I guess the google bot is now on by blocked list.
There should be a public corporation, like Wikipedia, that starts scraping the Web and provides an api for anyone to access.
We're testing new ad formats in Search and expanding our Direct Offers pilot
471–480 of 603 posts
Re: We're testing new ad formats in Search and expanding our Direct Offers pilot
#472Oh wow I can’t wait for the “one off” ways people find to abuse how Google presents this creative for products.
“Yes! You can use an ACME shovel to bury a dead body!”
I’m sure brands will love the screenshots this will produce.
Re: We're testing new ad formats in Search and expanding our Direct Offers pilot
#473Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
The average user appears to care enough to go out of their way to use browsers and extensions and such that block ads, to the point that Google has spent enormous amount of time and money breaking those tools. I think that’s definitely something to consider. 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…
> The average user appears to care enough to go out of their way to use browsers and extensions and such that block ads
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.
Re: We're testing new ad formats in Search and expanding our Direct Offers pilot
#474I know this is controversial, and imperfect, but the longer this crap continues the more right I feel about this as a solution: What if we taxed advertising? https://matthewsinclair.com/blog/0177-what-if-we-taxed-adver...
It would have to be an incredibly tiny tax, no?
Re: We're testing new ad formats in Search and expanding our Direct Offers pilot
#475Earlier quoted context omitted.
Don't they already to this with maps routing? I thought this was the norm.
Do you mean something like rerouting you to make sure you pass a mcdonald’s at lunch time? Or are you talking about mcdonald’s always showing up when you search for food along your route? Rerouting would surprise me, but really it wouldn’t surprise me that much at this point.
Rerouting. Not that it completely takes over the route ofc, but that (potential) ad revenue is a metric just like traffic, speed limits et.c. that gets considered in the decision making.
Re: We're testing new ad formats in Search and expanding our Direct Offers pilot
#476> Now, if someone searches for an espresso machine, Gemini will pull up your most relevant products and instantly write a custom explainer highlighting why your product may be the right choice for them.
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.
Re: We're testing new ad formats in Search and expanding our Direct Offers pilot
#477I guess the google bot is now on by blocked list. There should be a public corporation, like Wikipedia, that starts scraping the Web and provides an api for anyone to access.
But does Google actually 'own' the index? Have they acted anticompetitively as far as that goes?
Re: We're testing new ad formats in Search and expanding our Direct Offers pilot
#478Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Have you ever looked at the browsing history of a non-technical, non-tech-addicted older person? I'm usually surprised by how little activity there typically is. 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…
I'm a tech person and 300 searches per month sounds like quite a lot to me, certainly if it's used outside of work. That's 10 searches/day, every day.
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.
Re: We're testing new ad formats in Search and expanding our Direct Offers pilot
#479Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
> Since when have we considered ads something helpful? 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 contac…
So what you're saying is that when Google says 'helpful ads' they mean helpful to the companies selling the things that are being advertised, ie. Google's real customers, not helpful to the people who get the ads smeared all over their screens.
That makes it make sense.
Google fucking suck.
Re: We're testing new ad formats in Search and expanding our Direct Offers pilot
#480Earlier quoted context omitted.
The major difference is that right now when you land on a page you can do your due diligence and decide if you trust the source. You can still be tricked, but it’s harder and you can get better at the detection. 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.
AI can also provide the sources. And if you need to be certain, you should ask for that.
Those sources are often made up (pages never existed) or outright wrong (they don’t say what the LLM claimed).
Asking an LLM for sources is about as (in)effective as telling it to not make stuff up.