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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

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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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[–] ShittyBeatlesFCPres 66 points 2 months ago (2 children)

You guys can hate on this but I, for one, have always dreamed of unreliable search results with links to relevant businesses embedded within the text. If only a voice assistant could read them out loud and also remind me to drink Pepsi every other paragraph, we’ll finally have achieved the promise of the Internet.

[–] thesohoriots 8 points 2 months ago

Nah man, you want New Coke. Catch the wave.

[–] tpihkal 3 points 2 months ago

Personally, I won't be happy until there are unskippable video ads before two pages of sponsored results with an AI summary somewhere in the middle of the third page of search results.

Of course there should be popups when advancing between search results pages.