Google is no longer asking — feed the AI or you’re not in search results
Kids today might not realize that, for about twenty years there, you could go to Google Search and find things you were looking for! Google now features a hilariously unreliable AI summary as the f…
But don’t worry! Google’s AI summaries will soon have ads!
dear fuck, pasting ads onto the part of Google search that’s already known to be unreliable and annoying at best seems like a terrible idea. for a laugh, let’s see if there’s any justification for this awful shit in the linked citation
Ads have always been an important part of consumers’ information journeys.
oh these people are on the expensive drugs huh
It's going to be so much worse than pasting ads if it ever actually works.
Rewriting the search results with LLMs let's you seamlessly mix the adverts into the text people are trying to read... That's why I need to sip a refreshing glass of coke zero(TM) when I'm contemplating the collapse of the internet into pure advertising drivel.
if there was ever a reason for going full ted kaczynski and enjoying the crisp taste of coke zero™ that would be it
Yeah, people who want a recipe for anything will get all the paying companies shoehorned in. To a point your result doesn't even match with your question, but at least it recommended you to pour some Brawndo™ into your cake mix.
that comment was dumber than pepsi.
Wait, are those people so fucked in the head they genuinely tricked themselves into thinking users... Like ads?
I swear every VP of Marketing at ShitCorp on mastodon shows up with that exact take in every adblocker thread. some of them follow it up with “…and the modern web wouldn’t exist without ads”, which is how you know they’re on the expensive drugs — these marketing geniuses haven’t noticed the fediverse’s got a pretty fucking dim view of the modern web as a whole
I think people will stop using AI if it has ads. People like LLMs because search engines return a bunch of Amazon affiliate link spam articles as the top hits under their own sponsored results which are also spam articles. Something that gives a straight answer is preferable even if it is often confidently wrong. If they put ads in the AI it removes basically the one thing it does better.
Ads have always been an important part of customers' information journeys.
Yeah; the fucking hazards obstructing the path to the destination.
It's as if Google hasn't merely stopped at prioritizing profit over providing a service that people actually value, but has set out with the deliberate goal of actively eliminating any and all possible value they might provide.
It's almost like a dare - "Let's see if we can arrange things so that we provide absolutely nothing of any value to anyone and still make billions."
I mean as a public company their end goal is to find the spot where the profit line crosses the satisfaction line. The goal is not to provide good service. It is to provide just enough service that you don't go elsewhere.
provide just enough service that you don’t go elsewhere.
It's not even that, is it? As long as they can force you to use their stuff it doesn't even have to provide any service.
If there was a way for Google to hold you at gunpoint via internet until you pay them $100 every day they'd have a fiduciary duty to do so.
capitalism: a simulacrum that signifies the absence of value
On the one hand, Google's still the dominant search engine, having used every dirty trick in the book to reach that position and maintain it. If you aren't on Google, you arguably might as well not exist.
On the other hand, Google's already under heavy scrutiny since being officially declared an illegal monopoly, and the public is pissed with how Google's declined in search quality - and deliberately so.
Part of me says we're about to see some truly wild shit go down.
also they're about to start squeezing even harder on the chrome-side control (along with some continuing sketch in android)
I'm an extremely cynical bastard but I also feel like there might be light in the tunnel. just hoping it's not a train I we can't hear yet.
part of me would like to see it involve pitchforks. maybe some torches.
we can be really california about this. I might still know where my old childhood pitchfork I used to turn compost is, and I can make it an acetylene torch hanging off a drone, if you want.
"Don't be evil"
"be utterly reprehensible"
You know they removed that from their motto... That's not their motto anymore cause $$$$$
If they squeeze this rock hard enough, maybe it'll bleed.
Google is so full of themselves, they don't even notice how they are slowly replaced by other means of searching. Not long and we'll say "Google used to be a search engine"
While I disagree. I hope like hell you're right.
for about twenty years
This all just makes me miss Jeeves.
How to piss off every artist with a website in a 5 mile radius:
But why they pay Reddit then? If they pay Reddit for having the permission to feed their user generated content to the ai, then they should pay every single site on the internet
This seems incredibly shortsighted even in their own framing. The SEO spammers who care about being on top of Google the most are the ones generating fake AI websites en masse, so wouldn't this just cause immediate AI inbreeding?
