hckrnws
We're testing new ad formats in Search and expanding our Direct Offers pilot
(blog.google)
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by sofumel
by sofumel
When it was a research project at Stanford in 1996 it was genuinely about making the World information accessible.
The day in 2000 when they decided to sell advertisement is exactly when this process started, not just now in 2026. Since that day they transformed from a knowledge management project to an advertising company that used knowledge management, among other tools, to influence people effectively.
It's the same for Meta except they had Google business model as an example.
Those are advertising company that use tech, not real tech companies like e.g. ASML or IBM.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2025/12/researchers-find-wha...
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.
If all of your chatbots jumped off a bridge, would you do it too?
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2026 may not see it too bad, but 2028 will be an absolutely nasty election cycle.
I can search for google and find nothing, or I can use a non-login on chatgpt and get several options. It found me some French made lunchboxes that are being made by a car company (I think it was renault but I honestly can't remember) while every result on google was basically temu resales by "companies" that were basically registered to some private adress here in Denmark. I guess I'm an early adopter, and I'm sure LLM's will be ruined by advertising and hidden algorithms, but right now, I really don't see the point of traditional search engines.
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.
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.
If the LLM invents a product feature that doesn'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's blurb is just off the website.
<meta name="description" content="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.">
This would've been on old-Google. If you're an advertiser, Google is going to charge you their premium rates for a sloppy first paragraph you could've put there yourself if you wanted.
Note how the search query in that example asks for a "compact machine" but the explainer doesn't say anything about the size of the machine. The dimensions are right on the product's webpage. This advertising product doesn'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'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't hallucinate, you've created an ad product that is better than most product comparison sites, something users want to use.
They're not talking to users of the internet.
I always chuckle when ad companies say that. I have never seen a helpful ad in google search, but well I have been using adblockers forever so I would not know.I am honestly curious though, for those who don't use adblockers - what percentage of ads that you see are actually helpful?
Their purpose isn’t to be helpful. They're there to sell you something, and nothing more. Any semblance of helpfulness is misinterpretation and merely coincidental.
And now they admitted it AGAIN! "AI Mode" is basically an AdMode.
This also explains why they declared total war against ublock origin.
I think it is time the empire strikes back. We must get rid of Evil here - let's get rid of Google. This adCompany no longer has a useful purpose. All the "freebie features" (which are not free; ads pay for that) can be done by others, if people work together. We need no extension of more ads here.
There should be a public corporation, like Wikipedia, that starts scraping the Web and provides an api for anyone to access.
Time to update my uBO filters and tweak my custom CSS for Google properties (which is mostly 'display: none !important;').
Ads are so helpful!
Maybe it will work in the beginning until non-technical users realize that LLMs hallucinate very often (unless Google solved it somehow, but probably they didn't because they would have said so), they will lose trust in the results and go back to good old indexed search engines.
Maybe I am coping but thinking from my own experience.
Ah so my "search" results are going to be biased and at the mercy of the highest bidder.
Only a matter of time before someone will sell privileges of baking your ad/agenda into a llm model during training. That, or companies will fluff their own websites with verbose claims about their products that will get sucked into training via "organic” scraping.
Enshittification of the AI tools has officially begun.
Maybe we will soon find e.g. AI-generated pictures of ourselves in branded clothes or using branded products to appear among our photos, discretely disguised as genuine photos with a little badge in the corner indicating that it is actually a paid "promotion".
And so on. And that would still be, in my opinion, just the beginning.
What if we taxed advertising? https://matthewsinclair.com/blog/0177-what-if-we-taxed-adver...
Freedom of the strongest caused reduction of the opportunities of the weakest on whom the strongest became the one.
It's a lot easier to mislead a user with an AI generated ad that with a Search result IMHO, I'm betting on a huige backlash if they don't make it VERY clear that ads are ads.
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.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBQAo6pEweE
This is the far future we are staring at.
LLMs are an alternative to search engines, which endangers google's whole ad business.
"AI mode" search is a sort of bridge. It gets Gemini a lot of customers that otherwise would not have used an LLM at all.
They may get stuck trying to keep the llm pattern similar enough to the search engine that the adwords business working more or less the same way.
This could be self limiting.
[PRJ-123] Fix the prod bug. This commit brought to you by Acme!
small businesses & brands etc spend a fortune on these ads & yet most of them see a negative ROI. they might as well be gambling.
just recently Google was found to be inflating Ad-prices (so yeah the 'auction' is fake)
maybe the only way to win is not to play. & do commerce without ads like how it has been done since eon
The last time i clicked on an AI link it took me to a page that wasn’t just more google ads or SEo bullshit. It was very disappointing I was looking forward to accidentally clicking more ads and instead found information relevant to what I wanted to know.
GenAI in other fields is useless and only promoted by charlatans or the financially invested.
I've ditched them about a decade ago, when the results started to become worse and worse.
I haven't opened them willingly since then. Only when I do something in Chromium, occasionally, it opens, because I haven't bothered changing the default search engine there.
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.
Same things with OpenAI. Ads.
I feel like we're right back in the early 2000's Internet again at least they aren't popups, we hope.
But with these models being embedded into, literally everything, will your screen on your car start showing you ads before you can turn the AC on?
It's coming
...for me this leads to the exact opposite experience: If you advertise your product in such a way I make sure to never ever buy it. Same for ads on TV, etc.
The well is beyond poisoned. Almost anything I search for is returning AI generated vomit. I have not used google in weeks.
On youtube I use Unhook and only look at /feed/subscriptions, when I search I use before:2022. And am actually downloading what I find interesting, before google starts deleting because of the flood of vomit. Hard disks can not be manufactured fast enough to consume it.
Even HN is slowly becoming unreadable.
The internet is on borrowed time.
Show me more ads.
Its time to move on.
Try new things, make your own networks. Write your ipv6 address in the pub, under the table, in the top left corner, write it on the subway walls, and tenement halls.
Listen on tcp port 1492 and explain how to talk to you.
Seriously, I haven't used google products for 5 years at least, its easy. Why is everyone still using them?
English is not my first language but I think this sentence can’t be grammatically correct?
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The user asked for the "best language apps for an upcoming trip"?
Are you going to answer their question objectively?
What if the correct answer is apps A and B are what they need, yet the publisher of app C paid you to be a Highlighted Answer?
What if C is not only not among the best, but is a toxic load of poo?
Also, when are you going to stop often blatantly plagiarizing things people wrote on the Internet, for your "AI" answer, even though you absolutely know you're violating the social contract that built your company, and destroying the creators from whom you're stealing?
I'm kind of worried that the AI offered to consumers will behave as a very savvy and manipulative shill or salesperson.
I use an adblocker and DDG. I sometimes use !g to search Google.
I wonder if people will run local models to filter the content they consume. On one hand I would hate to read slop output. I also dislike censorship. But on the other hand, I think that the information we decide to ingest is important and it's something we should have control over. The problem is you can't really decide what information to ingest until we've looked at it, after which point we've ingested it.
I digress. Thoughts?
[Product placement in The Truman Show clip]
I still remember the assurances made that ads would only be text based and unintrusive
If humanity makes it out of the current era with our dignity and intellect intact, I think we will recognize that allowing ad companies to build our vital infrastructure was a tragic mistake.
rAiNIer buSInEss sCHoOl
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On assumes there is a strategic reason for it, but I'm not sure about what it is.
Anyone have a theory or care to guess?
of course, this will never happen
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I thought Google would use their playbook of search - initially, everything works so good like magic until they enshittify the service by auctioning the results to who pay the most. This time around they are so bold they start from shit..
Then again, SEO gaming got a whole lot cheaper with LLMs, spammers spam even if there's not a great return, as long as it's cheap for them.
Not sure how long google will let it go.
Any decent alternatives? DuckDuckGo was always been awful for me in terms of relevant search results.
“Don’t trust ibuprofen, you need opiates. Your pain sounds really bad.”
https://github.com/MoserMichael/tips_on_using_google_ai_mode
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“Yes! You can use an ACME shovel to bury a dead body!”
I’m sure brands will love the screenshots this will produce.
The obvious answer is "patents", but software patents aren't valid in Europe; and besides, the Amazon patent has expired; and European stores are, if anything, far, far more horrendous than American ones.
I guess upsells are more profitable than one-click these days?
- only free shipping >€50
- much more limited selection of items
- can't say much about their return / warranty process but I doubt it's as lenient as Amazon's
Pretty much the opposite of "far better".
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The limited selection is certainly true but mainly it misses drop shipping stuff and what's essentially a mirror of aliexpress with a huge markup. I don't really miss those. In fact, it requires a considerable amount of time to navigate through those offers on Amazon, so not having them is a plus in my book.
For me it's mostly been the "this person bought a vacuum, time to advertise 50 other vacuums to them" kind of result.
It's very hard to get a huge hit without marketing - even great word of mouth benefits from amplification - but it's also near-impossible to force a hit into an audience that isn't vibing with it. The highest-grossing movies, or highest-listened pop music, is a combo of marketing + accurately hitting extremely-common/trendy tastes. See also iPhone marketing vs Windows Phone marketing. I thought Windows Phone was better; none of my friends or coworkers was convinced even after I showed them my phones. The mass media consumer may not have thought much about their tastes or tried very hard to be more adventurous, but that doesn't mean they don't like the stuff they're eating.
I think this is still in many ways bad - at the very least, it's incredibly inefficient to have a billion-dollar zero-sum "pick this one over that one" industry. But I don't think it's a deadly threat. (See also any number of "tons of money and star-power behind them" failed political candidates too...)
I think this is one of the most under-appreciated explanations of why American-style capitalism succeeded where soviet-style communism failed. In theory, communism is more economically efficient, as you don't have multiple companies duplicating work and re-inventing variations on the same idea. In practice, it's much harder to judge an idea than a finished product, so the best way to make a good product is to do it by evolution, not up-front design. If the whole country is oriented around making X happen, X must happen, whether it is a good idea or not.
With LLM, the same company will learn from previous experience and make it worst faster. It is exactly the same company, making exactly the same product (search), with exactly the same management and being subject of exactly the same market forces.
The result will be exactly the same, they will just get there faster.
I have no doubt that Renault could pay ChatGPT to get it to recommend people buying lunch boxes. For all I know there might be a bunch of eco friendly "European produced" lunch boxes with compartments and the LLM recommended me the three which fit the needs I described because those companies paid for it. I didn't find any of them on Google though, that was all Temu resales.
They presumably were doing it to increase "engagement". 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.
Perhaps the bright side from Google's POV is that it means that they can be the first to start wooing advertisers to their platform. First-mover advantage there might outweigh reputational damage with the public, especially if OpenAI follows suit with ads in 6 months.
Google starts from horrid UX where every advertiseable pixel has been squeezed dry. Only way to go is down.
As to the rest of Google's dominant position, it's an advantage for sure, but every leading vendor whose products turned to shit went the way of the dodo one way or another.
And it's important to mention that this includes GAds, not just the loss leader (Search). They have been so good at squeezing advertisers dry that ROI is barely there in many categories.
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.
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 average user isn't going out of their way to use ad block, at least globally. Last estimates I remember are still around only 30% of internet users using an ad blocker unfortunately. Ad blocker adoption is heavily skewed toward techies.
It's an even lower amount of people on mobile, where the 'average user' spends the majority of their time.
Also, they have to start experimenting now to get the formula right for AI ads.
What about if you know your competitors are taking the offer?
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's just everywhere.
I've already listened to it. I don't want to listen to it again every single day for the rest of time.
Now I use a different music streaming platform and have history turned off on YouTube.
Maybe I'd just be shouting into the void.
Isn’t this what the current search experience already is?
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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.
The 'advertising' part only makes sense if it seeped in small degrees at a time.
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.
You can't trust those results no matter what
The pages that they pull in to source that data all contain affiliate links and companies contact websites to get their tools to the tops of those lists by paying money often monthly. I know this because I do this...
It's basically standard SEO but it also manipulates AI like ChatGPT very very easily
There are key differences.
1) Google doesn't get paid for the SEO, so even is crime is involved, Google isn't directly responsible.
2) AI ads are unmarked, which is illegal pretty much everywhere. And because of the way LLMs work, it is impossible to tell where a given output came from, neither which part of the prompt/context nor whether it's from the prompt or training.
Google doesn't get paid directly for the SEO but they definitely benefit monetarily. Do a recipe search and ask yourself if these are the results the user would like to see. Google benefits by not penalizing sites which litter themselves with ads. It's not that indirect.
They won't get you on any worthwhile list unless it's their own because it's too risky for them and any site they would publish it on would want to use their own affiliate link. Unless of course we are talking about something like Medium or YouTube which does work
And then of course there's the fraudsters who will bid on branded keywords we have banned dozens of people for that
But yes actually I was doing this about 15 years ago in the men's fashion subreddit for one of my companies lol
I don't think you can fine-tune your way out of it.
I'd be more worried about AI convincing you that you need a product or expensive solution when you actually don't.
If search or AI or whatever can suggest a few decent tools I haven't tried that are somewhat within range, I can try them and decide for myself.
Regular search being replaced with AI search means regular search (with ads) being replaced with AI search (with ads).
The benefit of AI search will be that it’s much better “integrated” in the answer, aka even harder to detect.
Maybe they grew up in an environment where the phrase "elephant in the room" meant a situation where people enter a room, notice an elephant there, and immediately scream "Jesus Christ there's a goddamn elephant!"
It seems like for now they are making an effort to keep them separate.
Eh, it really isn't the only goose in goog town. Cloud is at ~20% of their total revenue, and probably is going up w/ their hardware success and other licensing deals. I'm curious to see what goog can do with their properties if this trend continues. Less reliance on ads could be interesting. (many former googlers have said that pressure from the ad business was felt across all their products)
https://research.google/blog/mechanism-design-for-large-lang...
It's the same. There are slots, there's bidding, there're bidders. Same ad model, evolved for AI era.
Yes, it takes time, but I'm the one to blame if something goes wrong about it.
Also, it helps that I don't use Google for searching the web. I prefer Kagi.
I use Gemini (and only Gemini) to dig the net for the things that I can't find despite my best efforts. They are generally unbranded or very specific things, so ads doesn't play much role there.
I'm a bad customer for Google. :D
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.
Their entire ideology. An LLM is the perfect propaganda technology, the more people outsource their thinking to them, the easier they will be for Big Corporate to control.
It's crazy to me that AI developments have such a big uncritical following from people that claim to be pro-freedom, especially around these parts. The end goal is and always has been enslavement to capital.
No. It's not 2005 anymore.
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.
> A search through GPT‑5.5’s SFT data found many datapoints containing “goblin” and “gremlin.” Further investigation revealed a whole family of other odd creatures: raccoons, trolls, ogres, and pigeons were identified as other tic words, while most uses of frog turned out to be legitimate.
It is the end of the open web. People need to wake up and realise what full Evil is being planned here. Google tried this before, e. g. AMP and what not.
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.
Might be useful for a B that wants to penetrate some C, but is it really useful from a penetrated C perspective?
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.
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.
They are helpful to the people who buy the ads, not those of us who have them injected into our experiences.
They are not. The utility of companies advertising their products can be trivially served with dedicated 'advertising' channels without enabling stealth surveillance by big co. and their paying clients, various goverments.
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.
I have genuinely met people who claim that ads are helpful and interesting and used this as a justification for adware companies to stalk you every step you take on the web.
My guy take is that they are mindrotted by ads into thinking they are good for them. Digital Stockholm Syndrome. Or maybe a Myth of Sisyphus type situation.
Their purpose isn’t to be helpful. They're there to sell you something, and nothing more. Any semblance of helpfulness is misinterpretation and merely coincidental.
Pithy, dismissive, reductionist, and wrong.
Yes, most of the bottom-feeding ads you see these days are along the lines of your description. But those are not the only ads, not the only method of advertising.
Good advertising is informative. iPod ads let people know that iPods exist. An ad for a new album lets you know that a band you like, but don't follow closely, has something you might want to try. An ad letting you know that "Chainsaw Y is on sale this week" is helpful for people thinking about buying a chainsaw. An ad demonstrating "Chainsaw A is as good as Chainsaw B, but costs less" is helpful for people considering an alternative.
The problem is the race-to-the-bottom mentality that has consumed the advertising industry since 2008. This is largely fueled by the ad tech industry which prioritizes things like "engagement" that can be presented in a pretty chart to middle managers, but don't actually mean anything. That's how you end up with all the obnoxious pop-ups and videos.
Ads for chainsaws on a chainsaw enthusiast web site is fine. Ads for a refrigerator I already bought two weeks ago is just a waste in a dozen ways.
The results of above mentioned advertising have been great. I get inbound enquiries, parents get their curiosity about the usefulness of what I offer whetted. I don’t understand how the ad was unhelpful to the parent and me.
The ads there are usually fairly innocuous (i.e. not disruptive, not flashing auto play vids etc, they just look like another news item and you can just scroll past them like other news articles you're not interested in), but I have actually found them useful. I am wearing a T-shirt right now in fact that was advertised to me a week or two ago as "on sale" for £8 (eight) and which I clicked through and purchased. There have been one or two other examples of things there that actually have been useful or at least interesting to me right now. So they actually have been useful/helpful in that regard.
So I am a bit conflicted here. It is no cost to me to click on the ad, and I bought some things that I use but would probably have not got otherwise. Am I being manipulated to part with my money? I dunno. Would I have bought a £8 t-shirt anyway if I was just in a shop and saw it? Maybe. Was the ad actually quite well targeted and appropriate? In this case yes.
I think on balance I would say those news feed ads are acceptable to me. I have problems where it is totally irrelevant and disruptive. Hopefully the AI mode ones will be similar to the news feed ones. I would be pretty upset if the ad content was directly worded into the response.
The ASR voice recorder app gets this right. It lets me use the full featured version for three days, after which I need to watch a few ads to get another three days. I choose when to watch the ads, and if I'm late there is nothing worse than a small nag at the bottom of the app. I actually now start every day with the ads, while I cook breakfast, and it is a positive experience. I could also just pay for the app and be done with them.
I still get ads that I'm interested in in that niche; I just choose not to click them because I think my wife will kill me if I collect any more board games :)
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.
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.
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'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's nails. But the rest are all fun stuff that I'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't great though because I still see Instagram ads.
I used to do this. I used to pay for adverts -- computer shopper was a magazine I traded real money for to get the adverts.
If ads aren't opt in, they aren't useful.
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.
When searching for sonarqube, I received an ad for a competing product I'd never heard of and I'll check them today to see if it fits my need.
I have never seen a helpful ad, anywhere, in my life.
"Ads help people discover new products" 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.
You could maybe argue that ad revenue could subsidize the costs of information delivery but information delivery costs are basically non existent today - it's all about attention delivery and thats an entirely different thing.
I bought once through facebook ads, and now I actively try to avoid any ads
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.
If your ads inventory is big enough, ads can actually be a better answer to your intent than organic content, because the companies behind the ads have a much stronger incentive to satisfy your need.
If AdWords or search consider both relevance and the fee collected, the end user will never be shown the most useful results consistently. If the goal was usefulness they would only pick results by relevance and take no fee at all, or take a flat fee that isn't based on a bidding system.
The organic search results didn'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.
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.
Truly an exception though. I think generally the only people for whom ads are helpful are advertisers.
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.
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
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!
That's a good thing.
I don't mind ads, as I understand that without money, web sites go away. But I'm very careful about being tracked. That, I don't think is cool.
It's not unusual for me to see ads for companies hundreds or even thousands of miles away, and often selling things for which I do not possess the correct body parts.
I consider that affirmation that I am mostly successful at staying off the ad-tech radar.
I mind ads because they crowd out less profitable margins and result in worse products. Imagine how nice and useful Google could be if they optimized for search instead of ads.
I have, fairly often in fact. That's why Google makes such a bucket load of money from their ads - they're actually vaguely relevant.
I've don't think I've ever seen a relevant ad outside of Google though, and I still wouldn't say "yeay, helpful ads!". Nobody is going to want them even though I occasionally get relevant ones and click on them.
I 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.
Those "naive" ads from 15+yr ago are far more relevant than anything I've ever seen since.
There, I fixed it!
That was a helpful advert.
I also sought out the Supergirl trailer and decided I wouldn't bother seeing it. Again a helpful advert.
In both cases I chose the advert.
> I have never seen an ad in google, because I use adblockers
But yeah that's literally the only platform where I've ever had useful ads. Even other meta products only have absolute garbage ads.
And I'm a to-the-bone hater of ads. Ad-blockers up to my eyeballs. Except for that one niche of local gigs on insta.
That this self-awarely-self-contradicting quip is the top comment on the page is about as essential a summation of HN's collective thought as I can think of.
I remain amazed at the pathology that results in the truth that, even in the world as it exists today, the one enemy that truly unites the supposedly-elite techno-leaders of our increasingly advanced society is...
...horror about seeing advertisements for products we're probably buying anyway.
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But seriously. What are we paying advertisers for? Converse pays Google so that they don't show Vans when I search for Converse? Sounds like extortion or protection money.
I have never purchased anything [just] because of an ad, nor do I know anyone who has.
But I have been turned off from EVER buying some things because of their obnoxious ads.
The whole ads racket is a case of the emperor with no clothes, an ugly self-justifying cancer infesting human civilization.
And to those perpetuating the racket who'll say "but how will people find out about products??" the answer is fucking better search and filtering systems.
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Compare https://www.google.com/search?q=test to https://www.google.com/search?q=test&udm=14
Use Kagi instead.
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.
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.
What a wild future.
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.
Why do you believe so?
As long as there is a clear indication somewhere on the webpage (in the metadata or in the text itself) that a specific portion of a text is an ad, a browser extension will be able to block it.
And I assume that there are laws mandating that the ads must be clearly marked in order to be distinguishable from the genuine content.
Big tech is paying handsomely for this, and I don't think the populace is going to outbribe them.
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.
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Every single one of you who worked for these companies: you knew what you were doing.
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.
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Transport layer that used to be clean as mountain air now full of hungry eyes peeking at you through the nether.
Russia followed China's playbook and inserted black traffic-filtering boxes, which particularly dislike anything that looks like encrypted messaging. EU and rest of "developed" world is eager to have the same.
Listen on port 1492 for the signs of civilization collapse, listen to the sounds of silence.
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?
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.
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.
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.
???
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.
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.
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?"
Even worse, many Soviet factories were incentivized to lie about the quantity of goods produced or sacrifice quality to meet quotas. So as a first order, approximation, markets are really nice solution to this.
Of course there are many known market failures, which can disrupt such a fragile system if not addressed. For example, monopolies and information asymmetries.
Some people also believe that part of the failures of the planned economy was a limitation of the technology at the time. Without computers, it wasn’t that easy to track the outputs of factories to enforce quality. Those people argue that a modern day planned economy might look a little bit more like Amazon does internally. Maybe still not a great place to live though.
This is such a funny comment, historically you bought stocks to extract profits, ie dividends. Now you make money from houses and stocks by value appreciation instead of rent and dividends, you can see how that leads to very different behaviours and how that is not very stable compared to buying based on rent and dividends.
If you can get 30% of the population to boycott anything it’s not only significant but forces a response out of the group on the other side. You’re talking almost 1 in 3 people. Those are literally historic numbers.
Do you have any idea how much companies spend to increase their conversions by single digits?
That's probably more to do with the increasing popularity of China-style national firewalls/tracking (sorry, "age verification") than ads.
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To filter bullshit it would first have to understand bullshit, and it doesn't. That's why an LLM will tell you the solution to a problem that doesn't work, and argue with you when you correct it.
For me, it's a resource wasting text generator. I'll not lie, I don't use OpenAI, Mistral or Anthropic's models, even for coding. I prefer to read my API docs and cry once.
I used Gemini, five or six times in total. Twice I asked a couple of very specific things, and it unearthed them. Since they were not products, but information, that was helpful. Twice, it has given wrong information. When I "told" it, there was another way, it said "of course there are two ways", etc. Tasteless and time wasting.
I don't like using an LLM all day long, or offload my thinking to them. It's the ultimate self-poisoning incident.
And as you say, these algorithms can't know right/wrong/logical/bullshit, etc. They just spew out text.
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Companies then get to bid for a preference “place”. This is more like Google paying to be the search engine default in Firefox.
And they are trained on web data just like any other model...
(Thinking about it a bit more, I actually think that the phrase's meaning could have really gone that other way. Nothing in the phrase itself suggests that the elephant is being deliberately ignored -- we only learn that critical part "in the background" via culture. For comparison, the similarly structured "bull in a China shop" means exactly what you would expect, without any implied reversal.)
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> 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.
That makes it make sense.
Google fucking suck.
Ads are useful, but to whom? Not often the consumer!
The benefits ads have to the consumer can be obtained other ways, like a well functioning search engine.
Imagine if Google used AI to improve search results rather than maximize the revenue from, and irritation by, ads
If nothing else, an ad cannot impartially compare a product with the competition (and sometimes the "competition" is buying nothing at all), therefore every ad lies.
If I already needed or knew about it, I didn't need the ad.
If I was happy with my life without the product advertised, I didn't need the ad.
Furthermore, ads are fueling our capitalist, consumerist economy that is destroying the planet. Ads are a literal existential threat to humans.
Now, after a doctor’s involvement, my friend is on the new med and it treats their condition better and the quality of their life is improved.
The ad triggered a series of events that helped my friend.
The doctor, for whatever reason, was not the primary motivation.
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Well, how do you know that your life couldn't be better with the product? /s
Promotion and discovery are important. Advertising is the spread of information. Of course some can be bad or misleading, and that is bad.
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."
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.
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.)
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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
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.
Or what Google is doing for years: a wall of ads for "Black & Decker" chainsaws when you specifically search "Husqvarna" or "Stihl", sending the results you want to the sixth or seventh place in the page.
No, it's not.
I completely unplugged from broadcast TV simply because I can no longer stand to be bombarded with FUD, manufactured lifestyles, propaganda, etc., that provides absolutely no useful information about a product, or really anything other than reminding me that X company's Y product exists.
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.
Plus, you'd have to offer this service somehow, meaning you'd have to describe it to potential customers... just another bunch of people you'd have to swear to perpetual secrecy.
I'm not denying it could (or even will) happen, though. Anything for a buck for these companies.
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.
Non-technical, tech-addicted younger people too!
Internet usage is primarily via social media apps with infinite scrolling, so there aren't actually all that many web searches happening.
> 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.
This is a good idea!
I've got a Team plan through work, but there's no way for me to cover family members with that.
Search-wise, all they know is Google. I've seen people open Internet Explorer, search 'google' via a Bing search box, then click on google.com where they finally searched for a website they basically opened every day. IMO had they known Bing is also a search engine, they would've skipped searching for Google, so I'm a bit skeptical to people changing search habits. If anything, AI could be the replacement.
Everything I access regularly is bookmarked. If I know the site I'm going to, such as wikipedia.org, I type it in the URL bar. I think 300 searches would be more than enough.
(Not saying anything about you here)
I've worked with a lot of people in tech over the years who weren't "tech people". Idk. The one thing I've always seen with "tech people" is a certain obsession for knowledge and learning.
There's still the possibility of some form of ads getting embedded in local models, or biases that favor certain sponsored content, which is one reason why having more than just the weights open is important. But that's probably a less immediate threat.
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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.
Are you sure your derision is warranted?
> You are a true advertiser. Congratulations.
I have never purchased any online ads. This is how far off the mark you are.
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.
If I wanted that level of care, I expect to pay for a personal physician who only has one patient. Me.
The reality is most of the time my Dr knows more technical info than the patient. But sometimes I know something they don’t. The information asymmetry lasts about 60 seconds before my doctor validates the info against his professional sources.
My doctor is providing a value commiserate with what I pay him.
The role of search
If so, I'm not so sure it is advertising, as being discussed here, that you're referring to.
If not, funny coincidence.
I am partly named after the doctor in the song Comfortably Numb.
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.
I've tried to match the absurdity of your example.
Asking an LLM for sources is about as (in)effective as telling it to not make stuff up.
And no, modern ones don’t “do it just fine”, they are still frequently wrong. Either you’ve been incredibly lucky, or have just stopped verifying thoroughly.
But if you’re that confident, please do share the exact models which you trust. Proponents always shift goal posts (somehow, every release in perpetuity, those ones are the good ones and everything before were garbage) so let’s avoid the vagueness.
The first gets blasted all over the internet to be shoved in the faces of all and sundry.
The second goes quietly and efficiently to the professionals tasked with helping the individuals in society with problems that may directly benefit from new thing.
The distinction, to me, is obvious.