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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

#511

Post by janalsncm »

svieira wrote: post #386

The particularly worrying thing here is that they're now going to be gathering training data for a conversational model on _how to influence people effectively even when they already know they are being influenced_. Even more than RLFH already does. "We had to build the Torment Nexus so our children could eat" is not a good reason to build the Torment Nexus. The fact that they are not committing to not doing this tel…

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.

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

#512

Post by jgalt212 »

svieira wrote: post #386

The particularly worrying thing here is that they're now going to be gathering training data for a conversational model on _how to influence people effectively even when they already know they are being influenced_. Even more than RLFH already does. "We had to build the Torment Nexus so our children could eat" is not a good reason to build the Torment Nexus. The fact that they are not committing to not doing this tel…

Parenting advice updated for the AI age.

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

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

#513

Post by saghm »

Jensson wrote: post #504
akerl_ wrote: post #482

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When was the payoff of a stock not from selling it later?

> When was the payoff of a stock not from selling it later? This is such a funny comment, historically you bought stocks to extract profits, ie dividends. Now you make money from houses and stocks by value appreciation instead of rent and dividends, you can see how that leads to very different behaviours and how that is not very stable compared to buying based on rent and dividends.

Yeah, I'm kind of in shock that anyone would think this is the normal way things always worked. I'm not that old yet, I was born in the 90s!

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

#514

Post by jedbrooke »

I know this will never happen, but wishful thinking has got me thinking about the “perfect” ad algorithm. Advertisers don’t want to waste money on impressions that won’t convert. If AI got smart enough that it would truly know which ads would convert and which would not, then the “perfectly relevant ad” would only be stuff you actually need, and if you don’t need anything, no ads!

of course, this will never happen

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

#515

Post by akoboldfrying »

bbmatryoshka wrote: post #75
akoboldfrying wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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!"

Usually the elephant in a room is something very evident about which no one wants to discuss about

Yes. My post was a joke -- I was trying to make fun of GP's (to me, baffling) use of the phrase "elephant in the room" by proposing an unlikely explanation for why they seemed to get its meaning back-to-front.

(Thinking about it a bit more, I actually think that the phrase's meaning could have really gone that other way. Nothing in the phrase itself suggests that the elephant is being deliberately ignored -- we only learn that critical part "in the background" via culture. For comparison, the similarly structured "bull in a China shop" means exactly what you would expect, without any implied reversal.)

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

#516

Post by [deleted] »

jedbrooke wrote: post #514

I know this will never happen, but wishful thinking has got me thinking about the “perfect” ad algorithm. Advertisers don’t want to waste money on impressions that won’t convert. If AI got smart enough that it would truly know which ads would convert and which would not, then the “perfectly relevant ad” would only be stuff you actually need, and if you don’t need anything, no ads! of course, this will never happen

[deleted]

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

#517

Post by magicalhippo »

colonelspace wrote: post #507
the__alchemist wrote: post #503

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The YouTube algorithm seems to be this bad. I listened to a song a few weeks ago... now that song is in almost every page on YouTube for me. Homepage, sidebar, search results. It's just everywhere. I've already listened to it. I don't want to listen to it again every single day for the rest of time.

Even worse, listening in YouTube Music pollutes my regular YouTube feed. Why have two apps when they're the same thing?

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

#518

Post by ghost-process »

colonelspace wrote: post #507
the__alchemist wrote: post #503

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The YouTube algorithm seems to be this bad. I listened to a song a few weeks ago... now that song is in almost every page on YouTube for me. Homepage, sidebar, search results. It's just everywhere. I've already listened to it. I don't want to listen to it again every single day for the rest of time.

Apologies. That's probably because of people like me. I listen to the same 5-6 songs and click through on the home page.

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

#519

Post by SlinkyOnStairs »

yuliyp wrote: post #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…

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.

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.

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