Google's AI Search Summaries Officially Have Ads (theverge.com) 30
Google is rolling out ads in AI Overviews, which means you'll now start seeing products in some of the search engine's AI-generated summaries. From a report: Let's say you're searching for ways to get a grass stain out of your pants. If you ask Google, its AI-generated response will offer some tips, along with suggestions for products to purchase that could help you remove the stain. The products will appear beneath a "sponsored" header, and Google spokesperson Craig Ewer told The Verge they'll only show up if a question has a "commercial angle."
Glue for your pizza (Score:5, Funny)
People read those? (Score:4, Insightful)
I just scroll right through those (and the rest of the header crud, including the imbecilic "other people ask") towards the bottom of the page where the "real" search results (still?) are. Doesn't everyone?
Re:People read those? (Score:4, Informative)
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I take a moment to thumbs-down every time. Sometimes I'll give feedback asking (with wildly varying degrees of politeness) that they stop stealing content from others and regurgitating it as LLM vomit.
Fight Big Data; Poison the well.
=Smidge=
ADception was a lousy movie (Score:2)
Leela: Didn't you have ad's in the 20th century?
Fry: Well sure, but not in our dreams. Only on TV and radio. And in magazines. And movies. And at ball games and on buses and milk cartons and t-shirts and written on the sky. But not in dreams. No siree!
bonus content^W AD:
Great ads have little ads upon their backs to bite 'em,
And little ads have lesser ads, and so ad infinitum.
And the great ads themselves, in turn, have greater ads to go on;
While these again have greater still, and greater still, and so on.
-- abject apologies to Augustus De Morgan
Re: (Score:2)
Nope, not me, but it depends on what kind of search I'm doing.
If I want something quick and easy, I'll definitely look at the AI summary. For example, "What's the difference between a PPO and POS health insurance plan?" I don't want to click through to a bunch of FAQ sites trying the find the answer, I like that AI serves up a concise answer right at thetop.
If I'm looking for something more deeply, where I want more detail, yes, I'll skip the summary and go to the search results.
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I don't want to click through to a bunch of FAQ sites trying the find the answer, I like that AI serves up a concise answer right at thetop.
Concise, yes. It is that. But the important question is whether it is correct , or just some random word salad (now attached to an ad for something that may or may not be relevant to the question).
Re: (Score:2)
When I need a quick-and-dirty answer, I'm not usually too interested in "exactly correct," "in the ballpark" is usually good enough. It did a good job of explaining the difference between PPO and POS. If I needed precision, I'd go to the source documents.
Re: (Score:2)
Every AI that's been tested has, on occasion, erred far beyond "in the ballpark," the the point of outright hallucination. Telling you to put glue on your pizza is not "in the ballpark." At least one lawyer was nearly disbarred because making up case law whole cloth isn't In the ballpark."
No AI can be trusted without verification, so the AI overview is, literally, completely without value because you have to go the the sources anyway.
(And Google knows it. This isn't intended to be of any benefit to the aver
Re: (Score:2)
The "glue in the pizza recipe" reminds me of a stunt that happened back in 2017. Burger King ran some TV ads where someone said "Alexa, what is a Whopper?" If the viewer had an Alexa device nearby, it would respond by listing ingredients as found in Wikipedia. Pranksters changed the article to say that cyanide was one of the ingredients, a "hallucination" that Alexa happily repeated. https://www.bbc.com/news/techn... [bbc.com]
This is no different. The glue thing came from a joke posted on Reddit. https://www.forbes.c [forbes.com]
Re: People read those? (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
No recourse? You mean like this? https://apnews.com/article/goo... [apnews.com]
My point was that it doesn't take AI to hallucinate. We have many ways to consume false information or "fake news", with or without AI. AI isn't a special case.
My first search ... (sigh) (Score:3)
"How do I disable AI-generated summaries?"
Re: (Score:3)
Google has instructions on how to do so [google.com].
These did not show up in an AI overview, but it was the top link.
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Result: duckduckgo
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udm=14 (Score:3)
is what you want [arstechnica.com]
There's also a kajillion Firefox addons that exploit this trick.
Until Google gets tired of tolerating people who don't want their shitty AI garbage forced down their throat of course. But for the time being, it works.
Re: (Score:1)
Also saw this [reddit.com] as UBO filter:
! 2024-05-18 https://www.google.com/ [google.com] Block A.I Search Results
www.google.com##.M8OgIe > div:nth-of-type(2) > div
Re: (Score:2)
Google (or rather Alphabet) tolerates YouTube ad-blockers. Sure, it does try (and consistently fail from my experiences with the Vivaldi-integrated blocker) to get around them technologically, but it could just start to ban users. It does not. Guess even an ad-blocking user makes more money for them than a not-user. Same will probably be true for search. Not that I watch much YouTube these days after their last enshittification push.
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Google doesn't decide what add-ons Firefox/Waterfox can load: Mozilla does. Google controls the Chrome/Brave/Vivaldi/Thorium/Kiwi browser.
So glad.. (Score:3)
I don't use Google search, rather DuckDuckGo...
Google is no longer "search" (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
True that.
So much for useful AI (Score:3)
Why do people still trust Google anymore? (Score:2)
Google has become one of the worst companies on the internet, and the worst *for* the internet and I'm worried about how much farther they will sink.
They're an advertising company that wants to *be* the internet, via Android & Chrome/etc.
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Completely agree. Well, Google will go stale and already has gone stale in a lot of aspects and true to the typical enshittification process. And unlike, say, Microsoft, they have viable competitors.
Re: Why do people still trust Google anymore? (Score:2)
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You have obviously not tried any. Don't be a lazy ass. I not use Google maybe 3 or 4 times a year, typically do find out it does not find anything either.
The Enshitification (Score:2)
The Enshitification continues...
(Yes I use use DDG or Startpage but their results - mostly from Bing - are just lousy in far too many cases.)