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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

#51

Does nobody talk abot the elephant in the room? Will the answers the AI gives also be influenced by Googles customers?

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.

Elephants in the room are obvious by definition.

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

#53

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

This is why local AI is so important

How does that help if it's using search? You get whatever the search engine outputs

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

#54
> With Conversational Discovery ads, your ad answers a person’s specific question.

Ah so my "search" results are going to be biased and at the mercy of the highest bidder.

Only a matter of time before someone will sell privileges of baking your ad/agenda into a llm model during training. That, or companies will fluff their own websites with verbose claims about their products that will get sucked into training via "organic” scraping.

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

#55

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

This is why local AI is so important

That doesn't solve this particular problem. Your local model was trained on reddit comments written by bots.

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

#56

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

This is why local AI is so important

It's already being trained on "public" (ethical or otherwise) data. So, it already has ingested that kind of "optimization" during pre-training and training.

I don't think you can fine-tune your way out of it.

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

#57

Does nobody talk abot the elephant in the room? Will the answers the AI gives also be influenced by Googles customers?

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.

> This is not an elephant in the room, this is so obvious.

Maybe they grew up in an environment where the phrase "elephant in the room" meant a situation where people enter a room, notice an elephant there, and immediately scream "Jesus Christ there's a goddamn elephant!"

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

#58
post #18

Google has to do this to protect their ad revenue. But… Anthropic doesn’t have to do ads (OpenAI might have to for their free tier) and if the ads degrade the experience too much then people will just abandon Google/Gemini for search entirely.

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.

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

#59

Does nobody talk abot the elephant in the room? Will the answers the AI gives also be influenced by Googles customers?

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.

> their one and only goose that lays the golden eggs?

Eh, it really isn't the only goose in goog town. Cloud is at ~20% of their total revenue, and probably is going up w/ their hardware success and other licensing deals. I'm curious to see what goog can do with their properties if this trend continues. Less reliance on ads could be interesting. (many former googlers have said that pressure from the ad business was felt across all their products)

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

#60

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

This is why local AI is so important

It's less compromised, but it's still basing the answer on compromised queries. This is why I pay for independent reviews (e.g Which) where their incentives are more aligned with yours.
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