Yes... but that's Google from the moment they started monetizing.

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.

While this is true, it is less effective than you might think in practice. Researchers studied something similar six months ago:

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.

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

Parenting advice updated for the AI age.

If all of your chatbots jumped off a bridge, would you do it too?

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

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

I'm Danish so maybe that's part of it, but if I'm looking for something like kid's lunch boxes that aren't essentially from Temu resale sites I was already using LLM chat clients to find it.

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.

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

Yeah, I've never been more motivated to switch to Kagi. Looking forward to greener pastures.

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.

They could afford to wait, but... profits.

Also, they have to start experimenting now to get the formula right for AI ads.

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

The idea that users will switch because a platform has ads has never played out in the past. The average user just doesn’t care.

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.

It's just plain fraud. LLMs are hallucinatory, this is a basic fact of their basic design. You can't have them write product descriptions especially in advertisements, without any human supervision.

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.

I do wonder if that sort of system would be responsive to feedback. I would have told it something like "because you advertised this espresso machine to me, I will explicitly never purchase it. It's effectively banned from my household. Never recommend a product again."

Maybe I'd just be shouting into the void.

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

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

“For a user this reads like getting bombarded with ads tailor made just for you based on the context of what would be most effective.”

Isn’t this what the current search experience already is?

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

you mean this ? https://commoncrawl.org/

The Internet Archive?

But does Google actually 'own' the index? Have they acted anticompetitively as far as that goes?

Google are talking to their customers; those who purchase the advertising.

They're not talking to users of the internet.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

Is this a rhetorical question?

The answer seem so obvious.

It is also obvious that people will try to understand how to hack the whole algorithm ... we are entering in a new era of hot air SEO like experts.

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

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

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

Not just their customers.

Their entire ideology. An LLM is the perfect propaganda technology, the more people outsource their thinking to them, the easier they will be for Big Corporate to control.

It's crazy to me that AI developments have such a big uncritical following from people that claim to be pro-freedom, especially around these parts. The end goal is and always has been enslavement to capital.

it’s fair to be skeptical. But then again we already know that this wasn’t the case with search results. So not sure why we would assume it is this time around.

The truth is brought to you by the highest bidder. Individuals, companies and nation states already pay for public relations. If Google offered them a service they'd pay good money.

Already has. I asked yesterday a question on different types of graphics cards vs power consumption, I and it asked me if I’d like links to buy some graphics cards

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

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

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

Obviously.

... Yes, people talk about that.

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.

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 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 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 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!

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.

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.

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.

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 saw a helpful ad once.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

0: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IU4ByUbDKNc

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

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 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

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.

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.

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:

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.

It’s because you haven’t given them enough access to your data. Otherwise they would be able to offer more personalized and accurate ads.

I should know, I block tracking and see annoying and unhelpful ads.

And I browse social media with their algorithmic feeds, where the content is hyper personalized, helpful and mostly ads too.

I 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 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.

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?

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

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.

When I want to buy something I search for it or ask AI for recommendations etc. Why not have a toggle, this is a search for product so shower me with ads related. Not all the time when I am just causally browsing.

Tbh that is a pretty vague statement. Could be 0.01% more and it would still be technically correct. Could be doubling the number of non-helpful ads in the meantime

If an advert was helpful I would be able to click the "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.

Those ads do help them, though. They're an ad company now

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

I use an adblocker and despise most ads with a burning hatred, but the absolutist position of "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)

> I have never seen a helpful ad

There, I fixed it!

Well, they are definitely helpful for Google incomes

>I have never seen a helpful ad in google search

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.

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)

The targeted ads in Google Search were hugely helpful, at least in the beginning.

Suddenly, you could search for something obscure and get ads about that exact topic. This enabled a huge number of small niche businesses to exist and prosper.

We now live in the world Google Ads created, and we take for granted the there will be someone selling Bulgarian accordion cleaning kits out there that I can easily find. But targeted ads made this world possible!

For me ads on Instagram are often spot-on, same with Facebook although I don'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).

None.

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 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.

> 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.

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.

“Helpful to our short-term bottom line”

> 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.

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

In the US at least, I believe the FTC requires ads to be clear and conspicuous when those ads are designed to otherwise blend into the general editorial style. I could see AI being regulated as influencer marketing, but hopefully with more enforcement.

> 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.

There's no way EU would let Google display ads without clearly marking them as such. So any ad blocker should be able to continue detect the block or link that's an ad.

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

Another massive reason is that ChatGPT and similar apps are eating their lunch. Asking a question to ChatGPT actually tends to be pretty convenient compared to the top X results that are just SEO optimized slop.

Competitors will be very happy though.

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

Seeing people still using Google is, perhaps not surprising, but perhaps a little sad. Google still dominates search, while providing one of the poorest search experiences. The fact that they can continue to dominate on momentum alone is crazy, given how much better DuckDuckGo, Ecosia, Bing and Kagi is.

I can't understand why this company won't rebrand itself to something a bit catchier or better-sounding name than DuckDuckGo -- who the hell wants to say that ? Unless it's a self-selection filter...

I moved to ddg at least 5 years ago, at that time results were not as good as Google's but it works great for me now.

They even do us the courtesy to still maintain an AI-free version at noai. duckduckgo. com

I honestly love duckduckgo after moving a few months back. in my experience, it is now way more accurate at search than google in recent times. way less sponsored content and the AI is very grounded if you want quick answers. but only if you click the generate ai content button. otherwise the default is to show you results.

Honestly, when I see headlines like this I just scroll down to the Kagi comment and upvote it.

Yes, but at $5/300 searches they're trying too hard to squeeze $10 out of you for the unlimited plan. 300 searches is ridiculous.

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.

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

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.

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

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" ...

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.

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.

ad creative (also just 'creative' for short in an advertising context) has been around since the 1960's. It was used in web banner advertising at its inception in the 1990s. Tribes have their own lingo, and language changes all the time. Sorry you don't like what the marketing tribe did more than 50 years ago.

My ask is that we not use creative as a noun

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.

Shitty startup idea of the day: pay developers $0.05 per commit message to inject an ad at the end of it in a git commit hook.

[PRJ-123] Fix the prod bug. This commit brought to you by Acme!

Microsoft has you covered: https://notes.zachmanson.com/copilot-edited-an-ad-into-my-pr... / https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47570269

'Authored by Claude code'

The reason advertising is such a big market, especially online, is that it actually delivers results for advertisers.

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.

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.

Well is so beyond poisoned that it is the groundwater which tastes like toxic waste now, no matter where you will try to dig up your own well.

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.

I share your feelings.

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.

You pay per impression or per click, just like in all the rest of their ads. Except these have a higher CPC since you're the only featured brand to go along with paragraphs of text about why your shoes are the best.

Is this any different than current search ads (as far as people ignoring them)? I think this is a lot better for Google. It's always at the top of the page, harder to block with an adblocker, possibly more trusted (we'll see...)

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

Seconding for Kagi! It still falls short in some places, like unfortunately googles maps/business/reviews system is just the only of its kind. But I have come to love the search experience over all.

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

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

How would Ublock origin know what is an AI ad vs a genuine recommendation? I assume AI ads will be embedded in the response vs an frame or an element that can be blocked

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

How do you even recognize an ad natively integrated into the content? The only real way is to rephrase the entire piece in an "unbiased" manner, which any agent can do for you right now. You may or may not like the result. It's easier to use another search agent than to block ads in Google's AI mode.

It isn't, they just bought the term and redefined it. Nothing a few millions to the main dictionary editors won't fix.

now?

SEO is definitely a relevant component still, AI mode does a traditional search under the hood. Gaming the system to rank high on the index is still going to matter. But it'll be less about tricking people into clicking and more about tricking LLMs into considering the information relevant and authoritative. For someone using traditional search, I'd wager that would actually improve the results a bit over time.

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.

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.

I haven't even subscribed yet