While this is true, it is less effective than you might think in practice. Researchers studied something similar six months ago:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;arstechnica.com&#x2F;science&#x2F;2025&#x2F;12&#x2F;researchers-find-what-makes-ai-chatbots-politically-persuasive&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;arstechnica.com&#x2F;science&#x2F;2025&#x2F;12&#x2F;researchers-find-wha...</a>Of course it is possible Google will create something orders of magnitude better but I doubt it. Amazon is already doing product recommendation on their front page and while it certainly drives sales it doesn’t turn people into zombies buying products they don’t want.What did work really well was the “1 click buy” button. Reducing the friction for people who already want to buy is usually a much higher ROI than persuading people who previously weren’t interested.

Parenting advice updated for the AI age.If all of your chatbots jumped off a bridge, would you do it too?

Its not worrying for me. This is what I expect from ad companies so I walk in prepared. What I&#x27;m more interested in is how we are going to take this new technology and give it back to people without trying to rip into them, for free. We need a Stallman &#x2F; Linus of AI.

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

&quot;You&#x27;re absolutely right. The trump administration has caused the lowest gas prices in US history and lowered drug costs by 1300%. Click here to donate to your nearest MAGA politician.&quot;2026 may not see it too bad, but 2028 will be an absolutely nasty election cycle.

I&#x27;m really worried about political ads. Google had no problem algorithmically bubbling up disinformation in the past, will Gemini now peddle straight lies for anyone willing to pay enough for them?

The particularly worrying thing here is that they&#x27;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. &quot;We had to build the Torment Nexus so our children could eat&quot; 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.

They should be provided by the transit system. I&#x27;m visiting The Netherlands for the first time right now. I learnes the hard way to use <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ns.nl" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ns.nl</a> instead of Google Maps.

For public transportation I use an app called Moovit

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

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

&gt; We&#x27;re testing new ad formats...Time to update my uBO filters and tweak my custom CSS for Google properties (which is mostly &#x27;display: none !important;&#x27;).

It&#x27;s just plain fraud. LLMs are hallucinatory, this is a basic fact of their basic design. You can&#x27;t have them write product descriptions especially in advertisements, without any human supervision.If the LLM invents a product feature that doesn&#x27;t exist, you have advertising fraud done fraud. And if the LLM un-invents a feature that does exist, you have done fraud and pissed off the advertiser.To not have these risks, you need to play it incredibly safe. E.g.: The bottom half of the Vertuo Up&#x27;s blurb is just off the website.&lt;meta name=&quot;description&quot; content=&quot;Vertuo Up is our new fast coffee machine, ready to brew in just 3 seconds. Enjoy 6 cup sizes and app connectivity for effortless control. Shop Pearl White.&quot;&gt;This would&#x27;ve been on old-Google. If you&#x27;re an advertiser, Google is going to charge you their premium rates for a sloppy first paragraph you could&#x27;ve put there yourself if you wanted.Note how the search query in that example asks for a &quot;compact machine&quot; but the explainer doesn&#x27;t say anything about the size of the machine. The dimensions are right on the product&#x27;s webpage. This advertising product doesn&#x27;t want to risk the LLM fucking up something like the dimensions, so it just does nothing at all.And the kicker is that none of this has to be a problem. It&#x27;s Google, they can just ask the advertisers to hand them over a standard-format datasheet, and put the LLM to work figuring out what parts of the data the user wants and include those verbatim. If the LLM hallucinates, it creates a perfectly truthful but slightly less effective ad. If the LLM doesn&#x27;t hallucinate, you&#x27;ve created an ad product that is better than most product comparison sites, something users want to use.

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

The YouTube algorithm seems to be this bad.I listened to a song a few weeks ago... now that song is in almost every page on YouTube for me. Homepage, sidebar, search results. It&#x27;s just everywhere.I&#x27;ve already listened to it. I don&#x27;t want to listen to it again every single day for the rest of time.

Silver lining: Is there a chance the ads will be relevant? Enterprise targeted advertising sophistication level is currently at &quot;He just bought shoes; wow he must like shoes&quot; or &quot;He&#x27;s 34-45M; make the reels only boobs.

Before it was:
&quot;Shop for balding pills&quot;, 
Now it&#x27;s going to be:
&quot;Your calendar indicates your mother&#x27;s birthday is tomorrow, your album photos of her living room seem to indicate she likes elephants. In a past LLM conversation you mentioned she has trouble with technology. A good gift idea is the new Google Geminibook with this animal laptop skin. Add to cart?&quot;

Ads weren&#x27;t tailor written by LLM on the fly previously.

“For a user this reads like getting bombarded with ads tailor made just for you based on the context of what would be most effective.”Isn’t this what the current search experience already is?

It&#x27;ll get worse. Just wait until Gemini is writing recommendations for political candidates based on who got the bid.

&gt; Now, if someone searches for an espresso machine, Gemini will pull up your most relevant products and instantly write a custom explainer highlighting why your product may be the right choice for them.This is like the essence of the evil of AI ads distilled down to one sentence. For an advertiser this is a dream. For a user this reads like getting bombarded with ads tailor made just for you based on the context of what would be most effective.

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

But does Google actually &#x27;own&#x27; the index? Have they acted anticompetitively as far as that goes?

I guess the google bot is now on by blocked list.There should be a public corporation, like Wikipedia, that starts scraping the Web and provides an api for anyone to access.

They seem to have been actively making search worse for at least a decade. No surprise they made it worse, that&#x27;s [seemingly] what they were trying to do.They presumably were doing it to increase &quot;engagement&quot;. More time spent getting infuriated with their worsening search meant more time seeing their ads.They deserve to go under.Meanwhile 1 minute unskippable ads on 30s YouTube videos, pop-ups on mobile that cover the video when you close an ad. I hope the UK TV ombudsman grows some balls and starts applying the law on advertising-to-tv-programming ratio. It needs to be applied when programs have ads in them too.

I have a hard time believing the stock price is based on anything other than vibes. It&#x27;s up 125% from a year ago!

Actually I believe Google is the one caught between a rock and a hard place here because their stock will reprice once the market realizes how much their position has weakened re: search ads.They commanded an absurd premium on ads by virtue of being monopolistic leaders of search. They don&#x27;t have a better product anymore, only a scale&#x2F;distribution advantage.

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

They could afford to wait, but... profits.Also, they have to start experimenting now to get the formula right for AI ads.

Plenty of iPhone users are on Brave Browser because it blocks ads on Youtube. When you type in a search query in the address bar, it defaults to Brave Search. Don&#x27;t underestimate the power of defaults.There is a boiling point for user tolerance when it comes to ads. Google has been pushing that needle deep into the red for years now.

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

The average user appears to care enough to go out of their way to use browsers and extensions and such that block ads, to the point that Google has spent enormous amount of time and money breaking those tools. I think that’s definitely something to consider.Anecdotally, the number of people who have asked me about VPNs over the last 12 to 18 months has skyrocketed. I probably get a message a month from people of all backgrounds.

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.

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.

100%. This is the only part that I find surprising&#x2F;confusing. Surely whoever blinks first incurs a massive reputational hit with the public (who don&#x27;t think about this deeply enough to see that it was always inevitable), so why do that if you don&#x27;t have to?Perhaps the bright side from Google&#x27;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.

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.

Google are talking to their customers; those who purchase the advertising.They&#x27;re not talking to users of the internet.

Google execs probably use kagi to google a question

Ads can be useful when they are optimized for users and not for advertiser&#x2F;ad platform.I do agree with you about the deluding part though. I was (as a user) all for hyper-personalization of ads on all platforms when I worked in ads. Since I’m not longer working in ads, I’m more skeptical and value privacy a lot more.Honestly, the core problem is that we can’t trust the platforms selling the ads.

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

You&#x27;d be shocked at how many people who work on ads really do delude themselves into thinking people find ads &quot;useful&quot;.Their usual justification is in the end somewhere tied to &quot;people click on ads so they must find them useful&quot;. 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.

I wonder whose bright idea it was to label ads as &#x27;helpful&#x27;. Do Google execs actually look for ads first when they google a question?

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

Let me let you in on a little industry &quot;secret&quot;You can&#x27;t trust those results no matter whatThe 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&#x27;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 &quot;what is the best tool for doing x&quot; are already manipulated, including reddit conversations.

Those sort of things are already highly biased because of the marketing spam that the modelsmare trained on.I&#x27;d be more worried about AI convincing you that you need a product or expensive solution when you actually don&#x27;t.

&gt; &quot;what is the best tool for doing x&quot; and I can&#x27;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 &quot;all available information?&quot;

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 &quot;intelligence&quot; 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.

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

I won&#x27;t be able to use their AI results if they are, personally. If I ask the question &quot;what is the best tool for doing x&quot; and I can&#x27;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&#x27;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.

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.

&gt; This is not an elephant in the room, this is so obvious.Maybe they grew up in an environment where the phrase &quot;elephant in the room&quot; meant a situation where people enter a room, notice an elephant there, and immediately scream &quot;Jesus Christ there&#x27;s a goddamn elephant!&quot;

But wouldn&#x27;t that break FCC rules?

&gt; their one and only goose that lays the golden eggs?Eh, it really isn&#x27;t the only goose in goog town. Cloud is at ~20% of their total revenue, and probably is going up w&#x2F; their hardware success and other licensing deals. I&#x27;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)

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.

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.

The method is already public for some time now. I bookmarked it since I share it a lot:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;research.google&#x2F;blog&#x2F;mechanism-design-for-large-language-models&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;research.google&#x2F;blog&#x2F;mechanism-design-for-large-lang...</a>It&#x27;s the same. There are slots, there&#x27;s bidding, there&#x27;re bidders. Same ad model, evolved for AI era.

Don&#x27;t they already to this with maps routing? I thought this was the norm.

That&#x27;s the real question and it&#x27;s not hypothetical. Google already adjusts organic rankings based on advertiser relationships in ways that aren&#x27;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&#x27;t.

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

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

The chat interface has the disclaimer &quot;AI responses may include mistakes.&quot; and that appears to be enough to relieve them of any responsibility for the responses. In a similar manner, wouldn&#x27;t it be enough to add a disclaimer that says &quot;AI responses may include sponsored content.&quot;?

Doesn&#x27;t matter as long as you bribe the right people. The government is completely compromised.

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?

That will be fun because it&#x27;s illegal to accept money to promote a product without indication that you have done so. The FTC requires &quot;clear and conspicuous disclosure&quot; for such endorsements.

Of course. Just look at the SEO industry Google created. You can&#x27;t search for anything without a full page of sponsored&#x2F;SEO bullshit, and everyone agrees it&#x27;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&#x27;s gonna leave that cash on the table?

Is this a rhetorical question?The answer seem so obvious.It is also obvious that people will try to understand how to hack the whole algorithm ... we are entering in a new era of hot air SEO like experts.

Will Google choose to negatively impact its bottom line for the sake of giving their users a higher quality experience?No. 
It&#x27;s not 2005 anymore.

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

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

Even if it&#x27;s not right now, it&#x27;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&#x27;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&#x27;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

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

What about political ads? Will the AI lie about news to further the interests of Google&#x27;s patrons?

I couldn&#x27;t write better satire if I tried:&gt; 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.

for sure, i guess this is one of the experiments that confirms that would work <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;openai.com&#x2F;index&#x2F;where-the-goblins-came-from&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;openai.com&#x2F;index&#x2F;where-the-goblins-came-from&#x2F;</a>

This is the problem with the black box model. These adCompanies control what people see. People don&#x27;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.

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

&gt; 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&#x27;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&#x27;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 &quot;Someone reached out to me&quot;. Ads are a way to make that happen.Now, if you&#x27;re talking about internet ads, then you&#x27;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.

&gt; 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&#x27;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&#x27;s the same sketchy sites that&#x27;s return for almost all searches. It&#x27;s rarely the &quot;brand sites&quot; that you trust who shows up first in the &quot;Sponsored products&quot; section.

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.

I disagree-ish because I&#x27;ve been sold by ads things that remain in my life today a long-time later, which mean that it was genuinely helpful, I&#x27;d say the ratio is minimal, but still sometimes it&#x27;s on-point, I actually discover a lot of products thanks to ads.

This. Ads are industrialized brainwashing designed to induce dissatisfaction in the viewer to stoke demand for shit you don&#x27;t need. And because companies pay for ads and then pass the price on to you, you&#x27;re getting taxed on everything you buy for the privilege of being brainwashed.

&gt; Their purpose isn’t to be helpful. They&#x27;re there to sell you something, and nothing more. Any semblance of helpfulness is misinterpretation and merely coincidental.Maybe it isn&#x27;t quite as black &amp; white as that?What about an ad run by a non-profit that doesn&#x27;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&#x2F;alternative to help with market discovery, customer discovery? Search has in the past served that function, but is likely to be soon dead.

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.

&gt; Since when have we considered ads something helpfulI 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.

Oh, they don&#x27;t mean helpful to you. What they mean is, helpful to their revenue.

&quot;More helpful&quot; to the person selling the ad, perhaps :)

&gt; Since when have we considered ads something helpful?They are not. The utility of companies advertising their products can be trivially served with dedicated &#x27;advertising&#x27; channels without enabling stealth surveillance by big co. and their paying clients, various goverments.

The people who are buying ad spots and creating ads absolutely believe they&#x27;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.

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

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 &quot;oh, you bought shoes once? Clearly you&#x27;re the guy who&#x27;s into buying shoes, let us spam you with shoes ads for the next 5 years!&quot;

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

Sometimes people want to buy something.

Since when have we considered ads something helpful?Their purpose isn’t to be helpful. They&#x27;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&#x27;t follow closely, has something you might want to try. An ad letting you know that &quot;Chainsaw Y is on sale this week&quot; is helpful for people thinking about buying a chainsaw. An ad demonstrating &quot;Chainsaw A is as good as Chainsaw B, but costs less&quot; 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 &quot;engagement&quot; that can be presented in a pretty chart to middle managers, but don&#x27;t actually mean anything. That&#x27;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.

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.

Since when have we considered ads something helpful?Their purpose isn’t to be helpful. They&#x27;re there to sell you something, and nothing more. Any semblance of helpfulness is misinterpretation and merely coincidental.

I don&#x27;t think I&#x27;ve ever seen a helpful ad on Google.But Instagram, despite me only using it to keep in touch with friends via DMs, seems to know me very well. I get a lot of ads for puzzles and board games and video games, which are right up my alley. I&#x27;ve purchased a nontrivial amount of stuff from Instagram ads. Very few were life changing, except maybe an electric nail clipper which is the only way I can clip my infant daughter&#x27;s nails. But the rest are all fun stuff that I&#x27;ve gotten value from.And FTR I do use an ad blocker both on my browser and my modem came with one. I guess the modems one isn&#x27;t great though because I still see Instagram ads.

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&#x27;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.

&gt; I am wearing a T-shirt right now in fact that was advertised to me a week or two ago as &quot;on sale&quot; 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 &quot;I need a certain T-shirt&quot; before this came up, it&#x27;s likely the ad created a desire in your mind which you didn&#x27;t have. You got manipulated successfully by the advertiser.

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&#x27;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&#x27;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.

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 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&#x27;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 &quot;on sale&quot; 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&#x2F;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 believe in brain plasticity but I also believe in uBlock Origin.

I find all ads — both search ads and website ads — very helpful in training the brain to ignore the noise. Isn&#x27;t it amazing how we trained ourselves to immediately detect the 1pt hidden &quot;Sponsored&quot; 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!

What do you expect them to say? More annoying ads? They&#x27;re trying to wrap this in a positive way. Everyone knows that ads are annoying.

I think weirdly, ads embedded in AI search responses actually maybe do have a chance at being helpful (as long as it&#x27;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&#x27;re not quite as well matched but offer other benefits, explain the difference.At the moment search ads aren&#x27;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&#x27;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&#x27;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 use an ad blocker, but I&#x27;m occasionally exposed to YouTube outside of my ad-free bubble and I find the ads useful for identifying brands to actively avoid.

I have seen 1 &quot;helpful&quot; ad yesterday.When searching for sonarqube, I received an ad for a competing product I&#x27;d never heard of and I&#x27;ll check them today to see if it fits my need.

I saw a helpful ad once.The organic search results didn&#x27;t offer what I needed at all, but the ad took me straight to an e-commerce site that sold what I wanted. I had it in my hands at a reasonable price about 5 days.It was for a Nintendo Wii component video cable, back in 2007.

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.

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&#x27;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

An exception that proves the rule, but KRAZAM&#x27;s channel on Youtube has legitimately helpful ad reads. Rare Data Hunters [0] for example ends with a 1 minute Cloudflare ad that&#x27;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: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=IU4ByUbDKNc" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=IU4ByUbDKNc</a>

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.

Assume the article reader &#x2F; 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.

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.

I understand your thinking, but I have never felt that the &quot;promoted result&quot; in any search when shopping around inspired confidence in them being the best fit or value for me, even though they&#x27;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 &quot;relevant to my interests&quot;. That&#x27;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&#x27;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.

Personally, I sometimes like targeted ads. If I&#x27;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

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&#x27;t based on a bidding system.

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.

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&#x27;t otherwise know about that it might show me (some of which i&#x27;ve bought). plus if it helps pay for services than i&#x27;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

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&#x27;s becoming totally useless

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 &quot;relevant&quot; ads.

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&#x27;t have bluetooth. It never amazes me that ad agencies just serve me 1 or 2 same ads all the time, but :shrug:

I remember the good ol&#x27; days when you&#x27;d search for the specs on a 10yo server you pulled out of the dumpster and then a day later you&#x27;d see &quot;Aging HPC infrastructure, upgrade to latest IBM X-series blade architecture&quot; banner adds in hilariously irrelevant places like thepiratebay or a certain hub of videos.Those &quot;naive&quot; ads from 15+yr ago are far more relevant than anything I&#x27;ve ever seen since.

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 don&#x27;t have an ad blocker on my laptop. The ads I get are pretty much entirely generic and irrelevant to me, I don&#x27;t remember ever consciously clicking on an ad.

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

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.

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&#x27;t expect a confirmation.

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?

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.

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

If an advert was helpful I would be able to click the &quot;show ads&quot; buttonI 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&#x27;t opt in, they aren&#x27;t useful.

Those ads do help them, though. They&#x27;re an ad company now

In my case I haven&#x27;t seen a single helpful ad in google search. They try to make the ads related to my work or hobbies but it&#x27;s not helpful at all. Aside from Google, Instagram seems to be nailing the ads algorithm better.

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

I use an adblocker and despise most ads with a burning hatred, but the absolutist position of &quot;never helpful&quot; isn&#x27;t right. My example: A game I&#x27;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&#x27;ve ever played (Burnout Paradise City - highly recommend, but wait for a sale)

Well, they are definitely helpful for Google incomes

Actually it should be:&gt; I have never seen an ad in google, because I use adblockers

I sought out the He Man trailer because I thought I&#x27;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&#x27;t bother seeing it. Again a helpful advert.In both cases I chose the advert.

&gt; I have never seen a helpful adThere, I fixed it!

I agree, maybe &quot;ads are useful&quot; could have been true long time ago before the world was not as connected.You could maybe argue that ad revenue could subsidize the costs of information delivery but information delivery costs are basically non existent today - it&#x27;s all about attention delivery and thats an entirely different thing.

&gt;I have never seen a helpful ad in google searchI have never seen a helpful ad, anywhere, in my life.&quot;Ads help people discover new products&quot; is a lie that people who work for companies supported by advertising revenue tell themselves. If $deity exists, and they were to delete all ads from the world tomorrow, never to return, everything would be just fine.Truly great products sell themselves by word of mouth.

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!

For me ads on Instagram are often spot-on, same with Facebook although I don&#x27;t check that too often.
Google search always seemed completely off, I don&#x27;t remember seeing one helpful ad here (helpful being defined as an ad of something I might be interested in buying).

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.

The only helpful ads are the ones that waste money on Google (namely those companies&#x2F;products&#x2F;results that show up on top anyway, right below the sponsored very same ad)

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 searchThat&#x27;s a good thing.I don&#x27;t mind ads, as I understand that without money, web sites go away. But I&#x27;m very careful about being tracked. That, I don&#x27;t think is cool.It&#x27;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.

&gt; I have never seen a helpful ad in google searchI have, fairly often in fact. That&#x27;s why Google makes such a bucket load of money from their ads - they&#x27;re actually vaguely relevant.I&#x27;ve don&#x27;t think I&#x27;ve ever seen a relevant ad outside of Google though, and I still wouldn&#x27;t say &quot;yeay, helpful ads!&quot;. Nobody is going to want them even though I occasionally get relevant ones and click on them.

Just came here to say the same thing. Local gigs and the like, instagram is actually decent.And I&#x27;m a to-the-bone hater of ads. Ad-blockers up to my eyeballs. Except for that one niche of local gigs on insta.

I never have on Google Search (I also block them to be fair), but I&#x27;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&#x27;s literally the only platform where I&#x27;ve ever had useful ads. Even other meta products only have absolute garbage ads.

&gt; 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&#x27;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&#x27;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&#x27;t show Vans when I search for Converse? Sounds like extortion or protection money.

“Helpful to our short-term bottom line”

&gt; I have never seen a helpful adI 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&#x27;ll say &quot;but how will people find out about products??&quot; the answer is fucking better search and filtering systems.

&gt; We’re introducing more helpful ads in AI ModeI 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&#x27;t use adblockers - what percentage of ads that you see are actually helpful?

Alternatively, just change your browser&#x27;s default search shortcut, and add &amp;udm=14 to the end of the normal google search. It changes the default search results to &quot;web&quot; rather than &quot;All&quot;, which removes all the extraneous crap they&#x27;ve added over the years.Compare <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.google.com&#x2F;search?q=test" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.google.com&#x2F;search?q=test</a> to <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.google.com&#x2F;search?q=test&amp;udm=14" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.google.com&#x2F;search?q=test&amp;udm=14</a>

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

Could also just block the element in ublock?

Block the AI overviews with extensions like <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;chromewebstore.google.com&#x2F;detail&#x2F;hide-google-ai-overviews&#x2F;neibhohkbmfjninidnaoacabkjonbahn" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;chromewebstore.google.com&#x2F;detail&#x2F;hide-google-ai-over...</a> or use a userscript to do the same.

You won&#x27;t be able to tell if it&#x27;s an ad, if it&#x27;s just biased (and the ad is not discolsed).They could always sell ads like &quot;recommend my tool more when user asks for cupcakes in London&quot;.And then, the output would be: &quot;My top 3 recomendations are X, Y, Z&quot;.And maybe only X is the one that paid and Y and Z are organic.

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? (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;developer.chrome.com&#x2F;docs&#x2F;ai&#x2F;prompt-api" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;developer.chrome.com&#x2F;docs&#x2F;ai&#x2F;prompt-api</a>)
Would be hilarious.

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

Fighting AI with AI?What a wild future.

Semi-seriously: I imagine we&#x27;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

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.

The law will not be updated or enforced. Laws don&#x27;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&#x27;t think the populace is going to outbribe them.

That&#x27;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.

It&#x27;s just gonna say &quot;this whole thing might be a big ad&quot; 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

&gt; but virtually impossible to block the text itselfWhy 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.

There&#x27;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&#x27;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&#x27;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.

Competitors will be very happy though.

The only reason Google is pushing this AI crap is so that they can shove ads right into people&#x27;s throats without them being able to use ad blockers (it&#x27;s easy to block a web script but virtually impossible to block the text itself), effectively doubling their profits overnight.

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

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.

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.

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

I think the search results are still there with AI mode

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

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

I&#x27;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 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).

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 can&#x27;t understand why this company won&#x27;t rebrand itself to something a bit catchier or better-sounding name than DuckDuckGo -- who the hell wants to say that ? Unless it&#x27;s a self-selection filter...

I moved to ddg at least 5 years ago, at that time results were not as good as Google&#x27;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.

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.

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

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?
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;matthewsinclair.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;0177-what-if-we-taxed-advertising" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;matthewsinclair.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;0177-what-if-we-taxed-adver...</a>