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?
sedawkgrep 2 hours 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.
mrweasel 12 minutes 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.
lelanthran 2 hours 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.
jordigh 31 minutes ago [-]
An ad is never helpful because ads are designed to mislead me into buying something I didn't need or knew about before I saw the ad.
If nothing else, an ad cannot impartially compare a product with the competition (and sometimes the "competition" is buying nothing at all), therefore every ad lies.
If I already needed or knew about it, I didn't need the ad.
If I was happy with my life without the product advertised, I didn't need the ad.
Furthermore, ads are fueling our capitalist, consumerist economy that is destroying the planet. Ads are a literal existential threat to humans.
drfloyd51 15 minutes ago [-]
I saw an add for a medicine that was new on the market and my friend who could use the meds, was unaware of its existence.
Now, after a doctor’s involvement, my friend is on the new med and it treats their condition better and the quality of their life is improved.
daveguy 24 minutes ago [-]
You argue that ads can be helpful... by saying all the ways ads are helpful to the business. That's not what Google means. It's a way to make ads not sound like an obnoxious shitshow by pretending they are helpful for the consumer. The only way they are remotely helpful is to let someone know about a product they didn't know about. But that's not what ads are really for and we all know it. They're for manipulating people into buying a product, but whether they need it is purely coincidental. The admongers can stop pretending otherwise.
kibwen 11 minutes 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.
pixel_popping 28 minutes 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.
JeremyNT 22 minutes ago [-]
"More helpful" to the person selling the ad, perhaps :)
adrian_b 2 hours 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.
aembleton 1 hours ago [-]
If you're researching which fridge to buy on Gemini, then an ad might be helpful. So long as they've got the data to answer your questions such as how wide it is.
spockz 24 minutes ago [-]
But only if that result contains all the facts, and doesn’t show only the fridge that they have an ad for while there also other fridges that fit.
hansmayer 2 hours ago [-]
Oh, they don't mean helpful to you. What they mean is, helpful to their revenue.
scrollop 55 minutes ago [-]
And larger companies are more able to purchase ads, reducing a breadth of stores and options.
embedding-shape 2 hours 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.
codingdave 2 hours 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.
moooo99 2 hours 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.
prepend 2 hours ago [-]
I’ve met people who enjoy lots of gross things. That doesn’t make the things gross to me, or the vast majority of humanity.
My guy take is that they are mindrotted by ads into thinking they are good for them. Digital Stockholm Syndrome. Or maybe a Myth of Sisyphus type situation.
reaperducer 2 hours 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.
otherme123 1 hours ago [-]
> Ads for chainsaws on a chainsaw
Or what Google is doing for years: a wall of ads for "Black & Decker" chainsaws when you specifically search "Husqvarna" or "Stihl", sending the results you want to the sixth or seventh place in the page.
saimiam 25 minutes 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.
kccqzy 8 minutes 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.
mattlondon 2 hours 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.
IdiotSavage 52 minutes 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.
jmathai 37 minutes ago [-]
I think what was left out of the blog post was "helpful to the advertiser".
The meta point is that advertising has become so ingrained into society it really is difficult to differentiate if a need or desire originated intrinsic or externally. It's really great for companies selling stuff.
dotancohen 2 hours 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.
ravenstine 2 hours ago [-]
The problem with the idealism of targeted advertising is that it assumes that there is always an ad that fits your desires. In reality, some people have very niche interests and preferences, and not every business advertises through the same channels or with the same budget. Ads will pretty much always cater to the lowest common denominator even if you account for the individual.
michaelbuckbee 53 minutes ago [-]
Search ads do seem like the one ad type that kind of flips that though. Where it's not based on some general set of interests, but literally the thing you're searching for at that moment.
furyofantares 1 hours 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.
yarekt 59 minutes ago [-]
I sort of wish there was a google "ad" search, where its like google search but only for ads, for the rare cases you want to buy something, and are looking through for a compatible product. Make advertisers differentiate by providing more information about their product to help me make a choice rather than shoving the product everywhere else hoping that I'll buy the thing out of fatigue
Forgeties79 1 hours 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
eithed 14 minutes 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:
whynotmaybe 1 hours 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.
illwrks 19 minutes 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 17 minutes 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.
laurentiurad 2 hours 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.
beanjuiceII 1 hours 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
netdur 1 hours 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
Eldodi 2 hours 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.
_heimdall 2 hours 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.
Antibabelic 3 hours 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 hours 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?
_heimdall 2 hours 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.
54 minutes ago [-]
iso1631 2 hours 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.
baal80spam 3 hours ago [-]
> I have never seen a helpful ad
There, I fixed it!
HelloUsername 1 hours ago [-]
Actually it should be:
> I have never seen an ad in google, because I use adblockers
iso1631 2 hours 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.
ulfw 2 hours 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)
reaperducer 2 hours 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.
prepend 2 hours 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.
IshKebab 2 hours 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.
Razengan 1 hours 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.
iLoveOncall 3 hours 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 1 hours 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.
otikik 2 hours ago [-]
“Helpful to our short-term bottom line”
karlkloss 3 hours ago [-]
Does nobody talk abot the elephant in the room?
Will the answers the AI gives also be influenced by Googles customers?
gbro3n 3 hours 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-issue 3 hours 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
SlinkyOnStairs 54 minutes ago [-]
> It's basically standard SEO but it also manipulates AI like ChatGPT very very easily
There are key differences.
1) Google doesn't get paid for the SEO, so even is crime is involved, Google isn't directly responsible.
2) AI ads are unmarked, which is illegal pretty much everywhere. And because of the way LLMs work, it is impossible to tell where a given output came from, neither which part of the prompt/context nor whether it's from the prompt or training.
jmathai 33 minutes ago [-]
> 1) Google doesn't get paid for the SEO, so even is crime is involved, Google isn't directly responsible.
Google doesn't get paid directly for the SEO but they definitely benefit monetarily. Do a recipe search and ask yourself if these are the results the user would like to see. Google benefits by not penalizing sites which litter themselves with ads. It's not that indirect.
weird-eye-issue 23 minutes ago [-]
I'm just talking about the methods that business owners can use for getting good SEO or AI recommendations are basically the same thing, not sure what point you are trying to make?
faangguyindia 2 hours ago [-]
Simplest way to do is by running affiliate program for your SaaS and shady marketers will do everything to get sales if it's profitable.
weird-eye-issue 2 hours ago [-]
Eh not really
They won't get you on any worthwhile list unless it's their own because it's too risky for them and any site they would publish it on would want to use their own affiliate link. Unless of course we are talking about something like Medium or YouTube which does work
And then of course there's the fraudsters who will bid on branded keywords we have banned dozens of people for that
reactordev 2 hours ago [-]
This is why local AI is so important
bayindirh 2 hours ago [-]
It's already being trained on "public" (ethical or otherwise) data. So, it already has ingested that kind of "optimization" during pre-training and training.
I don't think you can fine-tune your way out of it.
fsflover 2 hours ago [-]
This is far from widespread at the moment, so it'll be possible to at least use the current cutting-edge models locally in the future.
bayindirh 2 hours ago [-]
Far from widespread? SEO has seeped to all crevices of the internet for the last 20 years.
fsflover 53 minutes ago [-]
By this measure, any information you can get whatsoever is biased and there is no reason to trust anything at all.
latexr 43 minutes ago [-]
The major difference is that right now when you land on a page you can do your due diligence and decide if you trust the source. You can still be tricked, but it’s harder and you can get better at the detection.
With LLMs, everything is given the same importance so you have no idea if the data came from a reputable source or an obvious SEO junk website.
fsflover 12 minutes ago [-]
AI can also provide the sources. And if you need to be certain, you should ask for that.
ToucanLoucan 2 hours ago [-]
People still think these things are smart. That if their word generator eats enough of the Internet, it will somehow give them the real information that's otherwise hidden. Or perhaps a better word; filter the bullshit.
To filter bullshit it would first have to understand bullshit, and it doesn't. That's why an LLM will tell you the solution to a problem that doesn't work, and argue with you when you correct it.
bayindirh 2 hours ago [-]
This is what bothers me a lot. For the people who doesn't know how it's made or want to believe, it's a miracle.
For me, it's a resource wasting text generator. I'll not lie, I don't use OpenAI, Mistral or Anthropic's models, even for coding. I prefer to read my API docs and cry once.
I used Gemini, five or six times in total. Twice I asked a couple of very specific things, and it unearthed them. Since they were not products, but information, that was helpful. Twice, it has given wrong information. When I "told" it, there was another way, it said "of course there are two ways", etc. Tasteless and time wasting.
I don't like using an LLM all day long, or offload my thinking to them. It's the ultimate self-poisoning incident.
And as you say, these algorithms can't know right/wrong/logical/bullshit, etc. They just spew out text.
latexr 27 minutes ago [-]
Something I’ve also seen multiple times is an LLM giving wrong information, I tell it it’s not right, then it tells me I’m “absolutely right” and it provides the exact same answer and tells me that one will work.
rplnt 2 hours ago [-]
That doesn't solve this particular problem. Your local model was trained on reddit comments written by bots.
Schweigerose 2 hours ago [-]
How do you make sure that the model you run locally is not tainted? Is there even a way to confirm this without providing the complete training set?
psb5 2 hours ago [-]
Fwiw I just run kiwix/zeal locally which has old school search index of all articles in wiki/stackoverflow etc. That seems enough for most of my day to day use.
soloto 2 hours ago [-]
Local AI will have the bias that existed at the time of its training, which is different from no bias. For stuff that needs to be current, a local LLM would need to search the net regardless.
embedding-shape 2 hours ago [-]
And since "no bias" isn't something that actually exists in reality when it comes to language or even anything near humans, "bias in local model I can introspect" will always be miles ahead of "bias I know is there, but cannot introspect".
jondea 2 hours ago [-]
It's less compromised, but it's still basing the answer on compromised queries. This is why I pay for independent reviews (e.g Which) where their incentives are more aligned with yours.
1 hours ago [-]
rdtsc 2 hours ago [-]
Not if the models come from Google. The ads will be implicit in the model. X is better that Y an Z would be easy to add to a the training set.
pautasso 18 minutes ago [-]
Does this mean the model must be retrained every time a new ad is posted? How much are AI ads going to cost?
rdtsc 4 minutes ago [-]
Yeah, I meant not individual ads but implicit forced/influenced preference for certain brands. Let’s say it always picks Coke vs Pepsi when giving an example of a soft drink. Or picks BMW when asked to pick the best car. Which cloud provider is the best? -Why, GCP of course, etc.
Companies then get to bid for a preference “place”. This is more like Google paying to be the search engine default in Firefox.
FergusArgyll 2 hours ago [-]
How does that help if it's using search? You get whatever the search engine outputs
weird-eye-issue 2 hours ago [-]
Local AI models pull in search results just like ChatGPT does
...
And they are trained on web data just like any other model...
HEX4AGON 19 minutes 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.
nekzn 2 hours 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.
_heimdall 2 hours ago [-]
Don't forget the YouTube videos, those "top 5 x" robot videos are the worst.
adverbly 2 hours 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 hours ago [-]
There is no “true answer given all available infomation” maybe unless you give an eval function.
LastTrain 2 hours ago [-]
Then you already can’t use it because it already doesn’t give you a result like that.
stingraycharles 3 hours 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 hours ago [-]
Elephants in the room are obvious by definition.
bandrami 2 hours ago [-]
I think the point of the phrase is that it is obvious but people refuse to talk about it
j_maffe 2 hours ago [-]
But wouldn't that break FCC rules?
water-data-dude 13 minutes ago [-]
Is this administration really interested in enforcing regulations? The FCC might make noises, but only until Trump gets another kickback.
xigoi 2 hours ago [-]
Since when does Google care about laws?
akoboldfrying 2 hours 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!"
bbmatryoshka 2 hours ago [-]
Usually the elephant in a room is something very evident about which no one wants to discuss about
stingraycharles 2 hours ago [-]
But everyone is discussing how AI will have ads, so it’s not an elephant in the room.
NitpickLawyer 2 hours 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)
bayindirh 3 hours ago [-]
The method is already public for some time now. I bookmarked it since I share it a lot:
It's the same. There are slots, there's bidding, there're bidders. Same ad model, evolved for AI era.
iugtmkbdfil834 2 hours 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.
bayindirh 2 hours ago [-]
I never ask computers about a certain device directly. I lost that faith eons ago. I first search for candidates, then go to official pages to check specs and then read / watch reviews, then decide.
Yes, it takes time, but I'm the one to blame if something goes wrong about it.
Also, it helps that I don't use Google for searching the web. I prefer Kagi.
I use Gemini (and only Gemini) to dig the net for the things that I can't find despite my best efforts. They are generally unbranded or very specific things, so ads doesn't play much role there.
I'm a bad customer for Google. :D
Predaxia 3 hours 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.
modin 3 hours ago [-]
Don't they already to this with maps routing? I thought this was the norm.
onionisafruit 2 hours ago [-]
Do you mean something like rerouting you to make sure you pass a mcdonald’s at lunch time? Or are you talking about mcdonald’s always showing up when you search for food along your route? Rerouting would surprise me, but really it wouldn’t surprise me that much at this point.
da_chicken 3 hours 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.
twobitshifter 2 hours ago [-]
Crime is legal now
_heimdall 2 hours ago [-]
Unenforced crimes are still crimes, you have to rewrite laws to change that.
account42 2 hours 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.
rplnt 2 hours ago [-]
You can label the whole output, every time, right? May include sponsored content or something.
kubik369 2 hours 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."?
vrganj 2 hours ago [-]
Doesn't matter as long as you bribe the right people. The government is completely compromised.
ungovernableCat 1 hours 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.
AlfieJones 2 hours ago [-]
Even if it's not right now, it's hard not seeing this happening at some point
baxtr 2 hours 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.
reactordev 3 hours ago [-]
All signs point to yes. It’s Google’s profit center.
emsign 2 hours 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.
vrganj 2 hours 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.
thrance 2 hours ago [-]
What about political ads? Will the AI lie about news to further the interests of Google's patrons?
alfiedotwtf 2 hours 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
> 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.
shevy-java 2 hours 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.
crowcroft 2 hours ago [-]
This never occurred to traditional search results so highly doubt they’ll start now.
neuropacabra 36 minutes 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.
mrweasel 3 minutes 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.
ahahs 21 minutes 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.
cdrnsf 2 minutes ago [-]
I've never bought anything from a search or social media ad. I can't imagine this will change that.
lars_von_pidor 2 hours 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.
skinfaxi 12 minutes 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.
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.
You can block the entire AI response, but not the paid-for product placement in the response separately.
superloika 2 hours ago [-]
Block the entire AI response. It's not a good thing. It tells you whatever google wants you to see. It's an incredibly powerful brainwashing tool.
hootz 2 hours ago [-]
The search results without AI also tell you whatever Google wants you to see. The immediate solution is not to block AI summaries, it's to stop using Google entirely.
SJMG 54 minutes ago [-]
Not to mention the entire well is "poisoned" now. You can avoid LLM points of entry. You can't go to a random source and expect to avoid generative output.
superloika 43 minutes ago [-]
There is a way to see old results, by adding "before:2023" to the search query.
SJMG 2 minutes ago [-]
[delayed]
sgt 1 hours ago [-]
These days, the AI response is often a lot better than the actual search results. Search result quality has dropped drastically the last decade. Sometimes it feels even Altavista had better results than today's Google.
onionisafruit 1 hours ago [-]
The blog post says ‘These formats will also continue to be clearly labeled as “Sponsored.”’. We will probably be able to block them about as well as we can block sponsored search results.
fg137 1 hours 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
alex_suzuki 19 minutes 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.
ryanschaefer 1 hours ago [-]
Entirely accurate, but what an absolute waste of resources across the board.
fnands 1 hours ago [-]
Fighting AI with AI?
What a wild future.
pbasista 2 hours 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.
creationcomplex 2 hours 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.
hootz 2 hours 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.
pbasista 2 hours ago [-]
> if they are part of the training
That would be an intentional poisoning of the models with biased or outright untruthful data.
I believe that many people would be unwilling to use such models.
hootz 2 hours ago [-]
They won't be if the models are "free", which is the case for AI Mode in Google Search. That's why common people still use Google despite it being an ad-ridden slopfest, it's "free"!
yread 2 hours 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
1 hours ago [-]
elpocko 2 hours 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.
spiderfarmer 2 hours ago [-]
Competitors will be very happy though.
kdavis 45 seconds ago [-]
Surprised pikachu face
ablation 3 hours ago [-]
Well, yes. I mean of course they are. They're an ad company.
neolefty 5 minutes 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" ...
pllbnk 16 minutes 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.
FinnKuhn 3 hours 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.
gomox 34 minutes 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.
akoboldfrying 2 hours 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.
gomox 25 minutes 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.
jdw64 3 hours 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?
onionisafruit 1 hours ago [-]
Google execs probably use kagi to google a question
BoiledCabbage 1 hours 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.
jdw64 1 hours ago [-]
Maybe breaking into the ad business starts with learning how to lie to yourself.
QuantumNoodle 2 hours 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.
pbasista 2 hours 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.
cryo32 2 hours ago [-]
Dear customers, we regret to inform you that the existing hallucinations now include biased trash.
gsky 3 hours ago [-]
Most ads i see on YouTube are outright scams. Google and Meta are so evil.
boelboel 2 hours 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.
creationcomplex 2 hours 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.
CalRobert 36 minutes 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.
dzonga 59 minutes 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
1 hours ago [-]
podgorniy 51 minutes 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.
schnitzelstoat 3 hours 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?)
twobitshifter 2 hours ago [-]
I think the search results are still there with AI mode
dbbk 3 hours ago [-]
Well Google is going to exist 10 years from now and ChatGPT will not
bogdan 2 hours ago [-]
Wait until they release 100 year bonds.. oh wait, they already did lol
matthewsinclair 1 hours ago [-]
I know this is controversial, and imperfect, but the longer this crap continues the more right I feel about this as a solution:
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.
binarymax 1 hours ago [-]
A more surprising title would be “Google announces search results will be included in AI Mode ads”
zeafoamrun 2 hours 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!
unsane 1 hours 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.
xnorswap 2 hours 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.
zeafoamrun 2 hours ago [-]
You're on the right track, a creative makes creatives (to be included alongside google searches, obviously)
2 hours ago [-]
onionisafruit 1 hours ago [-]
My ask is that we not use creative as a noun
7bit 7 minutes ago [-]
What AI Mode? (Glancing over to ublock)
Eldodi 3 hours 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 hours 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.
b3ing 2 hours 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
flohofwoe 1 hours 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).
Joscharb 27 minutes 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.
pelagicAustral 3 hours ago [-]
What I am really waiting for is ads on my commit messages.
creationcomplex 2 hours ago [-]
'Authored by Claude code'
pelagicAustral 1 hours ago [-]
Yeah, no, I'm probably thinking more around the lines of deodorant, or tattoo removal services.
1 hours ago [-]
jslakro 2 hours 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 hours 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.
dlahoda 1 hours 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?
podgorniy 56 minutes ago [-]
What's your alternative in case they will not make you free of ads?
aykutseker 2 hours 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
swader999 44 minutes ago [-]
Are they included in the training too? Gee I hope so!
srveale 2 hours 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
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 hours 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.
sunaookami 1 hours 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.
spaqin 2 hours 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.
bastawhiz 57 minutes ago [-]
Your friendly reminder to check out a search engine that you pay for. I use Kagi and love it, and you might too!
cdnsteve 2 hours 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
_doctor_love 2 hours 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?
throwatdem12311 2 hours 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.
How does this compare to the Easy List filter that’s included by default?
swiftcoder 3 hours 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 3 hours ago [-]
Not search - ads in search account for >50% of their total revenue.
carschno 2 hours ago [-]
Don't _ads in search_ account for 100% of their search revenue? Does Google Search offer any other paid services?
swiftcoder 1 hours ago [-]
That’s the same thing, isn’t it? Without search, there are no ads in search
rashar 2 hours 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.
wompapumpum 3 hours ago [-]
Please let me advertise beside incorrect content
another-dave 3 hours ago [-]
Need a proof reader who can spell strawberry? Send your AI draft to us for corrections.
OtomotO 29 minutes 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.
shevy-java 2 hours 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.
anonzzzies 2 hours ago [-]
So every search will now result in an ad and/or hallucination?
lenerdenator 39 minutes 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.
doginasuit 2 hours 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.
amazingamazing 3 hours ago [-]
Surprised it took this long.
jackdoe 2 hours 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 hours ago [-]
I share your feelings.
1970-01-01 28 minutes ago [-]
That's one small step for Google, one giant leap for enshittification.
adverbly 2 hours 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?
csomar 59 minutes 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?
wateralien 2 hours ago [-]
So the web is now pay to play.
AndroTux 2 hours ago [-]
now?
matthewsinclair 1 hours ago [-]
The enshitification will continue until morale improves.
Trias11 3 hours ago [-]
Yeah,
Lets build the next generation AI and slap an ads on it for a good measure.
creationcomplex 2 hours ago [-]
The naivete that this wasn't inevitable is almost endearing, if it wasn't from the same crowd who's building this shit.
dyauspitr 2 hours ago [-]
From the page, “what are some top colleges…”
rAiNIer buSInEss sCHoOl
DeathArrow 2 hours 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.
dyauspitr 2 hours 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.
2 hours ago [-]
_3u10 3 hours ago [-]
Will I be able to pay google to make its Claude code write code that uses left pad as a service.
gadders 1 hours ago [-]
The enshittification has begun.
aembleton 56 minutes ago [-]
I haven't even subscribed yet
field_reader 2 hours ago [-]
Isn't this the whole point? Surely no one still believes in that stuff anymore.
_3u10 3 hours 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.
techterrier 2 hours ago [-]
dog barks, more at 11
1 hours ago [-]
2 hours ago [-]
Oxlamarr 2 hours ago [-]
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bozturk43 2 hours ago [-]
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wotsdat 1 hours ago [-]
[dead]
Rendered at 13:29:57 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
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?
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.
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.
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.
If nothing else, an ad cannot impartially compare a product with the competition (and sometimes the "competition" is buying nothing at all), therefore every ad lies.
If I already needed or knew about it, I didn't need the ad.
If I was happy with my life without the product advertised, I didn't need the ad.
Furthermore, ads are fueling our capitalist, consumerist economy that is destroying the planet. Ads are a literal existential threat to humans.
Now, after a doctor’s involvement, my friend is on the new med and it treats their condition better and the quality of their life is improved.
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.
They are helpful to the people who buy the ads, not those of us who have them injected into our experiences.
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.
My guy take is that they are mindrotted by ads into thinking they are good for them. Digital Stockholm Syndrome. Or maybe a Myth of Sisyphus type situation.
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.
Or what Google is doing for years: a wall of ads for "Black & Decker" chainsaws when you specifically search "Husqvarna" or "Stihl", sending the results you want to the sixth or seventh place in the page.
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.
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.
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.
The meta point is that advertising has become so ingrained into society it really is difficult to differentiate if a need or desire originated intrinsic or externally. It's really great for companies selling stuff.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
There, I fixed it!
> I have never seen an ad in google, because I use adblockers
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
But yeah that's literally the only platform where I've ever had useful ads. Even other meta products only have absolute garbage ads.
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.
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
There are key differences.
1) Google doesn't get paid for the SEO, so even is crime is involved, Google isn't directly responsible.
2) AI ads are unmarked, which is illegal pretty much everywhere. And because of the way LLMs work, it is impossible to tell where a given output came from, neither which part of the prompt/context nor whether it's from the prompt or training.
Google doesn't get paid directly for the SEO but they definitely benefit monetarily. Do a recipe search and ask yourself if these are the results the user would like to see. Google benefits by not penalizing sites which litter themselves with ads. It's not that indirect.
They won't get you on any worthwhile list unless it's their own because it's too risky for them and any site they would publish it on would want to use their own affiliate link. Unless of course we are talking about something like Medium or YouTube which does work
And then of course there's the fraudsters who will bid on branded keywords we have banned dozens of people for that
I don't think you can fine-tune your way out of it.
With LLMs, everything is given the same importance so you have no idea if the data came from a reputable source or an obvious SEO junk website.
To filter bullshit it would first have to understand bullshit, and it doesn't. That's why an LLM will tell you the solution to a problem that doesn't work, and argue with you when you correct it.
For me, it's a resource wasting text generator. I'll not lie, I don't use OpenAI, Mistral or Anthropic's models, even for coding. I prefer to read my API docs and cry once.
I used Gemini, five or six times in total. Twice I asked a couple of very specific things, and it unearthed them. Since they were not products, but information, that was helpful. Twice, it has given wrong information. When I "told" it, there was another way, it said "of course there are two ways", etc. Tasteless and time wasting.
I don't like using an LLM all day long, or offload my thinking to them. It's the ultimate self-poisoning incident.
And as you say, these algorithms can't know right/wrong/logical/bullshit, etc. They just spew out text.
Companies then get to bid for a preference “place”. This is more like Google paying to be the search engine default in Firefox.
And they are trained on web data just like any other model...
I'd be more worried about AI convincing you that you need a product or expensive solution when you actually don't.
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.
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!"
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)
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.
Yes, it takes time, but I'm the one to blame if something goes wrong about it.
Also, it helps that I don't use Google for searching the web. I prefer Kagi.
I use Gemini (and only Gemini) to dig the net for the things that I can't find despite my best efforts. They are generally unbranded or very specific things, so ads doesn't play much role there.
I'm a bad customer for Google. :D
No. It's not 2005 anymore.
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.
> 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.
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.
Compare https://www.google.com/search?q=test to https://www.google.com/search?q=test&udm=14
What a wild future.
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.
Big tech is paying handsomely for this, and I don't think the populace is going to outbribe them.
That would be an intentional poisoning of the models with biased or outright untruthful data.
I believe that many people would be unwilling to use such models.
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.
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.
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.
Google starts from horrid UX where every advertiseable pixel has been squeezed dry. Only way to go is down.
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.
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.
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.
Every single one of you who worked for these companies: you knew what you were doing.
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
Freedom of the strongest caused reduction of the opportunities of the weakest on whom the strongest became the one.
What if we taxed advertising? https://matthewsinclair.com/blog/0177-what-if-we-taxed-adver...
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.
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.
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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBQAo6pEweE
This is the far future we are staring at.
...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.
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
GenAI in other fields is useless and only promoted by charlatans or the financially invested.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
English is not my first language but I think this sentence can’t be grammatically correct?
rAiNIer buSInEss sCHoOl
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.