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

Posted by sofumel 11 hours ago

We're testing new ad formats in Search and expanding our Direct Offers pilot(blog.google)

514 points | 433 commentspage 7

kdavis 7 hours ago|

Surprised pikachu face

reacharavindh 5 hours ago||

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..

amazingamazing 10 hours ago||

Surprised it took this long.

swader999 8 hours ago||

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

tanepiper 3 hours ago||

So AI AMP....

anonzzzies 10 hours ago||

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

doginasuit 9 hours ago||

> 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.

Joscharb 8 hours ago||

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.

cjenkins 6 hours ago||

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?

fhd2 6 hours ago|

SEO is definitely a relevant component still, AI mode does a traditional search under the hood. Gaming the system to rank high on the index is still going to matter. But it'll be less about tricking people into clicking and more about tricking LLMs into considering the information relevant and authoritative. For someone using traditional search, I'd wager that would actually improve the results a bit over time.

Then again, SEO gaming got a whole lot cheaper with LLMs, spammers spam even if there's not a great return, as long as it's cheap for them.

adverbly 10 hours ago|

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?

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