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Google Is Stuffing Annoying Ads Into Its Terrible AI Search Feature (futurism.com)

submitted 2 months ago by [email protected] to c/technology

27 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Google's notoriously wonky AI Overviews feature — you know, the one that repeatedly makes up facts and literally tells users to eat rocks — is about to get a whole lot more annoying.

On Thursday, the tech giant announced that its AI-generated search summaries will now begin to show ads above, below, and within them, as a way of demonstrating that the technology is capable of actually making money.

It will also serve to assuage concerns that AI chatbots could eat into search ad revenues, which are Google's biggest cash cow.

Now, if you search how to get a grass stain out of jeans, as seen in an example in Google's blog post, you'll get an AI summary which contains a carousel of relevant website links, plus a heavy helping of "Sponsored" ads for stain removers. Revolutionary stuff.

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[–] subspaceinterferents 8 points 2 months ago (4 children)

Done with Google. Now paying $5 a month to use Kagi.com. Worth it.

[–] [email protected] 38 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

In case anyone reading this is curious, Kagi is not capable of storing the impossibly vast and expensive data storage and speeds required to query large indexes of the internet, and so leverages Google and Bing indexes in its search, which is exactly what SearXNG and DuckDuckGo both do for free.

What you pay for is honestly a fancy UI and the ability to quality control the search results for them, again already done for free by other search engines.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Wait, for real? I really thought kagi had its own thing going on, and that was why people would pay for it. Not like a fully bespoke index, but I assumed it was more than that. I guess the "quality control" is what I had heard about.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 months ago

There's no way on Satan's green earth that a small startup company started in 2018 has a search engine index as large and fast as the one started 30 years ago and has been indexing the entire internet since then (Google). Even Microsoft can't compete without dumping billions of dollars into Bing by forcing people to use it as default on their operating systems, renting/purchasing the now ancient Yahoo indexing databases, leeching software engineer talent from competitors with promises of huge paychecks, and greasing hands in China.

[–] bokherif 12 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I’ll stop going online before I have to pay for a fucking search engine.

[–] sirboozebum 1 points 2 months ago (1 children)

If you are not paying then you are the product.

[–] bokherif 4 points 2 months ago

I don’t think that means what you think it means.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 months ago

Same. Completed my switch this week on all my devices. No regrets. The results are excellent and well organized and it’s really useful.

Next project is to add the rest of my family to the family plan

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 months ago

Yup. I signed up to their unlimited a while ago, so I was happy to not notice this at all. 🙂👍