Earlier quoted context omitted.
Crime is legal now
Unenforced crimes are still crimes, you have to rewrite laws to change that.
or get a blanket pardon
We're testing new ad formats in Search and expanding our Direct Offers pilot
391–400 of 603 posts
Re: We're testing new ad formats in Search and expanding our Direct Offers pilot
#392Earlier 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 love the idea of targeting advertising. But the current implementations I hate. The ASR voice recorder app gets this right. It lets me use the full featured version for three days, after which I need to watch a few ads to get another three days. I choose when to watch the ads, and if I'm late there is nothing worse than a small nag at the bottom of the app. I actually now start every day with the ads, while I cook…
I think the very old Google was better in this: They analysed current intent by looking at current search and contents of the current page one looks at. There an ad may solve a specific current need. As soon as past profile overrides this the relevance goes down: It's great that two weeks ago I spent a lot of time on travel sites, but now my summer vacation is booked and all related ads are irrelevant.
Re: We're testing new ad formats in Search and expanding our Direct Offers pilot
#393Comments speculating how to block these ads... isn't the simplest solution to just not use Google?
Seriously, I haven't used google products for 5 years at least, its easy. Why is everyone still using them?
Re: We're testing new ad formats in Search and expanding our Direct Offers pilot
#394Earlier quoted context omitted.
seems like the ad was superfluous. the doctor treating your friend's condition would be aware of new drugs relevant to your friend's condition. i go to a doctor because i don't know about medicine, i don't want to be educated on medicine from snake oil salesmen.
Conspicuously absent from your scenario is the way the doctor becomes aware of the new drug. How does that happen?
By researching new drugs? Though sadly at the moment the doctor is also a target of advertising. The point being that this should generally be a pull process driven by a demand (and mediated by neutral review and publication processes) and not a push being driven by a supply (mediated by a process that goes to the highest bidder).
Re: We're testing new ad formats in Search and expanding our Direct Offers pilot
#395Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
I need a new dishwasher. I dont want to go knocking on doors until I find somewhere that sells them. Im glad they have signs, webpages, and info sheets. Promotion and discovery are important. Advertising is the spread of information. Of course some can be bad or misleading, and that is bad.
Publishing information about your product on your own website is not really what most people consider advertising. Nor is being added to lists of similar products. Most people object to 'push' advertising, where attempts to persuade you to buy a product are inserted whereever your attention is, as opposed to 'pull' processes where you have a need and are trying to gather information on how best to solve it.
Re: We're testing new ad formats in Search and expanding our Direct Offers pilot
#396Earlier quoted context omitted.
seems like the ad was superfluous. the doctor treating your friend's condition would be aware of new drugs relevant to your friend's condition. i go to a doctor because i don't know about medicine, i don't want to be educated on medicine from snake oil salesmen.
Conspicuously absent from your scenario is the way the doctor becomes aware of the new drug. How does that happen?
so in your mind "advertisement" covers any transmission of information?
Re: We're testing new ad formats in Search and expanding our Direct Offers pilot
#397Earlier quoted context omitted.
I do not think that I have ever seen on the Internet a helpful ad. When I want to buy something, I search what I want or I go directly to online shops that I have used before or to price comparison sites. Nonetheless, mostly before the appearance of the Internet, when I was reading various technical journals, especially during the seventies and the eighties of the past century, e.g. magazines or journals of electroni…
> " The most stupid thing is the fact that after I have searched for something to buy, I am bombarded for a long time with related ads, but that is exactly when with certainty I am no longer interested in that kind of ads " Please see this comment exchange from 3 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37218627 > "the correlation between $just_bought_thing and $will_buy_another is very, very high ... Showing…
I'm sure it's one of the most useful signals for the advertisers, but it is also one of the most irritating behaviours for the consumers, because even if this is a very high correlation in advertising terms, it's still the majority of the time not actually accurate for the consumer (like with all ads: I buy some orders of magnitudes fewer products than I see ads, even with adblocking, so even if I only bought things I had seen ads for, the vast majority are not helpful to me).
Re: We're testing new ad formats in Search and expanding our Direct Offers pilot
#398> 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?
Someone on here said his wife got upset when he set up adblocker for her.
Re: We're testing new ad formats in Search and expanding our Direct Offers pilot
#399Does nobody talk abot the elephant in the room? Will the answers the AI gives also be influenced by Googles customers?
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 a…
What were you doing before hand? Do you believe you were getting perfectly unbiased information?
Re: We're testing new ad formats in Search and expanding our Direct Offers pilot
#400Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
> If I was happy with my life without the product advertised, I didn't need the ad.
Well, how do you know that your life couldn't be better with the product? /s