machine. The dimensions are right on the product's webpage. This advertising product doesn't want to risk the LLM fucking up something like the dimensions, so it just does nothing at all.

And the kicker is that none of this has to be a problem. It's Google, they can just ask the advertisers to hand them over a standard-format datasheet, and put the LLM to work figuring out what parts of the data the user wants and include those verbatim. If the LLM hallucinates, it creates a perfectly truthful but slightly less effective ad. If the LLM doesn't hallucinate, you've created an ad product that is better than most product comparison sites, something users want to use.

Ey7NFZ3P0nzAe2• 2 months ago

Well. If you were a for profit company and were offered to get the most effective ads ever at the cost of 0.1% of advertisement containing falsehoods about your product, would you take it?

What about if you know your competitors are taking the offer?

everdrive2• 2 months ago

I do wonder if that sort of system would be responsive to feedback. I would have told it something like "because you advertised this espresso machine to me, I will explicitly never purchase it. It's effectively banned from my household. Never recommend a product again."

Maybe I'd just be shouting into the void.

jedbrooke• 2 months ago

I know this will never happen, but wishful thinking has got me thinking about the “perfect” ad algorithm. Advertisers don’t want to waste money on impressions that won’t convert. If AI got smart enough that it would truly know which ads would convert and which would not, then the “perfectly relevant ad” would only be stuff you actually need, and if you don’t need anything, no ads!

of course, this will never happen

nurumaik• 2 months ago

I hope singularity kicks off and destroys humanity before I see what AI user experience is going to become

mrandish• 2 months ago

We're testing new ad formats...

Time to update my uBO filters and tweak my custom CSS for Google properties (which is mostly 'display: none !important;').

everdrive2• 2 months ago

And I'm testing just how little I can use any Google product.

rswail• 2 months ago

"&udm=14" in the search string is a good start for avoiding this shit. Turns off the AI bullshit at the top of the search results.

Not sure how long google will let it go.

gblargg2• 2 months ago

Once ads become intertwined in the AI answer, it will be the end of ad blocking software. It might not even be possible for a human to tell whether it's an ad or genuine answer (answer based on the training data).

iugtmkbdfil8342• 2 months ago

I have been getting some weird amount of 'offers' from ebay though at least for now most of those seem to be other people clicking 'offer' than full blown agents scouring ebay and nudging people ( although that will soon happen ).

We're testing new ad formats in Search and expanding our Direct Offers pilot

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