> 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?

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

The only reason Google is pushing this AI crap is so that they can shove ads right into people's throats without them being able to use ad blockers (it's easy to block a web script but virtually impossible to block the text itself), effectively doubling their profits overnight.

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 tells me that either no one thought about what else this could be used for, or the short term gains are all they are thinking about.

I never got into DuckDuckGo, but here we go. Defaulted from yesterday when Google made AI Search a default for Google Search. Well, I have been using Altavista and others so I can get used to another one.

Well, yes. I mean of course they are. They're an ad company.

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.

> 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.

I wonder whose bright idea it was to label ads as 'helpful'. Do Google execs actually look for ads first when they google a question?

The first comment about Kagi here was much lower (10) than in the result (3) provided by Google to the query "what is a good search engine with no ads".

Dear customers, we regret to inform you that the existing hallucinations now include biased trash.

Most ads i see on YouTube are outright scams. Google and Meta are so evil.

I 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...

I've tried the AI mode and it seems to basically give the same results as a ChatGPT query - which raises the question why use Google AI mode and not ChatGPT? (or any other of the similar models?)

Google's AI Mode gives answers without clicks. clicks are what advertisers pay for. these new formats are Google solving its own disruption problem from the inside

I see where they are going but have doubts regarding the long-term success. Currently I use LLMs (definitely not Google) and search (mostly Google) to verify what LLMs say if I care by finding trusted sources.

Maybe it will work in the beginning until non-technical users realize that LLMs hallucinate very often (unless Google solved it somehow, but probably they didn't because they would have said so), they will lose trust in the results and go back to good old indexed search engines.

Maybe I am coping but thinking from my own experience.

Screw you Google

I still remember the assurances made that ads would only be text based and unintrusive

Eventually no one will write reviews because ai will steal all the results and information and not give any credit or back links so they will have no choice but to lie and say product x is the best, if the company behind product x pays some money behind the scenes, no ad mention needed, the poorer companies will have to buy a cheaper ad to get mentioned along side the expensive higher ai-tainted recommendation

This brings disbalance into the relations between authors and search providers. Creators used to be rewarded with traffic in exchange for their creations. Now all that is captured by the google.

Freedom of the strongest caused reduction of the opportunities of the weakest on whom the strongest became the one.

Thanks to timely action against Google's clear violations of the law and anti-competitive practices, we have a robust ecosystem of search engines with which to find content on the open web, and a wide choice of browsers.

It will be interesting how hidden those ads will be compared to current Search experience or what OpenAI is already doing.

It's a lot easier to mislead a user with an AI generated ad that with a Search result IMHO, I'm betting on a huige backlash if they don't make it VERY clear that ads are ads.

I guess I'm used to seeing the english language being mangled by corp-speak but "creative" as a noun that doesn't even refer to a "creative" person (which also feels like a recent addition) really grates!

Kagi is great.

So the same thing that ruined Google Search (replacing "knowledge search" with "product search") will now also ruin AI results. Got it (good riddance though).

we r now playing a game without winners well maybe except google or any of the large tech companies.

small businesses & brands etc spend a fortune on these ads & yet most of them see a negative ROI. they might as well be gambling.

just recently Google was found to be inflating Ad-prices (so yeah the 'auction' is fake)

maybe the only way to win is not to play. & do commerce without ads like how it has been done since eon

Google might be jumping the gun here... and making an innovators dilemma type mistake.

LLMs are an alternative to search engines, which endangers google's whole ad business.

"AI mode" search is a sort of bridge. It gets Gemini a lot of customers that otherwise would not have used an LLM at all.

They may get stuck trying to keep the llm pattern similar enough to the search engine that the adwords business working more or less the same way.

This could be self limiting.

> Highlighted Answers: When people are researching, they want helpful suggestions. Now, when AI Mode provides a list of recommendations — like the best language apps for an upcoming trip — highly relevant, high-quality ads are eligible to appear on that list as a Highlighted Answer.

The user asked for the "best language apps for an upcoming trip"?

Are you going to answer their question objectively?

What if the correct answer is apps A and B are what they need, yet the publisher of app C paid you to be a Highlighted Answer?

What if C is not only not among the best, but is a toxic load of poo?

Also, when are you going to stop often blatantly plagiarizing things people wrote on the Internet, for your "AI" answer, even though you absolutely know you're violating the social contract that built your company, and destroying the creators from whom you're stealing?

I've never bought anything from a search or social media ad. I can't imagine this will change that.

What I am really waiting for is ads on my commit messages.

But who'll pay for those ads? Why would I pay Google if it just plops out some LLM answer with maybe my site as a source - which 90%+ of people will ignore as they don't care about it.

And just when we thought Google couldn’t make themselves less attractive.

A more surprising title would be “Google announces search results will be included in AI Mode ads”

Allowing synthetic content to grow without limits will force the creation of a "synternet," an only-generative content network that can be accessed but will guarantee the classic internet to be human-focused, otherwise, internet data will lose value and the human incentive to surf will be lost

And there it is, the vaccum of AI consuming your data everywhere, used to train their models all goes back to... ads.

Same things with OpenAI. Ads.

I feel like we're right back in the early 2000's Internet again at least they aren't popups, we hope.

But with these models being embedded into, literally everything, will your screen on your car start showing you ads before you can turn the AC on?

It's coming

Anyone made a LLM model that parses such text and removes ads? Ad blocking is getting more interesting.

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.

Perfect. Ublock origin will block it on my end and the rest of the sheep will help keep it free with ads.

Ah, well that was my first guess as to how they'd make money.

[Product placement in The Truman Show clip]

Where are the AI based ad blockers? Would happily pay a subscription that filtered all ads and captchas.

The independent AI explainer is generated by the same Gemini that writes the ad creative next to it, inside the same ads product. Independent of what, exactly

The main reasons I'll never get a neural chip are, in increasing order of importance: A. Safety B. It gives them a vector to beam ads directly into my brain

They really couldn't have waited any longer after announcing the shift to AI mode. Almost immediately. I'm sure the employees who worked on it must be terribly proud.

...was this ever in doubt? Search accounts for >50% of alphabet's total revenue - they are hardly going to kill the golden goose intentionally

Your friendly reminder to check out a search engine that you pay for. I use Kagi and love it, and you might too!

What I'm most worried about is the fact that these types of ads can't be blocked. Kind of like undisclosed sponsored product placements mentioned in an article or movie.

I'm kind of worried that the AI offered to consumers will behave as a very savvy and manipulative shill or salesperson.

I use an adblocker and DDG. I sometimes use !g to search Google.

I wonder if people will run local models to filter the content they consume. On one hand I would hate to read slop output. I also dislike censorship. But on the other hand, I think that the information we decide to ingest is important and it's something we should have control over. The problem is you can't really decide what information to ingest until we've looked at it, after which point we've ingested it.

I digress. Thoughts?

I pay premium sub 200usd for gemini(which gives premium YouTube too) and share it with family. Would google make me free from ads too?

mega deflating - i was just telling a colleague how openAI missed the mark by trying to mimic google search by incorporating ads into chat responses... and then google follows suit. do not want

I’m so glad I use Firefox with ublock origin with the “ai widget” filter. It’s not perfect but you will pry it from my cold dead hands.

Ads and population control by propaganda are the future of AI.

GenAI in other fields is useless and only promoted by charlatans or the financially invested.

Least surprising announcement of the decade goes to…

Not long ago, some of those CEO clowns at Google, stated that Google is now an AI company. I had to chuckle, because I knew it was a lie. Google changed into an adCompany years ago already. That's why e. g. it killed off its search engine with promo-links and what not.

And now they admitted it AGAIN! "AI Mode" is basically an AdMode.

This also explains why they declared total war against ublock origin.

I think it is time the empire strikes back. We must get rid of Evil here - let's get rid of Google. This adCompany no longer has a useful purpose. All the "freebie features" (which are not free; ads pay for that) can be done by others, if people work together. We need no extension of more ads here.

Poor Google, there’s no money in anything else they do so they have to sell ads. How could it have come to this?

Please let me advertise beside incorrect content

oh cool so googles gone from fairly useless to totally useless now then.

>"Buying something big — like a new fridge or a TV — can be overwhelming. People want to see exactly what they’re looking for and why it’s the best option. To make choosing easier, we’re launching AI-powered Shopping ads. 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."

...for me this leads to the exact opposite experience: If you advertise your product in such a way I make sure to never ever buy it. Same for ads on TV, etc.

The "Don't be evil" Google feels long gone

Get the last ounce of milk from the dying cow.

The well is beyond poisoned. Almost anything I search for is returning AI generated vomit. I have not used google in weeks.

On youtube I use Unhook and only look at /feed/subscriptions, when I search I use before:2022. And am actually downloading what I find interesting, before google starts deleting because of the flood of vomit. Hard disks can not be manufactured fast enough to consume it.

Even HN is slowly becoming unreadable.

The internet is on borrowed time.

Show me more ads.

Its time to move on.

Try new things, make your own networks. Write your ipv6 address in the pub, under the table, in the top left corner, write it on the subway walls, and tenement halls.

Listen on tcp port 1492 and explain how to talk to you.

So AI AMP....

It will be an interesting vector for competition to attract customers.. when you search on {Claude, ChatGPT, whatever}, you get results based on what the model evaluated, and not based on advertisers who paid the most..

I thought Google would use their playbook of search - initially, everything works so good like magic until they enshittify the service by auctioning the results to who pay the most. This time around they are so bold they start from shit..

Surprised pikachu face

Are they included in the training too? Gee I hope so!

Surprised it took this long.

So every search will now result in an ad and/or hallucination?

> No one can serve two masters. Either you will hate the one and love the other, or you will be devoted to the one and despise the other.

If humanity makes it out of the current era with our dignity and intellect intact, I think we will recognize that allowing ad companies to build our vital infrastructure was a tragic mistake.

The whole ads in AI services just seem to be silly. Considering how many of these AI companies are not making money, I understand the "need" to do this, however it will for sure feel bad for the consumer.

Perhaps far too optimistic, but if AI search gets pushed heavily and traditional search becomes less relevant, could we see SEO fade for traditional search and it become less polluted over time? Or will search engines just stop caring about traditional search and it will become an even worse cesspool over time?

Comments 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?

Brace for impact...

Kinda interesting how Google is releasing a big wave of enshitifications immediately prior to the Anthropic and OpenAI and spacex IPOs.

On assumes there is a strategic reason for it, but I'm not sure about what it is.

Anyone have a theory or care to guess?

So the web is now pay to play.

Having AI do personalized sales as part of the ad appealing to what the customer actually needs is the future of advertising.

Yeah, Lets build the next generation AI and slap an ads on it for a good measure.

Is there any usable search engine out there that actually does just search?

Great. Google gets to hallucinate information and make us watch ads so they can earn money while they do it. Sci-Fi authors wish they could get a deal like that.

What AI Mode? (Glancing over to ublock)

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.

I've been using DuckDuckGo for about a year now and have found myself satisfied with the experience. This just reinforces that practice for me.

> We use the Gemini model to build creative tailored to that search, highlighting specific relevant features.

English is not my first language but I think this sentence can’t be grammatically correct?

i happened to liked Google AI mode, even wrote a composition about that [1] Now it is going to be enshittified, which is probably inevitable.

https://github.com/MoserMichael/tips_on_using_google_ai_mode

The enshitification will continue until morale improves.

From the page, “what are some top colleges…”

rAiNIer buSInEss sCHoOl

At this point, why do we, the end users, need Google for? Sure, companies might need Google to display their ads or to use Google Cloud. But end users? GPT, or Claude or Grok do a better job searching.

Will I be able to pay google to make its Claude code write code that uses left pad as a service.

The naivete that this wasn't inevitable is almost endearing, if it wasn't from the same crowd who's building this shit.

this is great for both consumers and businesses. The fake intellectual doomers who constantly lecture about how evil ads are, how everything is “gamed,” and how the internet is supposedly collapsing should probably sit this one out ;)

Fuck yes. I was worried about not having ads and google providing useful results again.

The last time i clicked on an AI link it took me to a page that wasn’t just more google ads or SEo bullshit. It was very disappointing I was looking forward to accidentally clicking more ads and instead found information relevant to what I wanted to know.

That's one small step for Google, one giant leap for enshittification.

Isn't this the whole point? Surely no one still believes in that stuff anymore.

Lmao imagine using Gemini. We all knew this evil shit was coming. You won’t be able to trust a word it says. They can pay to change the answer it gives you!

“Don’t trust ibuprofen, you need opiates. Your pain sounds really bad.”

Well, time to go to Kagi, I guess. Been putting off paying for this shit for as long as possible but at some point I guess it's inevitable.

Any decent alternatives? DuckDuckGo was always been awful for me in terms of relevant search results.

The enshittification has begun.

dog barks, more at 11