It's very possible that they never will, that instead the advertising will be so subtle nobody will be able to detect it. Including phrases similar to what products, brands, and their actual ads use in positive contexts, sentences that don't mention but make you think of products, being just slightly likely to bring a brand up than its competitor, and a tiny bit more critical of it, etc.
The goal isn't to have an ad->purchase, the goal is to make sure the purchase is more likely in the long term.
I agree they'd love to do that in theory, and it seems technically feasible. What gives me hope on that front is that marketers and advertisers (let alone the companies that pay them) have never shown the slightest capacity for that level of subtlety. The most sophisticated adtech today, produced by networks of massive data collection and analysis, ultimately just tries to shove as many loud, disruptive ads in your face as possible.
I think if you had this incredible technology that could manipulate language to nudge readers in the softest possible way toward thinking a little bit more about buying some product, so that in aggregate you'd increase sales in a measurable way that nobody would ever notice, it would just quickly just devolve into companies demanding the phrase "BUY MORE REYNOLDS GARBAGE BAGS!!!!!!!!" at least 7 times.
I've noticed this even with product placement in film and television. It's not enough that Super Agent X drives a Palmora Targon, they just have to pan, zoom, tilt the camera to include a shot of the Palmora logo perfectly centered in frame for a few seconds as the car careens off a cliff. I'm only surprised the protagonist isn't also talking about how well the car has served him with its <insert technical details> as he laments its loss while he parachutes to safety.
I’m pretty sure it would be measurable. How else would advertisers pay for it? And given that advertisers would know about it, it would also be generally known. I wager that enough people and businesses would reject it, if it isn’t outright illegal in the first place.
Who says it has to be measurable in the output? It could be correlated with searches and purchases of fingerprinted users/demographics, or even just temporally.
I think subliminal advertising is banned in quite a few countries - not sure about the US - so it might be a problem internationally. I know that here in Australia there was a big scare about it in the mid 2000s, some station was cutting 100ms ads into shows. Not sure about the efficacy of it though, I’m sure it would be better if you watched a whole ad.
Edward Bernays created a method to get people to buy/hate/like things. It is used all the time. Its manipulative and shockingly effective. You will never see it coming. It is used all the time on everyone for any plethora of subjects. Subliminal advertising while mildly effective can not hold a candle to the Edward Barnays method of selling.
Meme magic, is what I call it. Like how the stage magician moves whole islands for the crowd, TV magicians move whole populations by changing their internal representative models of reality.
> It's very possible that they never will, that instead the advertising will be so subtle nobody will be able to detect it.
I was going to write a rebuttal to this, about how more subtle forms of advertising are likely not very effective, and then I remembered subliminal advertising.
It's largely been banned (I think), but probably only because it's relatively easy to define and very easy to identify. In the case of LLMs, defining what they shouldn't be allowed to do "subliminally" will be a lot harder, and identifying it could be all but impossible without inside knowledge.
Yeah, the laws against subliminal advertising were written in a rather knee jerk reaction to the creepiness of the entire concept instead of as a result of careful study and analysis.
How effective is it? We don't know, but there is nothing of potential value to lose so nobody really cared. Just ban it and move on.
This is credible simply because this is how advertising works. Product placement, free products for celebs, modern life awash in images that make us desire things.
And they were actually praised when they did start doing ads because they weren't as obtrusive as the existing heavy duty in-your-face Flash animations and they were relevant to a user.
It quickly turned Google into the biggest / most valuable internet company of all time ever, and it still wasn't enough for them.
I've had adblockers running for as long as I can remember so I'm blisfully unaware of how bad it is now... mostly, I don't have adblockers on my phone and some pages are unusable.
When ads are too many blame website owners, as far as I know Google does not hijack websites to put more ads.
Ads done right is the least bad way of supporting free stuff for people who don't want to pay the cost. But people with ubo punish all sites regardless of whether they do ads nicely or not.
You are right now writing in a thread about upcming future where promotion is embedded in the content so that content itself is one big ad disguised as whatever. Do you really think it's a better alternative to clearly delimited and unmistakeable ads?
Ads on the page aren't the same thing as ads interspersed with the results. The ads used to be in a sidebar, or in an inset with a different background color that appeared above all results.
Read your own link:
> For example, entering the query "buy domain" into the search box on Google’s home page produces search results and an AdWords text advertisement that appears to the right of Google’s search results
> Google’s quick-loading AdWords text ads appear to the right of the Google search results and are highlighted as sponsored links, clearly separate from the search results. Google’s premium sponsorship ads will continue to appear at the top of the search results page.
It’s crazy on the web when you point out that google or google products used to be much better in the past someone will come out of nowhere to tell you it’s always been that way
what is this instinct? anyone that’s over the age of 25 would know
"The rules were you guys weren't going to fact check."
The instinct is about pointing out factual inaccuracies. What they wrote is either correct, or not. If it is not, and someone knows better they can and should point that out.
If you, or some other commenter, have a fuzzy feeling that google is worse than it used to be you are free to write that. You are perfectly entitled to that opinion. But you can't just make up false statements and expect to be unchallenged and unchallengeable on it.
Except that jkaptur is the one making up false statements, and then providing "citations" that contradict him. I don't think an instinct to point out inaccuracies can explain that. There would have to be inaccuracies to point out first.
If you believe stuff like this isn’t actual astroturfing, you must face that from somewhere there seems to exist a deeply ingrained belief from a subset of extremely vocal and argumentative people that Google is amazing and if it isnt well that’s just how the web is now (ignore the google man behind the curtain that created the modern web in the first place) and if it’s not that well, it’s always been this way (even if it hasn’t).
There is a very strong stance on this site against talking about astroturfing, and I understand it. But for the life of me, I cannot figure out where this general type of sentiment originates. I don’t know any google enthusiasts and am not sure I’ve ever met one. It’s a fairly uncontroversial take on this website and in the tech world that google search has worsened (the degree of which is debateable). Coming out and saying boldly “no it isn’t, you’re lying” is just crazy weird to me and again I’m very curious where that sentiment comes from.
see some of the sibling and aunt/uncle comments in this thread to get at a little of what I’m talking about.
I was a google fan back when they first started and were just a search engine. Search engines like Yahoo and excite became massively bloated and ad-filled while google was clean and fast.
I wasn't a fan for very long. Google got creepy fast, and at this point their search is becoming useless, but for a short time I really thought that Google is amazing and I was an enthusiast.
All I see here is someone making a claim and someone else making a different claim. They may have erroneously intended the claim in opposition, either missing or interpreting differently the 'interspersed' qualifier. Or, alternatively, they may believe when any ads appeared is more meaningful in the context of this discussion.
I think Google search has gone downhill tremendously to the point of near uselessness and have been a Kagi subscriber for awhile, but I don't see astroturf in this instance. Do you have other examples?
> Except that jkaptur is the one making up false statements, and then providing "citations" that contradict him.
I believe I have covered that case in my comment. Let me quote the relevant part here for you: “What they wrote is either correct, or not. If it is not, and someone knows better they can and should point that out.”
That being said could you help me by pointing out the inaccuracy in jkaptur’s comment? It seems fairly simple and as far as I can see well supported by the source.
Other than the fact the parent comment to this subthread is posting a literal factual innacuracy regarding the history of ads on google - It’s not just one guy’s “fuzzy feeling.” It’s been written about in so many thousands of words over the last two years and is the general sentiment across the tech space. It’s sort of the major reason big companies like chatGPT, and smaller ones like Kagi are trying to swoop in and fill this void. it’s fairly obvious to anyone paying attention.
You can sealion with posts like this all you want but every time someone counters a post like this with ample evidence it gets group downvoted or ignored. You are also making an assertion that you’re free to back with evidence, that google and google products are not noticeably worse than 10 years ago.
Since we don’t have a time machine and can’t study the google of 2015 we have to rely on collective memory, don’t we? You proclaiming “it’s always been this way” and saying any assertion otherwise is false is an absolutely unfalsifisble statement. As I said, anyone over 25 knows.
Besides perusing the wealth of writing about this the last two years or so, in which the tech world at large has lamented at how bad search specifically has gotten - we also see market trends where people are increasingly seeking tools like chatGPT and LLM’s as a search replacement. Surely you, a thinking individual, could come to some pretty obvious conclusions as to why that might be, which is that google search has got a lot worse. The language models well known to make up stuff and people still are preferring them because search is somehow even less reliable and definitely more exhausting, and it was not always this way. If it was always this way, why are so many people turning to other tools?
> Other than the fact the parent comment to this subthread is posting a literal factual innacuracy regarding the history of ads on google
Sounds like it should be very easy to counter their argument then.
For my education could you tell me which part of their message is inaccurate? The “Google was founded in 1998” or the “and you could buy ads on the search results page in 2000.” part?
> You are also making an assertion that you’re free to back with evidence, that google and google products are not noticeably worse than 10 years ago.
I did not make such an assertion. Where in my comment do you think i’m making that assertion?
> You proclaiming “it’s always been this way”
I’m sorry but who are you quoting? Did you perhaps misclicked which comment you wanted to respond to?
Many people who post here are, were, or would like to be Googlers. Maybe not so much astroturfing ao much as a kind of corporate hasbara (though maybe both).
> Maybe not so much astroturfing as much as a kind of corporate hasbara
What's the difference? In astroturfing, someone pays people to form an organization, claim to have no external support, and do some kind of activism.
In hasbara, the government of Israel pays people to not form an organization, claim to have no external support, and do various kinds of pro-Israel and pro-Jew activism. This looks like astroturfing with the major vulnerability of the no-external-support claim shored up.
At that time and it's what got them the market share. Once they achieved monopoly status "Don't be Evil" was quietly replaced by "You call that an acceptable margin?!"
You obviously haven't been A/B tested yet. I got very obvious advertisements in a super simple question I asked last week to ChatGPT. The question was "When was the last year it was really smokey in Canada" it answered in one paragraph, then gave me about 6 paragraphs of ads for air purifiers, masks etc.
I'd guess we're only 6-12 months out from a full advertisement takeover.
This is of course, absolutely, master sahib boss man.
Have you considered buying a ChatGPT filter/scrubber to clean your results? Only $9.99 a month! Not available in all areas, not legal in most of the world.
I would wager that the most prevalent use of AI today is to sell you ads. Whether through market analysis, campaign analysis, content optimization, and content generation.
thank you. the idea that this will be the one thing that doesn't get enshittified when it's being so heavily pushed by the people who enshittified everything else is frankly absurd
