alt Hacker NewsWe're testing new ad formats in Search and expanding our Direct Offers pilot
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Does nobody talk abot the elephant in the room? Will the answers the AI gives also be influenced by Googles customers?
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.
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.
Well, yes. I mean of course they are. They're an ad company.
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.
> 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.
Anyone made a LLM model that parses such text and removes ads? Ad blocking is getting more interesting.
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?
Dear customers, we regret to inform you that the existing hallucinations now include biased trash.
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.
Most ads i see on YouTube are outright scams. Google and Meta are so evil.
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?)
Having AI do personalized sales as part of the ad appealing to what the customer actually needs is the future of advertising.
Least surprising announcement of the decade goes to…
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.
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...
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.
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
Perfect. Ublock origin will block it on my end and the rest of the sheep will help keep it free with ads.
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.
And just when we thought Google couldn’t make themselves less attractive.
Ah, well that was my first guess as to how they'd make money.
[Product placement in The Truman Show clip]
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
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).
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.
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!
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
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.
Where are the AI based ad blockers? Would happily pay a subscription that filtered all ads and captchas.
A more surprising title would be “Google announces search results will be included in AI Mode ads”
What I am really waiting for is ads on my commit messages.
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?
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
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
I've never bought anything from a search or social media ad. I can't imagine this will change that.
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.
oh cool so googles gone from fairly useless to totally useless now then.
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
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?
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
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.
Is there any usable search engine out there that actually does just search?
...was this ever in doubt? Search accounts for >50% of alphabet's total revenue - they are hardly going to kill the golden goose intentionally
Surprised pikachu face
> 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?