[deprave]

People must remember that Google is first and foremost an advertising company. 90% of its revenue comes directly from advertising. Anyone who thinks they will prioritize anything over ad revenue is either very naive or very stupid.

Google's CEO declared it's "AI first" and they developed TensorFlow. If they wanted to, they could have easily prevented those ads from entering their network.

[coding123]

Might be easy, and I imagine they are going to shuffle employees around (they read HN) believe it or not, they are humans and make mistakes. It's very likely that up to this point in time, they didn't think to use ML on proposed ads, and even if they did, it's not like every employee working at Google has ML skills yet. The most advanced ML departments there are probably already working on their top priority issues that need ML. Second tier ML guys at Google are probably the ones that are learning ML just like many devs on HN, won't quite have the expertise to get this stuff moving quickly.

But yes, if they wanted to, they can divert their more advanced ML teams to tackle specific issues like this first and get it done. I really doubt this is a high priority issue for them.

[theDoug]

Please explain how, since it’s easy.

[webmaven]

I'll take a crack at an explanation:

Google has machine learning technology that automatically reads street address numbers on houses, regardless of angle, color, size, focus, or typeface.

Using the same type of algorithm to answer "does this ad have anything that looks like a button in it?" is relatively simple by at least two orders of magnitude.

So rather than it being "easy" in some absolute sense, what's meant here is that it is easy compared to similar tasks that we already know Google does routinely and has largely automated.

[yuriks]

Lots of things have button and aren't maliciously masquerading as download links. Furthermore, if they start doing that then ad producers will start changing their ad images to evade the algorithm. It's much harder to use ML for a problem when you have a malicious opponent actively working against it.

[SmellyGeekBoy]

It should be as simple as:

- Is this a download page?

- Does this ad contain a button-like image with the word "Download" on it?

Presumably the people creating these ads are specifically targeting pages with the word "download" in to create this confusion, it doesn't seem like rocket science for Google to apply the exact same rules.

[wordupmaking]

The easiest thing is to say something is too hard to even try that you don't even want to try for other reasons, such as green paper.

And changing the images to evade the algorithm would also directly affect how likely they are to trick people, so it's win/win?

[Sephr]

ML could be used as a tool to empower the reviewers to to review the most suspect ads first.

[rvnx]

There is a human behind every single creative shown on Google AdSense. There are even rules around these creatives (need to have distinct border and need to say the name of the advertised product).

[webmaven]

Yes, but evading the filter by making the ad not look like a download button (or link, I guess) also solves the problem.