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We're testing new ad formats in Search and expanding our Direct Offers pilot

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Re: We're testing new ad formats in Search and expanding our Direct Offers pilot

#221

Post by jmathai »

IdiotSavage wrote: post #214
mattlondon wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

> 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. This means the ad was effective. But was it useful to you? Did it save you from having to look for it yourself? If you were not thinking something like "I need a certain T-shirt" before this came up, it's likely the ad created a desire in your mind which you did…

I think what was left out of the blog post was "helpful to the advertiser".

The meta point is that advertising has become so ingrained into society it really is difficult to differentiate if a need or desire originated intrinsic or externally. It's really great for companies selling stuff.

Re: We're testing new ad formats in Search and expanding our Direct Offers pilot

#224

Post by gomox »

FinnKuhn wrote: post #7

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.

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.

Re: We're testing new ad formats in Search and expanding our Direct Offers pilot

#225

Post by jmathai »

SlinkyOnStairs wrote: post #210
weird-eye-issue wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let me let you in on a little industry "secret" You can't trust those results no matter what The pages that they pull in to source that data all contain affiliate links and companies contact websites to get their tools to the tops of those lists by paying money often monthly. I know this because I do this... It's basically standard SEO but it also manipulates AI like ChatGPT very very easily

> It's basically standard SEO but it also manipulates AI like ChatGPT very very easily There are key differences. 1) Google doesn't get paid for the SEO, so even is crime is involved, Google isn't directly responsible. 2) AI ads are unmarked, which is illegal pretty much everywhere. And because of the way LLMs work, it is impossible to tell where a given output came from, neither which part of the prompt/context nor…

> 1) Google doesn't get paid for the SEO, so even is crime is involved, Google isn't directly responsible.

Google doesn't get paid directly for the SEO but they definitely benefit monetarily. Do a recipe search and ask yourself if these are the results the user would like to see. Google benefits by not penalizing sites which litter themselves with ads. It's not that indirect.

Re: We're testing new ad formats in Search and expanding our Direct Offers pilot

#226

Post by jordigh »

lelanthran wrote: post #136
sedawkgrep wrote: post #62

Earlier 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…

An ad is never helpful because ads are designed to mislead me into buying something I didn't need or knew about before I saw the ad.

If nothing else, an ad cannot impartially compare a product with the competition (and sometimes the "competition" is buying nothing at all), therefore every ad lies.

If I already needed or knew about it, I didn't need the ad.

If I was happy with my life without the product advertised, I didn't need the ad.

Furthermore, ads are fueling our capitalist, consumerist economy that is destroying the planet. Ads are a literal existential threat to humans.

Re: We're testing new ad formats in Search and expanding our Direct Offers pilot

#227

Post by OtomotO »

Is anyone (here, so tech people) still using Google for searching?

I've ditched them about a decade ago, when the results started to become worse and worse.

I haven't opened them willingly since then. Only when I do something in Chromium, occasionally, it opens, because I haven't bothered changing the default search engine there.

Re: We're testing new ad formats in Search and expanding our Direct Offers pilot

#229

Post by pixel_popping »

sedawkgrep wrote: post #62
nelblu wrote: post #15

> We’re introducing more helpful ads in AI Mode 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?

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 disagree-ish because I've been sold by ads things that remain in my life today a long-time later, which mean that it was genuinely helpful, I'd say the ratio is minimal, but still sometimes it's on-point, I actually discover a lot of products thanks to ads.

Re: We're testing new ad formats in Search and expanding our Direct Offers pilot

#230

Post by latexr »

bayindirh wrote: post #146
ToucanLoucan wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People still think these things are smart. That if their word generator eats enough of the Internet, it will somehow give them the real information that's otherwise hidden. Or perhaps a better word; filter the bullshit. To filter bullshit it would first have to understand bullshit, and it doesn't. That's why an LLM will tell you the solution to a problem that doesn't work, and argue with you when you correct it.

This is what bothers me a lot. For the people who doesn't know how it's made or want to believe, it's a miracle. For me, it's a resource wasting text generator. I'll not lie, I don't use OpenAI, Mistral or Anthropic's models, even for coding. I prefer to read my API docs and cry once. I used Gemini, five or six times in total. Twice I asked a couple of very specific things, and it unearthed them. Since they were not…

Something I’ve also seen multiple times is an LLM giving wrong information, I tell it it’s not right, then it tells me I’m “absolutely right” and it provides the exact same answer and tells me that one will work.
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