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?
The interesting thing about ads in AI search results is that it fundamentally changes the economic model of SEO. Right now, the entire SEO industry exists to game ranking algorithms. If AI Mode synthesizes answers and presents ads as "helpful suggestions" within the conversation, the incentive shifts from gaming rankings to gaming the AI's understanding of what's "helpful."
That's a much harder problem to police. Traditional search ads are clearly labeled and separated from organic results. Conversational ads embedded in AI responses blur that line to the point where it may not exist anymore. When an AI tells you "Product X might be right for you because..." and that recommendation is a paid placement, the disclosure burden is fundamentally different from a blue link with "Sponsored" next to it.
Google's blog post frames this as "helpful answers that connect people with businesses." But the history of Google's ad products suggests that helpfulness and monetization diverge over time. The early text ads were genuinely useful too. Give it three years and we'll be navigating AI responses where every other sentence is a product placement.
The real question is whether users will tolerate conversational ads or if it drives them to alternatives. The switching cost for search is essentially zero.
> The real question is whether users will tolerate conversational ads
Unfortunately I think they will, as much as I'd hope for the opposite.
People already tolerate influencers, deliberate product placement, etc. Heck, most big content creator type content on YouTube/TikTok right now are basically infomercials disguised as entertainment, and people eat it up.
The problem with ads in LLM responses is now you can no longer trust (what little you could, anyway) the output. You have to constantly guess "did someone pay for this response or is it authentic?" and it goes further than just text responses with the new universal shopping cart thing and other agentic tools. When these things operate autonomously, how much influence are advertisers going to have? Could we see a malicious library pay for Gemini ads and now the coding model is adding it to coding projects?
> the incentive shifts from gaming rankings to gaming the AI's understanding of what's "helpful."
My 2ct: The incentive shifts from gaming rankings to bidding the highest on Google’s keyword (or similar) auction. Google then promotes it as helpful while businesses maximize the amount they pay for that service. There is only one winner in this game.
It's also just a much harder problem. At low margins the "solution" may very well be to genuinely make your widget superior to the competing widget for a given set of users or situations.
Or, just produce a cheaper, shittier widget, and pay Google to have their AI tell people your widget is superior anyway. My guess is Google will try to keep their ad costs just low enough to make this second option the most attractive.
You realize search result relevancy was also driven by advertising, right? The ads come from Google and the results themselves. It is a hard problem but it's equivalent to LLM response relevancy.
> gaming the AI's understanding of what's "helpful."
The AI doesn't have any understanding. You just have to tell it "this is helpful to AI". It has no critical discernment, it doesn't have a theory of mind to ask "why is the author of this information making this statement?"
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.
> 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.
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.
seems like the ad was superfluous. the doctor treating your friend's condition would be aware of new drugs relevant to your friend's condition. i go to a doctor because i don't know about medicine, i don't want to be educated on medicine from snake oil salesmen.
just to be clear i don't know your friend or their life or their medical condition or if the drug you saw an ad for treats their condition or if you saw an ad for a drug or if your friend has a medical conditon or if you have a friend at all... and i don't know if every event in a chain of events is necessary to the eventual outcome of that chain of events... and i can't see into the alternate reality wherein you didn't see that ad for a drug, to know your friend would've been fine in the end... and so on.
i'm speaking more generally, saying advertising is superfluous to medicine.
By researching new drugs? Though sadly at the moment the doctor is also a target of advertising. The point being that this should generally be a pull process driven by a demand (and mediated by neutral review and publication processes) and not a push being driven by a supply (mediated by a process that goes to the highest bidder).
This happened to me as well, and during a football game ad (which I generally skip and despise highly). The signal-to-noise ratio is extremely low with ads, but they indeed can be helpful sometimes.
I need a new dishwasher. I dont want to go knocking on doors until I find somewhere that sells them. Im glad they have signs, webpages, and info sheets.
Promotion and discovery are important. Advertising is the spread of information. Of course some can be bad or misleading, and that is bad.
Publishing information about your product on your own website is not really what most people consider advertising. Nor is being added to lists of similar products. Most people object to 'push' advertising, where attempts to persuade you to buy a product are inserted whereever your attention is, as opposed to 'pull' processes where you have a need and are trying to gather information on how best to solve it.
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.
>> 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.
> You argue that ads can be helpful... by saying all the ways ads are helpful to the business.
Your example on the statement was about the companies. What Google said has nothing to do with the companies. They're clearly trying to paper over the manipulation. I was giving you that credit for the one thing they're slightly good for once. But really we all know that consumers can find products just fine on their own through word of mouth and reviews. But advertisers manipulate that too with paid reviews and astroturfing. Way to pount out the only thing I agreed with you on as if I didn't, even though the majority of your post was arguing for the ads because they benefit companies. And you even said those internet ads that let people know about a product aren't worth the money. You are a true advertiser. Congratulations.
> 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.
I am old enough to remember a brief period where search engine ads were sometimes helpful because you could search for a thing and get an ad for a thing and click and buy a thing. That went away quickly once the optimizers discovered they could earn money by SEO-maxing, charging the premium and then just ship you somebody else's goods and make you pay for the whole thing and their profits. And it became the red queen game, where if you don't SEO-max, nobody is even going to know you existed.
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.
> "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"
> "the correlation between $just_bought_thing and $will_buy_another is very, very high ... Showing someone ads for products in a category they recently purchased from is one of the most effective things a store can do ... the data is exceedingly clear."
I'm sure it's one of the most useful signals for the advertisers, but it is also one of the most irritating behaviours for the consumers, because even if this is a very high correlation in advertising terms, it's still the majority of the time not actually accurate for the consumer.
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.
Advertising really only helps in two scenarios - it makes you aware of a class of product you had no idea existed (perhaps searching for toilet paper shows you a bidet ad) - or it makes you aware of a brand you hadn’t considered before.
And even the second is on shaky ground because by design it won’t tell you really where it stacks up.
I suppose you could argue that making you aware of sales/deals is “helpful” but that’s closer to what I’d classify most advertising as - zero-sum.
(Advertising of a different kind has a use, allowing companies to “sponsor” activities they like in a way the shareholders won’t revolt over. The more you consider companies to be feudal lordships the more it all starts to make sense.)
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.
> Their purpose isn’t to be helpful. They're there to sell you something, and nothing more. Any semblance of helpfulness is misinterpretation and merely coincidental.
Maybe it isn't quite as black & white as that?
What about an ad run by a non-profit that doesn't have any marketing professionals at all? Said non-profit attempting to connect to consumers?
What about listings on craiglist? or facebook marketplace? or personal ads in the local newspaper?
Do you have a proposal/alternative to help with market discovery, customer discovery? Search has in the past served that function, but is likely to be soon dead.
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.
> Since when have we considered ads something helpful?
They are not. The utility of companies advertising their products can be trivially served with dedicated 'advertising' channels without enabling stealth surveillance by big co. and their paying clients, various goverments.
> 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.
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.
The simpler explanation is that a significant segment of the population genuinely enjoys the rampant consumerism and view ads as a helpful discovery tool as they are actively seeking inspiration for their next purchase.
TikTok effectively became a shopping mall because of this behavior, and long before technology there has always been a large demographic that treated shopping as a hobby and form of entertainment.
If ads were universally repulsing to the entire population, we wouldn't have seen the development of current adtech. The uncomfortable reality is that most people either are apathetic toward ads, or actively want to be served ads. 60 to 70% of the global internet population still browse without any ad-block. Think back to how many people willingly and purposefully watched infomercial shopping channels like QVC?
The ads are a symptom of a society that largely enjoys consumerism.
Selling something to me can occasionally be helpful, because I need things from time to time, and at that moment offering to sell me a thing that I need is helpful. What is annoying is that with all billions upon billions supposedly spent on figuring out what I need to sell it to me, the best they can do is "oh, you bought shoes once? Clearly you're the guy who's into buying shoes, let us spam you with shoes ads for the next 5 years!"
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I think the very old Google was better in this: They analysed current intent by looking at current search and contents of the current page one looks at. There an ad may solve a specific current need. As soon as past profile overrides this the relevance goes down: It's great that two weeks ago I spent a lot of time on travel sites, but now my summer vacation is booked and all related ads are irrelevant.
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.
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.
They seem like that, but in practice, human marketers are your adversaries, and they're buying ads on targeted search terms. I can search "better pancakes than Waffle House" and a marketer at Waffle House will have bought the ads so I just see ads for Waffle House's pancakes. This is not actually useful to me at all.
> 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.
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.
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.
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
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
I think weirdly, ads embedded in AI search responses actually maybe do have a chance at being helpful (as long as it's clear from the context of the question that I may be willing to pay for a solution) just because they could potentially be quite well matched to the specific thing I want, or if they're not quite as well matched but offer other benefits, explain the difference.
At the moment search ads aren't very helpful because you have neither of those things. You always get them for any type of query, and when you do get them you don't know if the thing being shown will exactly solve your problem, or only approximately, and the work is much more on you to find that out by reading the product's marketing pages further.
If all that could be done for you up front, reasonably honestly, then I could see it being useful. I mean to be sure, in some small percentage of searches I really am looking to buy something and really do want to be usefully, honestly pitched on available options.
An exception that proves the rule, but KRAZAM's channel on Youtube has legitimately helpful ad reads. Rare Data Hunters [0] for example ends with a 1 minute Cloudflare ad that's basically a crash course in their services. Having worked with GCP and AWS but not so much with Cloudflare, that ad gave me a surprisingly clear idea of what the important pieces would be.
Truly an exception though. I think generally the only people for whom ads are helpful are advertisers.
It seems techies collectively try to avoid ads, but clearly other segments of people actively click and buy through ads. I would love to get a marketing expert's view on this. It differs by product obviously, but there must be some common character variables (gender, wealth level, ...)
I bought once through facebook ads, and now I actively try to avoid any ads
Advertisements have multiple purposes - brand awareness, product awareness, sale awareness, etc.
Coca Cola advertising is mainly brand awareness - remind you they exist but not really directing you to buy one “right now”.
Product awareness is how you learn about new product - usually trying to convince new customers, but sometimes just trying to swap existing customers. These can be “offensive” (a new product aimed at taking a competitors market share) or “defensive” (keeping existing customers from switching away). Of course this overlaps with above.
Sale awareness is how you “scoop” up customers who have been exposed to the above but haven’t bought - you’re offering a “deal” so they’re more likely to buy. Most online search-targeted advertising is this kind, and is the most immediate (click and buy) - the other two are just to make it so when you want product, you want their product.
Personally, I sometimes like targeted ads. If I'm intentionally shopping, it is nice to see ads relevant to my interests. Not saying the whole Internet should be a highly surveiled mall, but they do have their place
I understand your thinking, but I have never felt that the "promoted result" in any search when shopping around inspired confidence in them being the best fit or value for me, even though they're technically a relevant result.
More directly: Someone paid to have them surface that result for me, instead of having me find them for being the best. I can understand the need to bypass the SEO arms race of yesteryear, but it still rubs me the wrong way.
It would be great if I was shown things "relevant to my interests". That's not what targeted ads are because ad placement depends on who is willing to pay the most, not on what optimally matches what I want. The most obvious example is search ads in the App Store that show you a competitor's product (or an outright scam) as an ad when searching for a specific app. Now extend that kind of dynamic to any other product category and you start to see the problem.
I remember the good ol' days when you'd search for the specs on a 10yo server you pulled out of the dumpster and then a day later you'd see "Aging HPC infrastructure, upgrade to latest IBM X-series blade architecture" banner adds in hilariously irrelevant places like thepiratebay or a certain hub of videos.
Those "naive" ads from 15+yr ago are far more relevant than anything I've ever seen since.
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.
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
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.
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.
Tbh that is a pretty vague statement. Could be 0.01% more and it would still be technically correct. Could be doubling the number of non-helpful ads in the meantime
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
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:
For people who think often, ad is only useful in very few situations.
The ability to think often is ultimately a capability that only a minority of humans possess. Therefore, for the vast majority of people, ad is very useful.
For example, my retired parents enjoy buying little gadgets from ads.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
I use an adblocker and despise most ads with a burning hatred, but the absolutist position of "never helpful" isn't right. My example: A game I've been wanting to buy for a while recently went on sale on Steam. I saw an ad when I opened Steam. I bought the game for the low price, and it is now one of my favorite games I've ever played (Burnout Paradise City - highly recommend, but wait for a sale)
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)
The fact that a brand has to pay money to outbid competitors on their brand is something that feels it should be illegal. Google “forcing” Coca Cola to pay for ads on the search “coca cola” so Pepsi doesn’t appear at the top is somehow wrong.
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 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.
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 seen a helpful ad in google search, but well I have been using adblockers forever so I would not know.
That this self-awarely-self-contradicting quip is the top comment on the page is about as essential a summation of HN's collective thought as I can think of.
I remain amazed at the pathology that results in the truth that, even in the world as it exists today, the one enemy that truly unites the supposedly-elite techno-leaders of our increasingly advanced society is...
...horror about seeing advertisements for products we're probably buying anyway.
I search for Converse sneakers and top result is an ad for Converse sneakers! Genius! Pay these genius engineers more! So incredible. How are they smart enough to show me exactly what I search for?!
But seriously. What are we paying advertisers for? Converse pays Google so that they don't show Vans when I search for Converse? Sounds like extortion or protection money.
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.
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.
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.
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
> 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.
> 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.
Why would AI ads be unmarked? Most of the Google AI search results I get show sources. They're just summarizing top results for you, injecting a ad shown as an ad into that isn't tremendously different than how Google worked before.
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?
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
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.
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.
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.
I was just reading another post yesterday and your comment reminds me of this one [0], same sort of format and experience of the submitted article of the HN post that comment is on.
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.
All information has some sort of bias, as no information can truly be unbiased. There is no reason to trust any specific piece of information but taken in aggregate one can disambiguate the biases.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
They could have ads alongside the AI response, in a completely separate section of the page (like search results are). That seems fine. But if they start including ads in the AI context window then it becomes impossible to tell what parts of the response are driven by advertisement vs organic results.
It seems like for now they are making an effort to keep them separate.
> 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!"
> 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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
Of course. Just look at the SEO industry Google created. You can't search for anything without a full page of sponsored/SEO bullshit, and everyone agrees it's precisely why Google results are less relevant today than 10 years ago. But here we are, this is exactly the same thing. We used to search with a term, Google monetized that. We now search with a sentence, do you think Google's gonna leave that cash on the table?
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.
Seems to work fine for product placement in other media. Apparently "clear and conspicuous disclosure" can be a footnote hidden somewhere in the credits.
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."?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
"Cupcakes in London" is not a good example since it's directly asking for advertising. Ads in more information-oriented prompts would be much easier to spot, for example looking for out of context brands and products.
That's almost certainly illegal in many jurisdictions, and they'd definitely not be able to hide that they're doing it indefinitely. A sure way to be massively sued.
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.
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.
There's no way EU would let Google display ads without clearly marking them as such. So any ad blocker should be able to continue detect the block or link that's an ad.
> 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.
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.
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"!
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
Another massive reason is that ChatGPT and similar apps are eating their lunch. Asking a question to ChatGPT actually tends to be pretty convenient compared to the top X results that are just SEO optimized slop.
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.
The particularly worrying thing here is that they're now going to be gathering training data for a conversational model on _how to influence people effectively even when they already know they are being influenced_. Even more than RLFH already does. "We had to build the Torment Nexus so our children could eat" is not a good reason to build the Torment Nexus. The fact that they are not committing to not doing this tells me that either no one thought about what else this could be used for, or the short term gains are all they are thinking about.
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.
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.
I agree on search, really like DDG. I only rely on Google products that I pay for (Gemini APIs, YouTube Premium, occasionally pay for Colab, purchased Books on Play).
I can't understand why this company won't rebrand itself to something a bit catchier or better-sounding name than DuckDuckGo -- who the hell wants to say that ? Unless it's a self-selection filter...
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.
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" ...
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> Highlighted Answers: When people are researching, they want helpful suggestions. Now, when AI Mode provides a list of recommendations — like the best language apps for an upcoming trip — highly relevant, high-quality ads are eligible to appear on that list as a Highlighted Answer.
The user asked for the "best language apps for an upcoming trip"?
Are you going to answer their question objectively?
What if the correct answer is apps A and B are what they need, yet the publisher of app C paid you to be a Highlighted Answer?
What if C is not only not among the best, but is a toxic load of poo?
Also, when are you going to stop often blatantly plagiarizing things people wrote on the Internet, for your "AI" answer, even though you absolutely know you're violating the social contract that built your company, and destroying the creators from whom you're stealing?
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.
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.
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?)
What I'm most worried about is the fact that these types of ads can't be blocked. Kind of like undisclosed sponsored product placements mentioned in an article or movie.
I'm kind of worried that the AI offered to consumers will behave as a very savvy and manipulative shill or salesperson.
I use an adblocker and DDG. I sometimes use !g to search Google.
I wonder if people will run local models to filter the content they consume. On one hand I would hate to read slop output. I also dislike censorship. But on the other hand, I think that the information we decide to ingest is important and it's something we should have control over. The problem is you can't really decide what information to ingest until we've looked at it, after which point we've ingested it.
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
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.
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.
It will be an interesting vector for competition to attract customers.. when you search on {Claude, ChatGPT, whatever}, you get results based on what the model evaluated, and not based on advertisers who paid the most..
I thought Google would use their playbook of search - initially, everything works so good like magic until they enshittify the service by auctioning the results to who pay the most. This time around they are so bold they start from shit..
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.
Is this any different than current search ads (as far as people ignoring them)?
I think this is a lot better for Google. It's always at the top of the page, harder to block with an adblocker, possibly more trusted (we'll see...)
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.
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).
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!
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.
ad creative (also just 'creative' for short in an advertising context) has been around since the 1960's. It was used in web banner advertising at its inception in the 1990s.
Tribes have their own lingo, and language changes all the time. Sorry you don't like what the marketing tribe did more than 50 years ago.
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.
The reason advertising is such a big market, especially online, is that it actually delivers results for advertisers.
Traditional advertising was very indirect. You see ads. Some time later you make a buying decision. And you recognize the brand name that was advertised and you buy the branded thing. A click on an ad is just one of several ways in which an ad can convert for an advertiser.
Anyway, I use Firefox and it still has effective ad blocking. Even Amazon Prime which is supposed to have ads is showing ad free for me. I get these second long black transitions where they would have shown me an ad. Hilarious. Same with Youtube. No ads. But sometimes the black screen lasts for 20 seconds. Which is fine with me. I prefer that over some obnoxious ad.
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
How do you even recognize an ad natively integrated into the content? The only real way is to rephrase the entire piece in an "unbiased" manner, which any agent can do for you right now. You may or may not like the result. It's easier to use another search agent than to block ads in Google's AI mode.
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
>"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.
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?
SEO is definitely a relevant component still, AI mode does a traditional search under the hood. Gaming the system to rank high on the index is still going to matter. But it'll be less about tricking people into clicking and more about tricking LLMs into considering the information relevant and authoritative. For someone using traditional search, I'd wager that would actually improve the results a bit over time.
Then again, SEO gaming got a whole lot cheaper with LLMs, spammers spam even if there's not a great return, as long as it's cheap for them.
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.
Well is so beyond poisoned that it is the groundwater which tastes like toxic waste now, no matter where you will try to dig up your own well.
Transport layer that used to be clean as mountain air now full of hungry eyes peeking at you through the nether.
Russia followed China's playbook and inserted black traffic-filtering boxes, which particularly dislike anything that looks like encrypted messaging. EU and rest of "developed" world is eager to have the same.
Listen on port 1492 for the signs of civilization collapse, listen to the sounds of silence.
Of course it is an encrypted messaging. But it is safe as long as root certificates are not being imposed to be issued by government agencies only. Which is very easy to mandate in a totalitarian government. Want your website to serve customers in our jurisdiction? Then you ought to use certificate issued by us.
Seconding for Kagi! It still falls short in some places, like unfortunately googles maps/business/reviews system is just the only of its kind. But I have come to love the search experience over all.
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.
> 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.
Great. Google gets to hallucinate information and make us watch ads so they can earn money while they do it. Sci-Fi authors wish they could get a deal like that.
this is great for both consumers and businesses. The fake intellectual doomers who constantly lecture about how evil ads are, how everything is “gamed,” and how the internet is supposedly collapsing should probably sit this one out ;)
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.
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.
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.
> 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?
The interesting thing about ads in AI search results is that it fundamentally changes the economic model of SEO. Right now, the entire SEO industry exists to game ranking algorithms. If AI Mode synthesizes answers and presents ads as "helpful suggestions" within the conversation, the incentive shifts from gaming rankings to gaming the AI's understanding of what's "helpful."
That's a much harder problem to police. Traditional search ads are clearly labeled and separated from organic results. Conversational ads embedded in AI responses blur that line to the point where it may not exist anymore. When an AI tells you "Product X might be right for you because..." and that recommendation is a paid placement, the disclosure burden is fundamentally different from a blue link with "Sponsored" next to it.
Google's blog post frames this as "helpful answers that connect people with businesses." But the history of Google's ad products suggests that helpfulness and monetization diverge over time. The early text ads were genuinely useful too. Give it three years and we'll be navigating AI responses where every other sentence is a product placement.
The real question is whether users will tolerate conversational ads or if it drives them to alternatives. The switching cost for search is essentially zero.
> The real question is whether users will tolerate conversational ads
Unfortunately I think they will, as much as I'd hope for the opposite.
People already tolerate influencers, deliberate product placement, etc. Heck, most big content creator type content on YouTube/TikTok right now are basically infomercials disguised as entertainment, and people eat it up.
The problem with ads in LLM responses is now you can no longer trust (what little you could, anyway) the output. You have to constantly guess "did someone pay for this response or is it authentic?" and it goes further than just text responses with the new universal shopping cart thing and other agentic tools. When these things operate autonomously, how much influence are advertisers going to have? Could we see a malicious library pay for Gemini ads and now the coding model is adding it to coding projects?
All the more reason to go local.
> the incentive shifts from gaming rankings to gaming the AI's understanding of what's "helpful."
My 2ct: The incentive shifts from gaming rankings to bidding the highest on Google’s keyword (or similar) auction. Google then promotes it as helpful while businesses maximize the amount they pay for that service. There is only one winner in this game.
> The switching cost for search is essentially zero.
Those of us who remember when Google first appeared and revolutionized search can testify to that.
I tried Google and that was it, Yahoo, Alta Vista, etc, where just little dots in the rear view mirror.
Good insights from Claude
>That's a much harder problem to police
It's also just a much harder problem. At low margins the "solution" may very well be to genuinely make your widget superior to the competing widget for a given set of users or situations.
Or, just produce a cheaper, shittier widget, and pay Google to have their AI tell people your widget is superior anyway. My guess is Google will try to keep their ad costs just low enough to make this second option the most attractive.
You realize search result relevancy was also driven by advertising, right? The ads come from Google and the results themselves. It is a hard problem but it's equivalent to LLM response relevancy.
> gaming the AI's understanding of what's "helpful."
The AI doesn't have any understanding. You just have to tell it "this is helpful to AI". It has no critical discernment, it doesn't have a theory of mind to ask "why is the author of this information making this statement?"
I wonder what will make the ai more 'helpful'? $$$
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.
> 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.
>> mostly useful for B2C penetration
Might be useful for a B that wants to penetrate some C, but is it really useful from a penetrated C perspective?
Are we still talking about ads?
Of course. It seems like an illustration of who's getting F-ed
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.
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.
seems like the ad was superfluous. the doctor treating your friend's condition would be aware of new drugs relevant to your friend's condition. i go to a doctor because i don't know about medicine, i don't want to be educated on medicine from snake oil salesmen.
How does it seem like the ad was superfluous?
The ad triggered a series of events that helped my friend.
The doctor, for whatever reason, was not the primary motivation.
> How does it seem like the ad was superfluous?
just to be clear i don't know your friend or their life or their medical condition or if the drug you saw an ad for treats their condition or if you saw an ad for a drug or if your friend has a medical conditon or if you have a friend at all... and i don't know if every event in a chain of events is necessary to the eventual outcome of that chain of events... and i can't see into the alternate reality wherein you didn't see that ad for a drug, to know your friend would've been fine in the end... and so on.
i'm speaking more generally, saying advertising is superfluous to medicine.
Conspicuously absent from your scenario is the way the doctor becomes aware of the new drug. How does that happen?
By researching new drugs? Though sadly at the moment the doctor is also a target of advertising. The point being that this should generally be a pull process driven by a demand (and mediated by neutral review and publication processes) and not a push being driven by a supply (mediated by a process that goes to the highest bidder).
so in your mind "advertisement" covers any transmission of information?
Ah this world where doctors are perfect and know everything
ah the world where ads are a good form of education.
This happened to me as well, and during a football game ad (which I generally skip and despise highly). The signal-to-noise ratio is extremely low with ads, but they indeed can be helpful sometimes.
I need a new dishwasher. I dont want to go knocking on doors until I find somewhere that sells them. Im glad they have signs, webpages, and info sheets.
Promotion and discovery are important. Advertising is the spread of information. Of course some can be bad or misleading, and that is bad.
Publishing information about your product on your own website is not really what most people consider advertising. Nor is being added to lists of similar products. Most people object to 'push' advertising, where attempts to persuade you to buy a product are inserted whereever your attention is, as opposed to 'pull' processes where you have a need and are trying to gather information on how best to solve it.
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.
>> 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.
> You argue that ads can be helpful... by saying all the ways ads are helpful to the business.
Are you sure that's all I said.
Your example on the statement was about the companies. What Google said has nothing to do with the companies. They're clearly trying to paper over the manipulation. I was giving you that credit for the one thing they're slightly good for once. But really we all know that consumers can find products just fine on their own through word of mouth and reviews. But advertisers manipulate that too with paid reviews and astroturfing. Way to pount out the only thing I agreed with you on as if I didn't, even though the majority of your post was arguing for the ads because they benefit companies. And you even said those internet ads that let people know about a product aren't worth the money. You are a true advertiser. Congratulations.
> 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.
I am old enough to remember a brief period where search engine ads were sometimes helpful because you could search for a thing and get an ad for a thing and click and buy a thing. That went away quickly once the optimizers discovered they could earn money by SEO-maxing, charging the premium and then just ship you somebody else's goods and make you pay for the whole thing and their profits. And it became the red queen game, where if you don't SEO-max, nobody is even going to know you existed.
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.
> "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"
Please see this comment exchange from 3 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37218627
> "the correlation between $just_bought_thing and $will_buy_another is very, very high ... Showing someone ads for products in a category they recently purchased from is one of the most effective things a store can do ... the data is exceedingly clear."
I'm sure it's one of the most useful signals for the advertisers, but it is also one of the most irritating behaviours for the consumers, because even if this is a very high correlation in advertising terms, it's still the majority of the time not actually accurate for the consumer.
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.
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.
Advertising really only helps in two scenarios - it makes you aware of a class of product you had no idea existed (perhaps searching for toilet paper shows you a bidet ad) - or it makes you aware of a brand you hadn’t considered before.
And even the second is on shaky ground because by design it won’t tell you really where it stacks up.
I suppose you could argue that making you aware of sales/deals is “helpful” but that’s closer to what I’d classify most advertising as - zero-sum.
(Advertising of a different kind has a use, allowing companies to “sponsor” activities they like in a way the shareholders won’t revolt over. The more you consider companies to be feudal lordships the more it all starts to make sense.)
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.
> Their purpose isn’t to be helpful. They're there to sell you something, and nothing more. Any semblance of helpfulness is misinterpretation and merely coincidental.
Maybe it isn't quite as black & white as that?
What about an ad run by a non-profit that doesn't have any marketing professionals at all? Said non-profit attempting to connect to consumers?
What about listings on craiglist? or facebook marketplace? or personal ads in the local newspaper?
Do you have a proposal/alternative to help with market discovery, customer discovery? Search has in the past served that function, but is likely to be soon dead.
> What about listings on craiglist? or facebook marketplace? or personal ads in the local newspaper?
You opt in to looking at these, often for something specific. It doesn't lower your general quality of life like ads do.
> Do you have a proposal/alternative to help with market discovery, customer discovery?
Yea: we should stop building our society around encouraging people to buy crap they never asked for
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.
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.
> Since when have we considered ads something helpful?
They are not. The utility of companies advertising their products can be trivially served with dedicated 'advertising' channels without enabling stealth surveillance by big co. and their paying clients, various goverments.
"More helpful" to the person selling the ad, perhaps :)
Oh, they don't mean helpful to you. What they mean is, helpful to their revenue.
> 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.
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.
The simpler explanation is that a significant segment of the population genuinely enjoys the rampant consumerism and view ads as a helpful discovery tool as they are actively seeking inspiration for their next purchase.
TikTok effectively became a shopping mall because of this behavior, and long before technology there has always been a large demographic that treated shopping as a hobby and form of entertainment.
If ads were universally repulsing to the entire population, we wouldn't have seen the development of current adtech. The uncomfortable reality is that most people either are apathetic toward ads, or actively want to be served ads. 60 to 70% of the global internet population still browse without any ad-block. Think back to how many people willingly and purposefully watched infomercial shopping channels like QVC?
The ads are a symptom of a society that largely enjoys consumerism.
Selling something to me can occasionally be helpful, because I need things from time to time, and at that moment offering to sell me a thing that I need is helpful. What is annoying is that with all billions upon billions supposedly spent on figuring out what I need to sell it to me, the best they can do is "oh, you bought shoes once? Clearly you're the guy who's into buying shoes, let us spam you with shoes ads for the next 5 years!"
And larger companies are more able to purchase ads, reducing a breadth of stores and options.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
I think the very old Google was better in this: They analysed current intent by looking at current search and contents of the current page one looks at. There an ad may solve a specific current need. As soon as past profile overrides this the relevance goes down: It's great that two weeks ago I spent a lot of time on travel sites, but now my summer vacation is booked and all related ads are irrelevant.
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.
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.
They seem like that, but in practice, human marketers are your adversaries, and they're buying ads on targeted search terms. I can search "better pancakes than Waffle House" and a marketer at Waffle House will have bought the ads so I just see ads for Waffle House's pancakes. This is not actually useful to me at all.
> 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.
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.
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.
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
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
I think weirdly, ads embedded in AI search responses actually maybe do have a chance at being helpful (as long as it's clear from the context of the question that I may be willing to pay for a solution) just because they could potentially be quite well matched to the specific thing I want, or if they're not quite as well matched but offer other benefits, explain the difference.
At the moment search ads aren't very helpful because you have neither of those things. You always get them for any type of query, and when you do get them you don't know if the thing being shown will exactly solve your problem, or only approximately, and the work is much more on you to find that out by reading the product's marketing pages further.
If all that could be done for you up front, reasonably honestly, then I could see it being useful. I mean to be sure, in some small percentage of searches I really am looking to buy something and really do want to be usefully, honestly pitched on available options.
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.
An exception that proves the rule, but KRAZAM's channel on Youtube has legitimately helpful ad reads. Rare Data Hunters [0] for example ends with a 1 minute Cloudflare ad that's basically a crash course in their services. Having worked with GCP and AWS but not so much with Cloudflare, that ad gave me a surprisingly clear idea of what the important pieces would be.
Truly an exception though. I think generally the only people for whom ads are helpful are advertisers.
0: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IU4ByUbDKNc
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.
I used to see helpful ads every now and then about 18 years ago.
It seems techies collectively try to avoid ads, but clearly other segments of people actively click and buy through ads. I would love to get a marketing expert's view on this. It differs by product obviously, but there must be some common character variables (gender, wealth level, ...)
I bought once through facebook ads, and now I actively try to avoid any ads
Advertisements have multiple purposes - brand awareness, product awareness, sale awareness, etc.
Coca Cola advertising is mainly brand awareness - remind you they exist but not really directing you to buy one “right now”.
Product awareness is how you learn about new product - usually trying to convince new customers, but sometimes just trying to swap existing customers. These can be “offensive” (a new product aimed at taking a competitors market share) or “defensive” (keeping existing customers from switching away). Of course this overlaps with above.
Sale awareness is how you “scoop” up customers who have been exposed to the above but haven’t bought - you’re offering a “deal” so they’re more likely to buy. Most online search-targeted advertising is this kind, and is the most immediate (click and buy) - the other two are just to make it so when you want product, you want their product.
Those ads do help them, though. They're an ad company now
Personally, I sometimes like targeted ads. If I'm intentionally shopping, it is nice to see ads relevant to my interests. Not saying the whole Internet should be a highly surveiled mall, but they do have their place
I understand your thinking, but I have never felt that the "promoted result" in any search when shopping around inspired confidence in them being the best fit or value for me, even though they're technically a relevant result.
More directly: Someone paid to have them surface that result for me, instead of having me find them for being the best. I can understand the need to bypass the SEO arms race of yesteryear, but it still rubs me the wrong way.
It would be great if I was shown things "relevant to my interests". That's not what targeted ads are because ad placement depends on who is willing to pay the most, not on what optimally matches what I want. The most obvious example is search ads in the App Store that show you a competitor's product (or an outright scam) as an ad when searching for a specific app. Now extend that kind of dynamic to any other product category and you start to see the problem.
True. I guess I forgot about the whole auction process.
It’s because you haven’t given them enough access to your data. Otherwise they would be able to offer more personalized and accurate ads.
I should know, I block tracking and see annoying and unhelpful ads.
And I browse social media with their algorithmic feeds, where the content is hyper personalized, helpful and mostly ads too.
I remember the good ol' days when you'd search for the specs on a 10yo server you pulled out of the dumpster and then a day later you'd see "Aging HPC infrastructure, upgrade to latest IBM X-series blade architecture" banner adds in hilariously irrelevant places like thepiratebay or a certain hub of videos.
Those "naive" ads from 15+yr ago are far more relevant than anything I've ever seen since.
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.
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
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.
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.
Tbh that is a pretty vague statement. Could be 0.01% more and it would still be technically correct. Could be doubling the number of non-helpful ads in the meantime
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
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:
For people who think often, ad is only useful in very few situations.
The ability to think often is ultimately a capability that only a minority of humans possess. Therefore, for the vast majority of people, ad is very useful.
For example, my retired parents enjoy buying little gadgets from ads.
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.
Well, they are definitely helpful for Google incomes
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.
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.
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?
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.
I use an adblocker and despise most ads with a burning hatred, but the absolutist position of "never helpful" isn't right. My example: A game I've been wanting to buy for a while recently went on sale on Steam. I saw an ad when I opened Steam. I bought the game for the low price, and it is now one of my favorite games I've ever played (Burnout Paradise City - highly recommend, but wait for a sale)
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.
> I have never seen a helpful ad
There, I fixed it!
Actually it should be:
> I have never seen an ad in google, because I use adblockers
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.
None.
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)
The fact that a brand has to pay money to outbid competitors on their brand is something that feels it should be illegal. Google “forcing” Coca Cola to pay for ads on the search “coca cola” so Pepsi doesn’t appear at the top is somehow wrong.
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.
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.
> 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.
> I have never seen a helpful ad in google search, but well I have been using adblockers forever so I would not know.
That this self-awarely-self-contradicting quip is the top comment on the page is about as essential a summation of HN's collective thought as I can think of.
I remain amazed at the pathology that results in the truth that, even in the world as it exists today, the one enemy that truly unites the supposedly-elite techno-leaders of our increasingly advanced society is...
...horror about seeing advertisements for products we're probably buying anyway.
I search for Converse sneakers and top result is an ad for Converse sneakers! Genius! Pay these genius engineers more! So incredible. How are they smart enough to show me exactly what I search for?!
But seriously. What are we paying advertisers for? Converse pays Google so that they don't show Vans when I search for Converse? Sounds like extortion or protection money.
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.
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.
“Helpful to our short-term bottom line”
> 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.
Does nobody talk abot the elephant in the room? Will the answers the AI gives also be influenced by Googles customers?
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.
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
> 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.
> 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.
Why would AI ads be unmarked? Most of the Google AI search results I get show sources. They're just summarizing top results for you, injecting a ad shown as an ad into that isn't tremendously different than how Google worked before.
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?
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.
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
The cheat code for that used to be Reddit before they got growth-hacked 10+ years ago.
Actually Reddit is receiving more organic traffic than ever before and is more valuable to game than ever
But yes actually I was doing this about 15 years ago in the men's fashion subreddit for one of my companies lol
Can you elaborate a bit on how that looks like in practice?
This is why local AI is so important
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.
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.
Sadly critical thinking skills have atrophied steeply in the last decade.
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.
I was just reading another post yesterday and your comment reminds me of this one [0], same sort of format and experience of the submitted article of the HN post that comment is on.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48211730
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.
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.
Far from widespread? SEO has seeped to all crevices of the internet for the last 20 years.
By this measure, any information you can get whatsoever is biased and there is no reason to trust anything at all.
All information has some sort of bias, as no information can truly be unbiased. There is no reason to trust any specific piece of information but taken in aggregate one can disambiguate the biases.
So we are in agreement.
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.
AI can also provide the sources. And if you need to be certain, you should ask for that.
That doesn't solve this particular problem. Your local model was trained on reddit comments written by bots.
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.
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".
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?
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.
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.
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.
Does this mean the model must be retrained every time a new ad is posted? How much are AI ads going to cost?
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.
How does that help if it's using search? You get whatever the search engine outputs
Local AI models pull in search results just like ChatGPT does ...
And they are trained on web data just like any other model...
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.
Don't forget the YouTube videos, those "top 5 x" robot videos are the worst.
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.
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.
Then you already can’t use it because it already doesn’t give you a result like that.
There is no “true answer given all available infomation” maybe unless you give an eval function.
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.
They could have ads alongside the AI response, in a completely separate section of the page (like search results are). That seems fine. But if they start including ads in the AI context window then it becomes impossible to tell what parts of the response are driven by advertisement vs organic results.
It seems like for now they are making an effort to keep them separate.
Elephants in the room are obvious by definition.
I think the point of the phrase is that it is obvious but people refuse to talk about it
> 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!"
Usually the elephant in a room is something very evident about which no one wants to discuss about
But everyone is discussing how AI will have ads, so it’s not an elephant in the room.
But wouldn't that break FCC rules?
FTC rules. And probably. Unless they disclosed somewhere that there were ads informing results, in which case the fine print wins again.
Since when does Google care about laws?
Is this administration really interested in enforcing regulations? The FCC might make noises, but only until Trump gets another kickback.
> 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)
The method is already public for some time now. I bookmarked it since I share it a lot:
https://research.google/blog/mechanism-design-for-large-lang...
It's the same. There are slots, there's bidding, there're bidders. Same ad model, evolved for AI era.
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.
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
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.
Don't they already to this with maps routing? I thought this was the norm.
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.
Of course. Just look at the SEO industry Google created. You can't search for anything without a full page of sponsored/SEO bullshit, and everyone agrees it's precisely why Google results are less relevant today than 10 years ago. But here we are, this is exactly the same thing. We used to search with a term, Google monetized that. We now search with a sentence, do you think Google's gonna leave that cash on the table?
It depends on what influence you have in mind. Hidden advertising is illegal in most jurisdictions.
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.
Crime is legal now
Unenforced crimes are still crimes, you have to rewrite laws to change that.
or get a blanket pardon
Seems to work fine for product placement in other media. Apparently "clear and conspicuous disclosure" can be a footnote hidden somewhere in the credits.
Do you expect them to include a red flashing light and alarm in the middle of the scene? The credits are where I would expect to see those disclosures
I'd expect the notice to be on the same screen where the ad or ad-like content is shown if the regulation intends to actually make a difference.
So you expect the movie to pause for a disclaimer?
You can label the whole output, every time, right? May include sponsored content or something.
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."?
> and that appears to be enough to relieve them of any responsibility for the responses.
Unenforceable disclaimers to discourage people from holding you responsible have always existed. "Stay 300 ft back from truck", etc.
With AI, that might be enough of a disclosure, but it might not.
Doesn't matter as long as you bribe the right people. The government is completely compromised.
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.
All signs point to yes. It’s Google’s profit center.
Even if it's not right now, it's hard not seeing this happening at some point
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.
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.
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.
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
... Yes, people talk about that.
What about political ads? Will the AI lie about news to further the interests of Google's patrons?
for sure, i guess this is one of the experiments that confirms that would work https://openai.com/index/where-the-goblins-came-from/
I couldn't write better satire if I tried:
> A search through GPT‑5.5’s SFT data found many datapoints containing “goblin” and “gremlin.” Further investigation revealed a whole family of other odd creatures: raccoons, trolls, ogres, and pigeons were identified as other tic words, while most uses of frog turned out to be legitimate.
Obviously.
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.
This never occurred to traditional search results so highly doubt they’ll start now.
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.
Block the AI overviews with extensions like https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/hide-google-ai-over... or use a userscript to do the same.
Alternatively, just change your browser's default search shortcut, and add &udm=14 to the end of the normal google search. It changes the default search results to "web" rather than "All", which removes all the extraneous crap they've added over the years.
Compare https://www.google.com/search?q=test to https://www.google.com/search?q=test&udm=14
The wild thing is how much faster it is to load. I'd almost forgotten how fast Google's default search used to be. Thank you!
You can block the entire AI response, but not the paid-for product placement in the response separately.
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.
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.
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.
There is a way to see old results, by adding "before:2023" to the search query.
Great, as long as you don't mind the nexus of all human communication to be frozen in time three years ago.
For many queries it does not matter.
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.
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.
Could also just block the element in ublock?
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
You won't be able to tell if it's an ad, if it's just biased (and the ad is not discolsed).
They could always sell ads like "recommend my tool more when user asks for cupcakes in London".
And then, the output would be: "My top 3 recomendations are X, Y, Z".
And maybe only X is the one that paid and Y and Z are organic.
"Cupcakes in London" is not a good example since it's directly asking for advertising. Ads in more information-oriented prompts would be much easier to spot, for example looking for out of context brands and products.
That's almost certainly illegal in many jurisdictions, and they'd definitely not be able to hide that they're doing it indefinitely. A sure way to be massively sued.
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.
Entirely accurate, but what an absolute waste of resources across the board.
Fighting AI with AI?
What a wild future.
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.
There's no way EU would let Google display ads without clearly marking them as such. So any ad blocker should be able to continue detect the block or link that's an ad.
> 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.
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.
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.
> what if they are part of the training
No way Google is going to bake the ads into training data. Their entire business is built on auctioning off each ad slot in realtime.
> 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.
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"!
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
Another massive reason is that ChatGPT and similar apps are eating their lunch. Asking a question to ChatGPT actually tends to be pretty convenient compared to the top X results that are just SEO optimized slop.
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.
Competitors will be very happy though.
The particularly worrying thing here is that they're now going to be gathering training data for a conversational model on _how to influence people effectively even when they already know they are being influenced_. Even more than RLFH already does. "We had to build the Torment Nexus so our children could eat" is not a good reason to build the Torment Nexus. The fact that they are not committing to not doing this tells me that either no one thought about what else this could be used for, or the short term gains are all they are thinking about.
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.
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.
I agree on search, really like DDG. I only rely on Google products that I pay for (Gemini APIs, YouTube Premium, occasionally pay for Colab, purchased Books on Play).
I can't understand why this company won't rebrand itself to something a bit catchier or better-sounding name than DuckDuckGo -- who the hell wants to say that ? Unless it's a self-selection filter...
I moved to ddg at least 5 years ago, at that time results were not as good as Google's but it works great for me now.
They even do us the courtesy to still maintain an AI-free version at noai. duckduckgo. com
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.
Well, yes. I mean of course they are. They're an ad company.
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" ...
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.
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.
They could afford to wait, but... profits.
Also, they have to start experimenting now to get the formula right for AI ads.
The idea that users will switch because a platform has ads has never played out in the past. The average user just doesn’t care.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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?
Google execs probably use kagi to google a question
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.
Maybe breaking into the ad business starts with learning how to lie to yourself.
Dear customers, we regret to inform you that the existing hallucinations now include biased trash.
> Highlighted Answers: When people are researching, they want helpful suggestions. Now, when AI Mode provides a list of recommendations — like the best language apps for an upcoming trip — highly relevant, high-quality ads are eligible to appear on that list as a Highlighted Answer.
The user asked for the "best language apps for an upcoming trip"?
Are you going to answer their question objectively?
What if the correct answer is apps A and B are what they need, yet the publisher of app C paid you to be a Highlighted Answer?
What if C is not only not among the best, but is a toxic load of poo?
Also, when are you going to stop often blatantly plagiarizing things people wrote on the Internet, for your "AI" answer, even though you absolutely know you're violating the social contract that built your company, and destroying the creators from whom you're stealing?
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...
Most ads i see on YouTube are outright scams. Google and Meta are so evil.
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.
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.
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.
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?)
I think the search results are still there with AI mode
Well Google is going to exist 10 years from now and ChatGPT will not
Wait until they release 100 year bonds.. oh wait, they already did lol
Why would anyone want a 100-yr bond over equity? It seems like the biggest risk for the bond is the health of the underlying company.
What I'm most worried about is the fact that these types of ads can't be blocked. Kind of like undisclosed sponsored product placements mentioned in an article or movie.
I'm kind of worried that the AI offered to consumers will behave as a very savvy and manipulative shill or salesperson.
I use an adblocker and DDG. I sometimes use !g to search Google.
I wonder if people will run local models to filter the content they consume. On one hand I would hate to read slop output. I also dislike censorship. But on the other hand, I think that the information we decide to ingest is important and it's something we should have control over. The problem is you can't really decide what information to ingest until we've looked at it, after which point we've ingested it.
I digress. Thoughts?
Comments speculating how to block these ads... isn't the simplest solution to just not use Google?
Seriously, I haven't used google products for 5 years at least, its easy. Why is everyone still using them?
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
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.
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.
Anyone made a LLM model that parses such text and removes ads? Ad blocking is getting more interesting.
It will be an interesting vector for competition to attract customers.. when you search on {Claude, ChatGPT, whatever}, you get results based on what the model evaluated, and not based on advertisers who paid the most..
I thought Google would use their playbook of search - initially, everything works so good like magic until they enshittify the service by auctioning the results to who pay the most. This time around they are so bold they start from shit..
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.
Is this any different than current search ads (as far as people ignoring them)? I think this is a lot better for Google. It's always at the top of the page, harder to block with an adblocker, possibly more trusted (we'll see...)
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.
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.
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).
And just when we thought Google couldn’t make themselves less attractive.
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!
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.
ad creative (also just 'creative' for short in an advertising context) has been around since the 1960's. It was used in web banner advertising at its inception in the 1990s. Tribes have their own lingo, and language changes all the time. Sorry you don't like what the marketing tribe did more than 50 years ago.
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.
You're on the right track, a creative makes creatives (to be included alongside google searches, obviously)
My ask is that we not use creative as a noun
I've never bought anything from a search or social media ad. I can't imagine this will change that.
The reason advertising is such a big market, especially online, is that it actually delivers results for advertisers.
Traditional advertising was very indirect. You see ads. Some time later you make a buying decision. And you recognize the brand name that was advertised and you buy the branded thing. A click on an ad is just one of several ways in which an ad can convert for an advertiser.
Anyway, I use Firefox and it still has effective ad blocking. Even Amazon Prime which is supposed to have ads is showing ad free for me. I get these second long black transitions where they would have shown me an ad. Hilarious. Same with Youtube. No ads. But sometimes the black screen lasts for 20 seconds. Which is fine with me. I prefer that over some obnoxious ad.
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.
Perfect. Ublock origin will block it on my end and the rest of the sheep will help keep it free with ads.
Ah, well that was my first guess as to how they'd make money.
[Product placement in The Truman Show clip]
What I am really waiting for is ads on my commit messages.
Microsoft has you covered: https://notes.zachmanson.com/copilot-edited-an-ad-into-my-pr... / https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47570269
'Authored by Claude code'
Yeah, no, I'm probably thinking more around the lines of deodorant, or tattoo removal services.
Least surprising announcement of the decade goes to…
A more surprising title would be “Google announces search results will be included in AI Mode ads”
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
Where are the AI based ad blockers? Would happily pay a subscription that filtered all ads and captchas.
How do you even recognize an ad natively integrated into the content? The only real way is to rephrase the entire piece in an "unbiased" manner, which any agent can do for you right now. You may or may not like the result. It's easier to use another search agent than to block ads in Google's AI mode.
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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
Who Am I? - The Mysterious Thing You Always Are
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBQAo6pEweE
This is the far future we are staring at.
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?
What's your alternative in case they will not make you free of ads?
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.
...was this ever in doubt? Search accounts for >50% of alphabet's total revenue - they are hardly going to kill the golden goose intentionally
Not search - ads in search account for >50% of their total revenue.
Don't _ads in search_ account for 100% of their search revenue? Does Google Search offer any other paid services?
That’s the same thing, isn’t it? Without search, there are no ads in search
oh cool so googles gone from fairly useless to totally useless now then.
The "Don't be evil" Google feels long gone
It isn't, they just bought the term and redefined it. Nothing a few millions to the main dictionary editors won't fix.
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.
For anyone interested in such a filter, this one is great in my experience: https://github.com/Stevoisiak/Stevos-GenAI-Blocklist
How does this compare to the Easy List filter that’s included by default?
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.
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.
Poor Google, there’s no money in anything else they do so they have to sell ads. How could it have come to this?
Surprised pikachu face
>"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.
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?
SEO is definitely a relevant component still, AI mode does a traditional search under the hood. Gaming the system to rank high on the index is still going to matter. But it'll be less about tricking people into clicking and more about tricking LLMs into considering the information relevant and authoritative. For someone using traditional search, I'd wager that would actually improve the results a bit over time.
Then again, SEO gaming got a whole lot cheaper with LLMs, spammers spam even if there's not a great return, as long as it's cheap for them.
Please let me advertise beside incorrect content
Need a proof reader who can spell strawberry? Send your AI draft to us for corrections.
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.
Well is so beyond poisoned that it is the groundwater which tastes like toxic waste now, no matter where you will try to dig up your own well.
Transport layer that used to be clean as mountain air now full of hungry eyes peeking at you through the nether.
Russia followed China's playbook and inserted black traffic-filtering boxes, which particularly dislike anything that looks like encrypted messaging. EU and rest of "developed" world is eager to have the same.
Listen on port 1492 for the signs of civilization collapse, listen to the sounds of silence.
Isn't HTTPS encrypted messaging? Or does TLS not count as encryption?
Of course it is an encrypted messaging. But it is safe as long as root certificates are not being imposed to be issued by government agencies only. Which is very easy to mandate in a totalitarian government. Want your website to serve customers in our jurisdiction? Then you ought to use certificate issued by us.
I share your feelings.
Having AI do personalized sales as part of the ad appealing to what the customer actually needs is the future of advertising.
Are they included in the training too? Gee I hope so!
Brace for impact...
Your friendly reminder to check out a search engine that you pay for. I use Kagi and love it, and you might too!
Seconding for Kagi! It still falls short in some places, like unfortunately googles maps/business/reviews system is just the only of its kind. But I have come to love the search experience over all.
Kagi is great.
Yes, but at $5/300 searches they're trying too hard to squeeze $10 out of you for the unlimited plan. 300 searches is ridiculous.
This thread is about injecting ads into searches. Kagi's business model requires you to pay them instead of being bombarded with ads. So...
Honestly, when I see headlines like this I just scroll down to the Kagi comment and upvote it.
Surprised it took this long.
So every search will now result in an ad and/or hallucination?
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.
Is there any usable search engine out there that actually does just search?
> 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.
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?
So the web is now pay to play.
now?
Great. Google gets to hallucinate information and make us watch ads so they can earn money while they do it. Sci-Fi authors wish they could get a deal like that.
Yeah, Lets build the next generation AI and slap an ads on it for a good measure.
this is great for both consumers and businesses. The fake intellectual doomers who constantly lecture about how evil ads are, how everything is “gamed,” and how the internet is supposedly collapsing should probably sit this one out ;)
What AI Mode? (Glancing over to ublock)
i happened to liked Google AI mode, even wrote a composition about that [1] Now it is going to be enshittified, which is probably inevitable.
https://github.com/MoserMichael/tips_on_using_google_ai_mode
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.
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.
> 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?
The enshitification will continue until morale improves.
From the page, “what are some top colleges…”
rAiNIer buSInEss sCHoOl
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.
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.
The naivete that this wasn't inevitable is almost endearing, if it wasn't from the same crowd who's building this shit.
Will I be able to pay google to make its Claude code write code that uses left pad as a service.
That's one small step for Google, one giant leap for enshittification.
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.
Isn't this the whole point? Surely no one still believes in that stuff anymore.
Well, time to go to Kagi, I guess. Been putting off paying for this shit for as long as possible but at some point I guess it's inevitable.
Any decent alternatives? DuckDuckGo was always been awful for me in terms of relevant search results.
The enshittification has begun.
I haven't even subscribed yet
dog barks, more at 11