If I may offer a devil's advocate perspective.

I just googled Toyota Highlander (my car) and the ad in the search results is "please consider the Honda Pilot."

Now it's unlikely that I am shopping for a midsized SUV and am not aware of the major competitors, but squinting that away for a second - if I am searching for a car I think I want and Google informs me of a perfectly viable alternative that might be cheaper or better in some other way that can have a huge positive impact on my life. So in this case I am obviously aware of Honda but an ad for one of the Korean or domestic makers I hadn't considered could be useful.

Similarly if I am Google midjourney as in the article because I heard that somewhere and Google positions for me potential cheaper/better alternatives as ads - that's not a terrible thing and you could say hits at the best usecase of an ad - making me aware of an alternative solution to a problem I have that's driving my search to begin with.

I obviously don't feel this way about the majority of ads I see but when it "hits right" it's really useful

Fair point, but I'd argue that "Google informed [you] of a perfectly viable alternative that might be cheaper" isn't what happened. What happened is "Google offered you Honda first, for no other reason than Honda paid them money to do so".

If you squint they may look like the same thing, but their subtle difference is important. One is a tool suggesting "Hey I see you're trying to do A, but I think B might also fit your needs", and the other is "You want A? Ok, I'll eventually point you towards A, but only after you consume this message from our sponsor."

Google's not genuinely thinking "Hey this will help the user more!" and building that into their tool - it's an ad platform that mimics being helpful, in the name of growing profits.

(That's fine for them to do btw; They're a company and they need to make money somehow.)

Okay, then show those ads to people who google “midsize SUV” or “AI image generator”, not people who google the specific product by brand name. Sending people who google “midjourney” to competitors’ websites makes as much sense as sending people who google “midsize SUV” to bicycle websites: the user already made their preference very clear.

> If I may offer a devil's advocate perspective.

The devil doesn't need advocates. https://boardgamegeek.com/thread/3145446/the-devil-doesnt-ne...

There are clear and obvious ways to show advertisements without making those advertisements look like top search results. You know this. Google knows this. There's no reason for anyone to pretend otherwise.

In my view a lot of this hinges on how well the results are identified as ads, and whether they’re vectors of fraud.

I’m not inherently opposed to ads that are relevant to a user’s search query, but I am opposed to watering down their visual differentiation until they look just like regular search results. Once upon a time Google put ads on a yellow background labelled “Ads”. Now they’re “Sponsored results” and they look mostly identical to the rest. This is simply not about providing interesting and relevant alternatives, but about tricking the user into clicking the ad so Google can charge the advertiser.

What I truly can’t abide, though, is the volume of fraudulent and malicious advertising circulating their network. Given Google’s $100 billion profit in 2024, the amount of fake/scam versions of real websites that they allow to appear in search ads, or deepfake Elon Musk bitcoin giveaways they allow in YouTube prerolls is a calculated choice, not an inability or lack of resources to prevent it. At the end of the day it would eat into their profit if they were to make it harder to post deceptive ads.