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.

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.

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.

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.

My ask is that we not use creative as a noun

I think the search results are still there with AI mode

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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?

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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 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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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" ...

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

Google execs probably use kagi to google a question

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.

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.

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.

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...

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.

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.

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.

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

> 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.

>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.

???

If you look at the videos in the blog post there's clearly a "sponsored" tag next to the sponsored results. I don't see how it's different than sponsored search results.

> 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.

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.

Good insights from Claude

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.

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.

'Authored by Claude code'

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.

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.

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

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

> 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.

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.

> 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?

I'd add: since the AI is now referring the product "as if" it's an honest advice from a secondary source, they would be exempt from the usual advertisement rules.

Effectively, if you were to search "the best oatmeal without asbestos", it could suggest you "AsBestOats", and "AsBestOats" would only advertise asbestos in its content on the box for the human to see, but advertise to crawlers it's "the best oats without asbestos". It's not a false advertisement, because they didn't show it to a human, and machines can't sue.

>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.

> 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 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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

Competitors will be very happy though.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

> 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.

> 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.

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

> 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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

> 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)

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

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

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.

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

Could also just block the element in ublock?

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.

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).

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.

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

Gonna guess you are not a lawyer and this is all theorycrafted on a whim.

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.

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

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

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

> 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 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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Elephants in the room are obvious by definition.

But wouldn't that break FCC rules?

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

> 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!"

Crime is legal now

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

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

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

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.

Fighting AI with AI?

What a wild future.

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.

All the more reason to go local.

I wonder what will make the ai more 'helpful'? $$$

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.

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.

> "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."

>> 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?

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.

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."?

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.

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 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

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

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

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

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

We can replace the primary and (formerly) indispensable product of a company with a $4T market cap for $5-10/month (less if annualized), and some people still gripe.

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.

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.

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

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 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.

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.

The cheat code for that used to be Reddit before they got growth-hacked 10+ years ago.

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

There are key differences.

1) Google doesn't get paid for the SEO, so even is crime is involved, Google isn't directly responsible.

2) AI ads are unmarked, which is illegal pretty much everywhere. And because of the way LLMs work, it is impossible to tell where a given output came from, neither which part of the prompt/context nor whether it's from the prompt or training.

FTC rules. And probably. Unless they disclosed somewhere that there were ads informing results, in which case the fine print wins again.

Don't forget the YouTube videos, those "top 5 x" robot videos are the worst.

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

I think the point of the phrase is that it is obvious but people refuse to talk about it

Since when does Google care about laws?

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.

Is this administration really interested in enforcing regulations? The FCC might make noises, but only until Trump gets another kickback.

Wow, great tip! Thank you!

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!

Or even better: stop using Google.

Use Kagi instead.

I realistically don't see what other future there is. Either disconnect or adopt anti-grievance local AI, lest you be bombarded with ads and slop everywhere.

The first thing you install on your browser is uBlock, is it not?

Don't get me wrong, I hate this timeline, but the monster is out the box and there is no putting it back in.

> 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.

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.

> the correlation between $just_bought_thing and $will_buy_another is very, very high

This looks like an argument against advertising the same thing. Why would you advertise something, they were already going to buy?

But showing an ad before their next purchase definitely would improve the numbers on the "our conversion rate chart" _advertised_ to ad buyers. A con played by ad companies to sell more ads.

"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.

And social proximity to he AI's owners.

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 (like with all ads: I buy some orders of magnitudes fewer products than I see ads, even with adblocking, so even if I only bought things I had seen ads for, the vast majority are not helpful to me).

> If I was happy with my life without the product advertised, I didn't need the ad.

Well, how do you know that your life couldn't be better with the product? /s

> 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.

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.

This is why local AI is so important

Usually the elephant in a room is something very evident about which no one wants to discuss about

Unenforced crimes are still crimes, you have to rewrite laws to change that.

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

Both just give me a recaptcha. Start page doesn't:

https://www.startpage.com/sp/search?q=test

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.

When the only local options are Walmart and maybe Target and the local Kroger subsidiary, it isn't much better.

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.

>> 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.

> 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.

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.

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.

Are we still talking about ads?

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.

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?

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

> 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.

That doesn't solve this particular problem. Your local model was trained on reddit comments written by bots.

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.

But everyone is discussing how AI will have ads, so it’s not an elephant in the room.

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...

or get a blanket pardon

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.

Well, won't it be hard to test?

The customers could be paying for "increased visibility" in LLM results, but nothing specific.

Also, the ad platform could simply hint towards a customer, instead of directly mentioning, thus not being a true direct ad.

(NB: customer = the one buying the increased LLM visibility)

For example, a user could ask for "prebuild computers", and the ad platform could state: "the best ones for your use-case are those with AMD CPU, NVidia GPU, 2TB of RAM and a Z960X motherboard", and when you search for it, surprise-surprise, there is only one company in your location selling this specific setup. Or maybe, instead of linking directly to the company, it links to keywords/ideas that link to that company.

You get the gist, by using dynamically generated plain text and having more control over the user journey, you could actually steer the user into a specific direction without ever mentioning it.

Which search engines does it use? I couldn't find info, and I'm just curious.

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"!

I'd assume they meant self-hosted inference.

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.

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.)

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.

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.

Of course. It seems like an illustration of who's getting F-ed

> Furthermore, ads are fueling our capitalist, consumerist economy that is destroying the planet. Ads are a literal existential threat to humans.

I'm sorry, a single anecdote does not invalidate the above.

Ads are evil. They make us desire things we don't need, undermine our self-esteem, and in the large part just sell scams. I'd be happy to ban most forms of advertising. It's a plague.

Your examples are of passive information gathering. Surveillance driven behavioral manipulation across every screen you own is a different than looking up the list of local appliance stores. I rarely see ads trying to compete on product specs. When there is information it is low value and distorted because it has huge holes from selective omissions.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

Can you elaborate a bit on how that looks like in practice?

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.

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.

So you expect the movie to pause for a disclaimer?

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.

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.

I wish I could be this naive about things and still be happy.

Does this mean the model must be retrained every time a new ad is posted? How much are AI ads going to cost?

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.

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.

Ah this world where doctors are perfect and know everything

Conspicuously absent from your scenario is the way the doctor becomes aware of the new drug. How does that happen?

Sadly critical thinking skills have atrophied steeply in the last decade.

Instead of making non-substantive patronizing remarks, why don't you respond with actual arguments?

Far from widespread? SEO has seeped to all crevices of the internet for the last 20 years.

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.

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 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.

By accepting SWAG from the pharma rep, or accepting free trips to conferences sponsored by pharma. If a doctor has not heard about a new drug the their reps just haven't made their way to them yet because they're in a smaller market. The yet is key, eventually a rep will make their way to them. More than likely much sooner than the TV ads run

By doing their job instead of hoping a stranger's friend happens to land on a useful ad?

ah the world where ads are a good form of education.

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).

There is a way to see old results, by adding "before:2023" to the search query.

so in your mind "advertisement" covers any transmission of information?

By this measure, any information you can get whatsoever is biased and there is no reason to trust anything at all.

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.

Great, as long as you don't mind the nexus of all human communication to be frozen in time three years ago.

so in your mind, a pharmaceutical company telling a patient that a drug exists is "advertisement" but a pharma company telling a doctor that a drug exists magically isn't?

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.

For many queries it does not matter.

So we are in agreement.

AI can also provide the sources. And if you need to be certain, you should ask for that.