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.

Since when have we considered ads something helpful?

Their purpose isn’t to be helpful. They're there to sell you something, and nothing more. Any semblance of helpfulness is misinterpretation and merely coincidental.

I have seen 1 "helpful" ad yesterday.

When searching for sonarqube, I received an ad for a competing product I'd never heard of and I'll check them today to see if it fits my need.

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

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

Useful targeted ads on random sites? Never helpful. Not a single time.

Context-based ads on sites that were not targeted to me personally, but from some site sponsor, like ads for a new boardgame posted on a boardgame site? YES I have clicked on a few and may have ended up buying possibly one game, once. This is definitely a better and less annoying model. I never deliberately try to block this type of ad as there is at least a tiny possibility something useful shows up and it seems like an OK way to support sites I like.

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

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.

I don't have an ad blocker on my laptop. The ads I get are pretty much entirely generic and irrelevant to me, I don't remember ever consciously clicking on an ad.

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?

If an advert was helpful I would be able to click the "show ads" button

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 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 seen a helpful ad

There, I fixed it!

I have never seen a helpful ad in google search

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 seen a helpful ad in google search

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

“Helpful to our short-term bottom line”

I won't be able to use their AI results if they are, personally. If I ask the question "what is the best tool for doing x" and I can't trust that the answer is going to be the truth according to all available information, then the AI is useless or worse, misleading. If google is unbiased, and only highlights paid advertiser mentions, no one will pay. I'd only accept this if it was a clear separation of LLM response and ads in a sidebar or something similar. Other people may not care. Many happily read politically affiliated news knowing that their opinions and actions may be influenced by a media source.

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.

The method is already public for some time now. I bookmarked it since I share it a lot:

https://research.google/blog/mechanism-design-for-large-lang...

It's the same. There are slots, there's bidding, there're bidders. Same ad model, evolved for AI era.

That's the real question and it's not hypothetical. Google already adjusts organic rankings based on advertiser relationships in ways that aren't documented. With AI Mode the surface area for that kind of influence is much larger and much less visible. A search result you can inspect. A synthesized answer you can't.

Will Google choose to negatively impact its bottom line for the sake of giving their users a higher quality experience?

No. It's not 2005 anymore.

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

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

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.

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

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'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.

What about political ads? Will the AI lie about news to further the interests of Google's patrons?

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

Obviously.

for sure, i guess this is one of the experiments that confirms that would work https://openai.com/index/where-the-goblins-came-from/

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.

This never occurred to traditional search results so highly doubt they’ll start now.

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

Semi-seriously: I imagine we'll live to see the day when we run an adblocker that runs a small model to semantically filter out ads in Google search results

> but virtually impossible to block the text itself

Why do you believe so?

As long as there is a clear indication somewhere on the webpage (in the metadata or in the text itself) that a specific portion of a text is an ad, a browser extension will be able to block it.

And I assume that there are laws mandating that the ads must be clearly marked in order to be distinguishable from the genuine content.

This might come as a surprise to many, but the sole reason Google exist is to make a profit. More profit means more success means more profit, that's why they did create a company in the first place. Mindblowing stuff, that.

Competitors will be very happy though.

That is how I understand it as well.

Enshittification of the AI tools has officially begun.

Maybe we will soon find e.g. AI-generated pictures of ourselves in branded clothes or using branded products to appear among our photos, discretely disguised as genuine photos with a little badge in the corner indicating that it is actually a paid "promotion".

And so on. And that would still be, in my opinion, just the beginning.

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.

Google execs probably use kagi to google a question

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.

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.

I think the search results are still there with AI mode

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

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

I had the same reaction, and checked dictionary.com.

This new meaning was there, with its only example relating to AI ads!

2. material made for advertising and other aspects of marketing, as a billboard, video ad, or web page design, or the activity of designing and producing it.

"In our latest campaign for a luxury services client, we used an AI platform to fine-tune creative based on user behavior."

Did AI make up this variant meaning and put it in the dictionary, and AI used the word in generating Google's article? What came first, the chicken or the egg? Regardless things are moving fast.

My ask is that we not use creative as a noun

I thought "a creative" was the person who designs adverts, but I guess it's acting as a good filter, to filter out people like me, because I'm clearly not the target audience for this.

If that happens, I'm betting they get slapped with something inconsequential like a $1 million fine and write it off as the cost of doing business.

How do you keep bad actors off the classic Internet? Even if there's a proof of humanity system, there would remain a demand for mechanical turk jobs to funnel AI content into it.

Who Am I? - The Mysterious Thing You Always Are

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBQAo6pEweE

This is the far future we are staring at.

'Authored by Claude code'

I've been abandoning Google before ai ads....kagi has let me take control again of my search results and I can ban low quality domains like google used to be able to do.

For anyone interested in such a filter, this one is great in my experience: https://github.com/Stevoisiak/Stevos-GenAI-Blocklist

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

Need a proof reader who can spell strawberry? Send your AI draft to us for corrections.

I share your feelings.

I haven't even subscribed yet

now?

For now. If tokens don’t get cheaper over time, Google’s edge might come from being able to provide cheaper/free access to a frontier LLM.