Yep, and they're a company! Gotta pay the employees, power bills, and investors somehow. If I'm paying a subscription I think I get to expect no ads. But not if it's "free" ...
makes sense from the 10-K. Search ads were $198B last year, 57% of Alphabet revenue. if AI summaries kill the click model, this is the fix — ads inside the answers
It will be interesting how hidden those ads will be compared to current Search experience or what OpenAI is already doing.
It's a lot easier to mislead a user with an AI generated ad that with a Search result IMHO, I'm betting on a huige backlash if they don't make it VERY clear that ads are ads.
I 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.
100%. This is the only part that I find surprising/confusing. Surely whoever blinks first incurs a massive reputational hit with the public (who don't think about this deeply enough to see that it was always inevitable), so why do that if you don't have to?
Perhaps the bright side from Google's POV is that it means that they can be the first to start wooing advertisers to their platform. First-mover advantage there might outweigh reputational damage with the public, especially if OpenAI follows suit with ads in 6 months.
Actually I believe Google is the one caught between a rock and a hard place here because their stock will reprice once the market realizes how much their position has weakened re: search ads.
They commanded an absurd premium on ads by virtue of being monopolistic leaders of search. They don't have a better product anymore, only a scale/distribution advantage.
This is the problem with the black box model. These adCompanies control what people see. People don't know if they can trust the generated slop.
It is the end of the open web. People need to wake up and realise what full Evil is being planned here. Google tried this before, e. g. AMP and what not.
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
it’s fair to be skeptical. But then again we already know that this wasn’t the case with search results. So not sure why we would assume it is this time around.
The truth is brought to you by the highest bidder. Individuals, companies and nation states already pay for public relations. If Google offered them a service they'd pay good money.
Of course. Just look at the SEO industry Google created. You can't search for anything without a full page of sponsored/SEO bullshit, and everyone agrees it's precisely why Google results are less relevant today than 10 years ago. But here we are, this is exactly the same thing. We used to search with a term, Google monetized that. We now search with a sentence, do you think Google's gonna leave that cash on the table?
Fuck yes. I was worried about not having ads and google providing useful results again.
The last time i clicked on an AI link it took me to a page that wasn’t just more google ads or SEo bullshit. It was very disappointing I was looking forward to accidentally clicking more ads and instead found information relevant to what I wanted to know.
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?
I typically block ads as well, but more recently I changed some setting in the default Android newsfeed thing and some ads started to show through amongst the news items.
The ads there are usually fairly innocuous (i.e. not disruptive, not flashing auto play vids etc, they just look like another news item and you can just scroll past them like other news articles you're not interested in), but I have actually found them useful. I am wearing a T-shirt right now in fact that was advertised to me a week or two ago as "on sale" for £8 (eight) and which I clicked through and purchased. There have been one or two other examples of things there that actually have been useful or at least interesting to me right now. So they actually have been useful/helpful in that regard.
So I am a bit conflicted here. It is no cost to me to click on the ad, and I bought some things that I use but would probably have not got otherwise. Am I being manipulated to part with my money? I dunno. Would I have bought a £8 t-shirt anyway if I was just in a shop and saw it? Maybe. Was the ad actually quite well targeted and appropriate? In this case yes.
I think on balance I would say those news feed ads are acceptable to me. I have problems where it is totally irrelevant and disruptive. Hopefully the AI mode ones will be similar to the news feed ones. I would be pretty upset if the ad content was directly worded into the response.
I 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 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.
The only helpful ads are the ones that waste money on Google (namely those companies/products/results that show up on top anyway, right below the sponsored very same ad)
I have never purchased anything [just] because of an ad, nor do I know anyone who has.
But I have been turned off from EVER buying some things because of their obnoxious ads.
The whole ads racket is a case of the emperor with no clothes, an ugly self-justifying cancer infesting human civilization.
And to those perpetuating the racket who'll say "but how will people find out about products??" the answer is fucking better search and filtering systems.
I find helpful ads on Google Search sometimes, and it can be the easiest way to get results, but most of the time, ads (and SEO) ruin search accuracy to the point that it's becoming totally useless
this might sound wild but..on some platforms that are good with figuring out the types of things i like, I get many ads that I actually like. facebook for example i almost exclusively go there just to see what kind of products i wouldn't otherwise know about that it might show me (some of which i've bought). plus if it helps pay for services than i'm all for it.
the part that crosses the line for me is when the platforms are peddling malware and scams through ads. google search would have a ton of this suprisingly..so i hope in AI mode they can improve things
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.
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.
Maybe one or two in an ocean of crap. And even the ones I do see which are interesting I start despising, because I will see them hundreds of times. Base44 - I will never use your services because of the ad bombardment. Same with that fucking toothbrush that doesn't have bluetooth. It never amazes me that ad agencies just serve me 1 or 2 same ads all the time, but :shrug:
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.
It seems techies collectively try to avoid ads, but clearly other segments of people actively click and buy through ads. I would love to get a marketing expert's view on this. It differs by product obviously, but there must be some common character variables (gender, wealth level, ...)
I bought once through facebook ads, and now I actively try to avoid any ads
I use an adblocker and despise most ads with a burning hatred, but the absolutist position of "never helpful" isn't right. My example: A game I've been wanting to buy for a while recently went on sale on Steam. I saw an ad when I opened Steam. I bought the game for the low price, and it is now one of my favorite games I've ever played (Burnout Paradise City - highly recommend, but wait for a sale)
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.
Personally, I sometimes like targeted ads. If I'm intentionally shopping, it is nice to see ads relevant to my interests. Not saying the whole Internet should be a highly surveiled mall, but they do have their place
In my case I haven't seen a single helpful ad in google search. They try to make the ads related to my work or hobbies but it's not helpful at all. Aside from Google, Instagram seems to be nailing the ads algorithm better.
Tbh that is a pretty vague statement. Could be 0.01% more and it would still be technically correct. Could be doubling the number of non-helpful ads in the meantime
I search for Converse sneakers and top result is an ad for Converse sneakers! Genius! Pay these genius engineers more! So incredible. How are they smart enough to show me exactly what I search for?!
But seriously. What are we paying advertisers for? Converse pays Google so that they don't show Vans when I search for Converse? Sounds like extortion or protection money.
I think weirdly, ads embedded in AI search responses actually maybe do have a chance at being helpful (as long as it's clear from the context of the question that I may be willing to pay for a solution) just because they could potentially be quite well matched to the specific thing I want, or if they're not quite as well matched but offer other benefits, explain the difference.
At the moment search ads aren't very helpful because you have neither of those things. You always get them for any type of query, and when you do get them you don't know if the thing being shown will exactly solve your problem, or only approximately, and the work is much more on you to find that out by reading the product's marketing pages further.
If all that could be done for you up front, reasonably honestly, then I could see it being useful. I mean to be sure, in some small percentage of searches I really am looking to buy something and really do want to be usefully, honestly pitched on available options.
An exception that proves the rule, but KRAZAM's channel on Youtube has legitimately helpful ad reads. Rare Data Hunters [0] for example ends with a 1 minute Cloudflare ad that's basically a crash course in their services. Having worked with GCP and AWS but not so much with Cloudflare, that ad gave me a surprisingly clear idea of what the important pieces would be.
Truly an exception though. I think generally the only people for whom ads are helpful are advertisers.
> I have never seen a helpful ad in google search, but well I have been using adblockers forever so I would not know.
That this self-awarely-self-contradicting quip is the top comment on the page is about as essential a summation of HN's collective thought as I can think of.
I remain amazed at the pathology that results in the truth that, even in the world as it exists today, the one enemy that truly unites the supposedly-elite techno-leaders of our increasingly advanced society is...
...horror about seeing advertisements for products we're probably buying anyway.
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.
I find all ads — both search ads and website ads — very helpful in training the brain to ignore the noise. Isn't it amazing how we trained ourselves to immediately detect the 1pt hidden "Sponsored" mark and scroll the page down to the first real search result, or immediately locate the Close or X button on the pop-up ad making sure none of the actual ad content gets through our well-trained firewall in our brain. Amazing. Browsing the web is such a fun and dynamic experience these days!
I 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.
When AdWords first showed up (decades ago) they were legitimately useful at times. They were a dramatic improvement over previous ad tech that just used plain word matching to try and find "relevant" ads.
For me ads on Instagram are often spot-on, same with Facebook although I don't check that too often.
Google search always seemed completely off, I don't remember seeing one helpful ad here (helpful being defined as an ad of something I might be interested in buying).
Assume the article reader / audience to be someone buying ads on Google and how unhappy they are with how ineffective ads have become in recent years, and you understand AI Mode ads are presented here as more helpful for advertisers.
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!
I don't think I'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'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 use an ad blocker, but I'm occasionally exposed to YouTube outside of my ad-free bubble and I find the ads useful for identifying brands to actively avoid.
I've tried the AI mode and it seems to basically give the same results as a ChatGPT query - which raises the question why use Google AI mode and not ChatGPT? (or any other of the similar models?)
Google has to do this to protect their ad revenue. But… Anthropic doesn’t have to do ads (OpenAI might have to for their free tier) and if the ads degrade the experience too much then people will just abandon Google/Gemini for search entirely.
You'd be shocked at how many people who work on ads really do delude themselves into thinking people find ads "useful".
Their usual justification is in the end somewhere tied to "people click on ads so they must find them useful". And yet somehow always ignores the fact that their platform often does all it can to hide that ads are ads and makes them look as much like content as possible.
If lots of people work for the company, they’re making a lot, and paying a lot, in the world we live in professional ethics in tech are considered quaint and naive, if they’re even on the radar.
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.
Google loves cashing on malvertising. Google loves posting up ads that surface on top of the mac homebrew website containing a facade with their own malicious own curl | sh malware.
> With Conversational Discovery ads, your ad answers a person’s specific question.
Ah so my "search" results are going to be biased and at the mercy of the highest bidder.
Only a matter of time before someone will sell privileges of baking your ad/agenda into a llm model during training. That, or companies will fluff their own websites with verbose claims about their products that will get sucked into training via "organic” scraping.
Enshittification of the AI tools has officially begun.
Maybe we will soon find e.g. AI-generated pictures of ourselves in branded clothes or using branded products to appear among our photos, discretely disguised as genuine photos with a little badge in the corner indicating that it is actually a paid "promotion".
And so on. And that would still be, in my opinion, just the beginning.
They really couldn't have waited any longer after announcing the shift to AI mode. Almost immediately. I'm sure the employees who worked on it must be terribly proud.
191 comments
[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 194 ms ] threadIt'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.
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.
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.
Also, they have to start experimenting now to get the formula right for AI ads.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
The ads there are usually fairly innocuous (i.e. not disruptive, not flashing auto play vids etc, they just look like another news item and you can just scroll past them like other news articles you're not interested in), but I have actually found them useful. I am wearing a T-shirt right now in fact that was advertised to me a week or two ago as "on sale" for £8 (eight) and which I clicked through and purchased. There have been one or two other examples of things there that actually have been useful or at least interesting to me right now. So they actually have been useful/helpful in that regard.
So I am a bit conflicted here. It is no cost to me to click on the ad, and I bought some things that I use but would probably have not got otherwise. Am I being manipulated to part with my money? I dunno. Would I have bought a £8 t-shirt anyway if I was just in a shop and saw it? Maybe. Was the ad actually quite well targeted and appropriate? In this case yes.
I think on balance I would say those news feed ads are acceptable to me. I have problems where it is totally irrelevant and disruptive. Hopefully the AI mode ones will be similar to the news feed ones. I would be pretty upset if the ad content was directly worded into the response.
I 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.
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 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.
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.
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 bought once through facebook ads, and now I actively try to avoid any ads
The ability to think often is ultimately a capability that only a minority of humans possess. Therefore, for the vast majority of people, ad is very useful.
For example, my retired parents enjoy buying little gadgets from ads.
I 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.
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.
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.
Truly an exception though. I think generally the only people for whom ads are helpful are advertisers.
0: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IU4ByUbDKNc
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
[PRJ-123] Fix the prod bug. This commit brought to you by Acme!
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.
They're not talking to users of the internet.
Ads are so helpful!
GenAI in other fields is useless and only promoted by charlatans or the financially invested.
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.