[nelblu]

> We’re introducing more helpful ads in AI Mode

I always chuckle when ad companies say that. I have never seen a helpful ad in google search, but well I have been using adblockers forever so I would not know.I am honestly curious though, for those who don't use adblockers - what percentage of ads that you see are actually helpful?

[sedawkgrep]

Since when have we considered ads something helpful?

Their purpose isn’t to be helpful. They're there to sell you something, and nothing more. Any semblance of helpfulness is misinterpretation and merely coincidental.

[lelanthran]

> Since when have we considered ads something helpful?

Depends. Ads a low-effort large-reach pathways for lead generation, mostly useful for B2C penetration.

I also did sales when I ran my own company, and I can absolutely guarantee that ads can be helpful. When talking to leads you're talking to someone who a) never saw what you offered but is listening to you anyway, or b) saw what you offered and decided to contact you.

The very first thing I'd do in sales is try to determine if the person I was talking to had a) A need my product could satisfy, plus b) Authority to make the purchase, and c) The budget to actually follow through.

The last thing I wanted to do is spend a bunch of my limited time talking to people who never had any intention of pulling the trigger on a contract; those are much harder to convert to paying customers (not impossible, just harder) and were almost never worth the effort.

My best-case scenario was "Someone reached out to me". Ads are a way to make that happen.

Now, if you're talking about internet ads, then you're talking about a different beast altogether (B2C), and those ads can be helpful to purchasers if they were already in the market for $FOO.

The problem is that internet ads are almost never worth the money - a significant number of clicks are from bots, another significant number are from accidental clicks and only a tiny tiny number of them are from people with the intention to buy $FOO from somebody, and they are just checking our your $FOO offering to compare.

[lesostep]

>> mostly useful for B2C penetration

Might be useful for a B that wants to penetrate some C, but is it really useful from a penetrated C perspective?

[nticompass]

Are we still talking about ads?

[edoceo]

Of course. It seems like an illustration of who's getting F-ed

[daveguy]

You argue that ads can be helpful... by saying all the ways ads are helpful to the business. That's not what Google means. It's a way to make ads not sound like an obnoxious shitshow by pretending they are helpful for the consumer. The only way they are remotely helpful is to let someone know about a product they didn't know about. But that's not what ads are really for and we all know it. They're for manipulating people into buying a product, but whether they need it is purely coincidental. The admongers can stop pretending otherwise.

[lelanthran]

>> Now, if you're talking about internet ads, then you're talking about a different beast altogether (B2C), and those ads can be helpful to purchasers if they were already in the market for $FOO.

> You argue that ads can be helpful... by saying all the ways ads are helpful to the business.

Are you sure that's all I said.

[daveguy]

Your example on the statement was about the companies. What Google said has nothing to do with the companies. They're clearly trying to paper over the manipulation. I was giving you that credit for the one thing they're slightly good for once. But really we all know that consumers can find products just fine on their own through word of mouth and reviews. But advertisers manipulate that too with paid reviews and astroturfing. Way to pount out the only thing I agreed with you on as if I didn't, even though the majority of your post was arguing for the ads because they benefit companies. And you even said those internet ads that let people know about a product aren't worth the money. You are a true advertiser. Congratulations.

[lelanthran]

My point was that sales people don't want to waste time talking to people who aren't interested.

Are you sure your derision is warranted?

> You are a true advertiser. Congratulations.

I have never purchased any online ads. This is how far off the mark you are.

[BLKNSLVR]

So what you're saying is that when Google says 'helpful ads' they mean helpful to the companies selling the things that are being advertised, ie. Google's real customers, not helpful to the people who get the ads smeared all over their screens.

That makes it make sense.

Google fucking suck.

[worik]

Yes. Good points

Ads are useful, but to whom? Not often the consumer!

The benefits ads have to the consumer can be obtained other ways, like a well functioning search engine.

Imagine if Google used AI to improve search results rather than maximize the revenue from, and irritation by, ads

[jordigh]

An ad is never helpful because ads are designed to mislead me into buying something I didn't need or knew about before I saw the ad.

If nothing else, an ad cannot impartially compare a product with the competition (and sometimes the "competition" is buying nothing at all), therefore every ad lies.

If I already needed or knew about it, I didn't need the ad.

If I was happy with my life without the product advertised, I didn't need the ad.

Furthermore, ads are fueling our capitalist, consumerist economy that is destroying the planet. Ads are a literal existential threat to humans.

[drfloyd51]

I saw an add for a medicine that was new on the market and my friend who could use the meds, was unaware of its existence.

Now, after a doctor’s involvement, my friend is on the new med and it treats their condition better and the quality of their life is improved.

[pasquinelli]

seems like the ad was superfluous. the doctor treating your friend's condition would be aware of new drugs relevant to your friend's condition. i go to a doctor because i don't know about medicine, i don't want to be educated on medicine from snake oil salesmen.

[drfloyd51]

How does it seem like the ad was superfluous?

The ad triggered a series of events that helped my friend.

The doctor, for whatever reason, was not the primary motivation.

[jodrellblank]

Conspicuously absent from your scenario is the way the doctor becomes aware of the new drug. How does that happen?

[jamespo]

Ah this world where doctors are perfect and know everything

[BLKNSLVR]

Are you the said doctor, drfloyd51?

If so, I'm not so sure it is advertising, as being discussed here, that you're referring to.

If not, funny coincidence.

[drfloyd51]

Lol. No.

I am partly named after the doctor in the song Comfortably Numb.

[specproc]

> Furthermore, ads are fueling our capitalist, consumerist economy that is destroying the planet. Ads are a literal existential threat to humans.

I'm sorry, a single anecdote does not invalidate the above.

Ads are evil. They make us desire things we don't need, undermine our self-esteem, and in the large part just sell scams. I'd be happy to ban most forms of advertising. It's a plague.

[freedomben]

This happened to me as well, and during a football game ad (which I generally skip and despise highly). The signal-to-noise ratio is extremely low with ads, but they indeed can be helpful sometimes.

[dylan604]

> If I was happy with my life without the product advertised, I didn't need the ad.

Well, how do you know that your life couldn't be better with the product? /s

[s1artibartfast]

I need a new dishwasher. I dont want to go knocking on doors until I find somewhere that sells them. Im glad they have signs, webpages, and info sheets.

Promotion and discovery are important. Advertising is the spread of information. Of course some can be bad or misleading, and that is bad.

[rcxdude]

Publishing information about your product on your own website is not really what most people consider advertising. Nor is being added to lists of similar products. Most people object to 'push' advertising, where attempts to persuade you to buy a product are inserted whereever your attention is, as opposed to 'pull' processes where you have a need and are trying to gather information on how best to solve it.

[s1artibartfast]

How about buying a spot in the yellow pages?

[_DeadFred_]

Your examples are of passive information gathering. Surveillance driven behavioral manipulation across every screen you own is a different than looking up the list of local appliance stores. I rarely see ads trying to compete on product specs. When there is information it is low value and distorted because it has huge holes from selective omissions.

[s1artibartfast]

yes, that is the point I am making. It is not advertising that is bad, but particular types of advertising that bother people. Those that are misleading or intrusive.

[BLKNSLVR]

That's the way I got all my stuff. Knocking on doors. If there's no answer then I see if the door is unlocked. If it is... new stuff!

I've tried to match the absurdity of your example.

[adrian_b]

I do not think that I have ever seen on the Internet a helpful ad. When I want to buy something, I search what I want or I go directly to online shops that I have used before or to price comparison sites.

Nonetheless, mostly before the appearance of the Internet, when I was reading various technical journals, especially during the seventies and the eighties of the past century, e.g. magazines or journals of electronics or of computers, I was considering most ads as helpful, as they were making me aware of various things that I might have wanted to buy.

Unlike the ads that bother me today, those ads in magazines or journals intended for more competent buyers contained enough technical details and prices to make possible comparisons between products, and they were also easy to skip when not interested, instead of covering important content on a Web page and making efforts to provide a visual distraction that makes difficult to focus on the useful content of that Web page.

The Internet ads are completely unhelpful because they are never about something that I intend to buy in the near future. The most stupid thing is the fact that after I have searched for something to buy, I am bombarded for a long time with related ads, but that is exactly when with certainty I am no longer interested in that kind of ads, because I have already bought whatever I had been searching for.

[jodrellblank]

> "The most stupid thing is the fact that after I have searched for something to buy, I am bombarded for a long time with related ads, but that is exactly when with certainty I am no longer interested in that kind of ads"

Please see this comment exchange from 3 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37218627

> "the correlation between $just_bought_thing and $will_buy_another is very, very high ... Showing someone ads for products in a category they recently purchased from is one of the most effective things a store can do ... the data is exceedingly clear."

[rcxdude]

I'm sure it's one of the most useful signals for the advertisers, but it is also one of the most irritating behaviours for the consumers, because even if this is a very high correlation in advertising terms, it's still the majority of the time not actually accurate for the consumer (like with all ads: I buy some orders of magnitudes fewer products than I see ads, even with adblocking, so even if I only bought things I had seen ads for, the vast majority are not helpful to me).

[pavlus]

> the correlation between $just_bought_thing and $will_buy_another is very, very high

This looks like an argument against advertising the same thing. Why would you advertise something, they were already going to buy?

But showing an ad before their next purchase definitely would improve the numbers on the "our conversion rate chart" _advertised_ to ad buyers. A con played by ad companies to sell more ads.

[aembleton]

If you're researching which fridge to buy on Gemini, then an ad might be helpful. So long as they've got the data to answer your questions such as how wide it is.

[spockz]

But only if that result contains all the facts, and doesn’t show only the fridge that they have an ad for while there also other fridges that fit.

[bombcar]

Advertising really only helps in two scenarios - it makes you aware of a class of product you had no idea existed (perhaps searching for toilet paper shows you a bidet ad) - or it makes you aware of a brand you hadn’t considered before.

And even the second is on shaky ground because by design it won’t tell you really where it stacks up.

I suppose you could argue that making you aware of sales/deals is “helpful” but that’s closer to what I’d classify most advertising as - zero-sum.

(Advertising of a different kind has a use, allowing companies to “sponsor” activities they like in a way the shareholders won’t revolt over. The more you consider companies to be feudal lordships the more it all starts to make sense.)

[mrweasel]

> Since when have we considered ads something helpful?

At some point Google ads where genuinely good and helpful to me. If you needed to buy something, and you didn't know who sold it or what it was called, the Google ad engine would yield better results than their search.

Now Google also broke that part. All ads I get are for Temu, Fruugo and other weird sites that I guess does drop shipping, maybe some marketplace stuff. It's the same sketchy sites that's return for almost all searches. It's rarely the "brand sites" that you trust who shows up first in the "Sponsored products" section.

[smsm42]

I am old enough to remember a brief period where search engine ads were sometimes helpful because you could search for a thing and get an ad for a thing and click and buy a thing. That went away quickly once the optimizers discovered they could earn money by SEO-maxing, charging the premium and then just ship you somebody else's goods and make you pay for the whole thing and their profits. And it became the red queen game, where if you don't SEO-max, nobody is even going to know you existed.

[kibwen]

This. Ads are industrialized brainwashing designed to induce dissatisfaction in the viewer to stoke demand for shit you don't need. And because companies pay for ads and then pass the price on to you, you're getting taxed on everything you buy for the privilege of being brainwashed.

[pixel_popping]

I disagree-ish because I've been sold by ads things that remain in my life today a long-time later, which mean that it was genuinely helpful, I'd say the ratio is minimal, but still sometimes it's on-point, I actually discover a lot of products thanks to ads.

[codingdave]

Since when were we the customer?

They are helpful to the people who buy the ads, not those of us who have them injected into our experiences.

[yubblegum]

> Since when have we considered ads something helpful?

They are not. The utility of companies advertising their products can be trivially served with dedicated 'advertising' channels without enabling stealth surveillance by big co. and their paying clients, various goverments.

[ninjagoo]

> Their purpose isn’t to be helpful. They're there to sell you something, and nothing more. Any semblance of helpfulness is misinterpretation and merely coincidental.

Maybe it isn't quite as black & white as that?

What about an ad run by a non-profit that doesn't have any marketing professionals at all? Said non-profit attempting to connect to consumers?

What about listings on craiglist? or facebook marketplace? or personal ads in the local newspaper?

Do you have a proposal/alternative to help with market discovery, customer discovery? Search has in the past served that function, but is likely to be soon dead.

[throwaway27448]

> What about listings on craiglist? or facebook marketplace? or personal ads in the local newspaper?

You opt in to looking at these, often for something specific. It doesn't lower your general quality of life like ads do.

> Do you have a proposal/alternative to help with market discovery, customer discovery?

Yea: we should stop building our society around encouraging people to buy crap they never asked for

[moooo99]

> Since when have we considered ads something helpful

I have genuinely met people who claim that ads are helpful and interesting and used this as a justification for adware companies to stalk you every step you take on the web.

[prepend]

I’ve met people who enjoy lots of gross things. That doesn’t make the things gross to me, or the vast majority of humanity.

My guy take is that they are mindrotted by ads into thinking they are good for them. Digital Stockholm Syndrome. Or maybe a Myth of Sisyphus type situation.

[thewebguyd]

The simpler explanation is that a significant segment of the population genuinely enjoys the rampant consumerism and view ads as a helpful discovery tool as they are actively seeking inspiration for their next purchase.

TikTok effectively became a shopping mall because of this behavior, and long before technology there has always been a large demographic that treated shopping as a hobby and form of entertainment.

If ads were universally repulsing to the entire population, we wouldn't have seen the development of current adtech. The uncomfortable reality is that most people either are apathetic toward ads, or actively want to be served ads. 60 to 70% of the global internet population still browse without any ad-block. Think back to how many people willingly and purposefully watched infomercial shopping channels like QVC?

The ads are a symptom of a society that largely enjoys consumerism.

[reaperducer]

Since when have we considered ads something helpful?

Their purpose isn’t to be helpful. They're there to sell you something, and nothing more. Any semblance of helpfulness is misinterpretation and merely coincidental.

Pithy, dismissive, reductionist, and wrong.

Yes, most of the bottom-feeding ads you see these days are along the lines of your description. But those are not the only ads, not the only method of advertising.

Good advertising is informative. iPod ads let people know that iPods exist. An ad for a new album lets you know that a band you like, but don't follow closely, has something you might want to try. An ad letting you know that "Chainsaw Y is on sale this week" is helpful for people thinking about buying a chainsaw. An ad demonstrating "Chainsaw A is as good as Chainsaw B, but costs less" is helpful for people considering an alternative.

The problem is the race-to-the-bottom mentality that has consumed the advertising industry since 2008. This is largely fueled by the ad tech industry which prioritizes things like "engagement" that can be presented in a pretty chart to middle managers, but don't actually mean anything. That's how you end up with all the obnoxious pop-ups and videos.

Ads for chainsaws on a chainsaw enthusiast web site is fine. Ads for a refrigerator I already bought two weeks ago is just a waste in a dozen ways.

[otherme123]

> Ads for chainsaws on a chainsaw

Or what Google is doing for years: a wall of ads for "Black & Decker" chainsaws when you specifically search "Husqvarna" or "Stihl", sending the results you want to the sixth or seventh place in the page.

[sedawkgrep]

> Pithy, dismissive, reductionist, and wrong.

No, it's not.

I completely unplugged from broadcast TV simply because I can no longer stand to be bombarded with FUD, manufactured lifestyles, propaganda, etc., that provides absolutely no useful information about a product, or really anything other than reminding me that X company's Y product exists.

[JeremyNT]

"More helpful" to the person selling the ad, perhaps :)

[embedding-shape]

The people who are buying ad spots and creating ads absolutely believe they're helpful, not just to you, but to their client. Their purpose is to helpful, to the company, who wants your money and who gives the marketer their money, and with this action, the marketer will believe whatever is needed to do their job, as always.

[scrollop]

And larger companies are more able to purchase ads, reducing a breadth of stores and options.

[charcircuit]

A customer buying something means that they have found something valuable. Helping people increase the total (personal) value of what they own is helpful.

[carlosjobim]

Sometimes people want to buy something.

[smsm42]

Selling something to me can occasionally be helpful, because I need things from time to time, and at that moment offering to sell me a thing that I need is helpful. What is annoying is that with all billions upon billions supposedly spent on figuring out what I need to sell it to me, the best they can do is "oh, you bought shoes once? Clearly you're the guy who's into buying shoes, let us spam you with shoes ads for the next 5 years!"

[hansmayer]

Oh, they don't mean helpful to you. What they mean is, helpful to their revenue.

[saimiam]

FD - I pay Insta to advertise a product for parents.

The results of above mentioned advertising have been great. I get inbound enquiries, parents get their curiosity about the usefulness of what I offer whetted. I don’t understand how the ad was unhelpful to the parent and me.

[mattlondon]

I typically block ads as well, but more recently I changed some setting in the default Android newsfeed thing and some ads started to show through amongst the news items.

The ads there are usually fairly innocuous (i.e. not disruptive, not flashing auto play vids etc, they just look like another news item and you can just scroll past them like other news articles you're not interested in), but I have actually found them useful. I am wearing a T-shirt right now in fact that was advertised to me a week or two ago as "on sale" for £8 (eight) and which I clicked through and purchased. There have been one or two other examples of things there that actually have been useful or at least interesting to me right now. So they actually have been useful/helpful in that regard.

So I am a bit conflicted here. It is no cost to me to click on the ad, and I bought some things that I use but would probably have not got otherwise. Am I being manipulated to part with my money? I dunno. Would I have bought a £8 t-shirt anyway if I was just in a shop and saw it? Maybe. Was the ad actually quite well targeted and appropriate? In this case yes.

I think on balance I would say those news feed ads are acceptable to me. I have problems where it is totally irrelevant and disruptive. Hopefully the AI mode ones will be similar to the news feed ones. I would be pretty upset if the ad content was directly worded into the response.

[dotancohen]

I love the idea of targeting advertising. But the current implementations I hate.

The ASR voice recorder app gets this right. It lets me use the full featured version for three days, after which I need to watch a few ads to get another three days. I choose when to watch the ads, and if I'm late there is nothing worse than a small nag at the bottom of the app. I actually now start every day with the ads, while I cook breakfast, and it is a positive experience. I could also just pay for the app and be done with them.

[ravenstine]

The problem with the idealism of targeted advertising is that it assumes that there is always an ad that fits your desires. In reality, some people have very niche interests and preferences, and not every business advertises through the same channels or with the same budget. Ads will pretty much always cater to the lowest common denominator even if you account for the individual.

[abustamam]

I like indie board games but I almost never actively seek indie board games (ie I don't search "indie board games" but I do search for like Cat Tower which is an indie board game).

I still get ads that I'm interested in in that niche; I just choose not to click them because I think my wife will kill me if I collect any more board games :)

[michaelbuckbee]

Search ads do seem like the one ad type that kind of flips that though. Where it's not based on some general set of interests, but literally the thing you're searching for at that moment.

[miyoji]

They seem like that, but in practice, human marketers are your adversaries, and they're buying ads on targeted search terms. I can search "better pancakes than Waffle House" and a marketer at Waffle House will have bought the ads so I just see ads for Waffle House's pancakes. This is not actually useful to me at all.

[johannes1234321]

I think the very old Google was better in this: They analysed current intent by looking at current search and contents of the current page one looks at. There an ad may solve a specific current need. As soon as past profile overrides this the relevance goes down: It's great that two weeks ago I spent a lot of time on travel sites, but now my summer vacation is booked and all related ads are irrelevant.

[IdiotSavage]

> I am wearing a T-shirt right now in fact that was advertised to me a week or two ago as "on sale" for £8 (eight) and which I clicked through and purchased.

This means the ad was effective. But was it useful to you? Did it save you from having to look for it yourself?

If you were not thinking something like "I need a certain T-shirt" before this came up, it's likely the ad created a desire in your mind which you didn't have. You got manipulated successfully by the advertiser.

[jmathai]

I think what was left out of the blog post was "helpful to the advertiser".

The meta point is that advertising has become so ingrained into society it really is difficult to differentiate if a need or desire originated intrinsic or externally. It's really great for companies selling stuff.

[Forgeties79]

The super concise version of my typical rant is that we aren’t just being simply served up ads. They are mining us for data every step of the process and then using it in invasive ways or selling it to their friends who will use it for God knows what. We don’t know what they’re doing, when they’re doing it, what they’re using it for, and we have no way of not participating once we’ve walked through the door. There’s no warning sign that actually tells you what is happening and no realistic way to opt out except for never opening that URL in the first place. You literally can’t be an informed consumer if you want to be on the Internet

[furyofantares]

We live in a world where ads are the primary way information about products enters the information sphere. That seems like something we should fix to me, but it's where we are, and it means if ads are well enough targeted it can be rational for an individual to want to consume them.

Also I think people pay much of the price of ads even if they don't view them, via increased prices. The trillion dollar advertising industry money ultimately is paid by consumers. It is a necessary cost to try to launch a new product because we are reliant on it for information and because all your competitors are advertising.

[yarekt]

I sort of wish there was a google "ad" search, where its like google search but only for ads, for the rare cases you want to buy something, and are looking through for a compatible product. Make advertisers differentiate by providing more information about their product to help me make a choice rather than shoving the product everywhere else hoping that I'll buy the thing out of fatigue

[abustamam]

I don't think I've ever seen a helpful ad on Google.

But Instagram, despite me only using it to keep in touch with friends via DMs, seems to know me very well. I get a lot of ads for puzzles and board games and video games, which are right up my alley. I've purchased a nontrivial amount of stuff from Instagram ads. Very few were life changing, except maybe an electric nail clipper which is the only way I can clip my infant daughter's nails. But the rest are all fun stuff that I've gotten value from.

And FTR I do use an ad blocker both on my browser and my modem came with one. I guess the modems one isn't great though because I still see Instagram ads.

[laurentiurad]

What do you expect them to say? More annoying ads? They're trying to wrap this in a positive way. Everyone knows that ads are annoying.

[ventana]

I find all ads — both search ads and website ads — very helpful in training the brain to ignore the noise. Isn't it amazing how we trained ourselves to immediately detect the 1pt hidden "Sponsored" mark and scroll the page down to the first real search result, or immediately locate the Close or X button on the pop-up ad making sure none of the actual ad content gets through our well-trained firewall in our brain. Amazing. Browsing the web is such a fun and dynamic experience these days!

[hoppyhoppy2]

I believe in brain plasticity but I also believe in uBlock Origin.

[iso1631]

If an advert was helpful I would be able to click the "show ads" button

I used to do this. I used to pay for adverts -- computer shopper was a magazine I traded real money for to get the adverts.

If ads aren't opt in, they aren't useful.

[davnicwil]

I think weirdly, ads embedded in AI search responses actually maybe do have a chance at being helpful (as long as it's clear from the context of the question that I may be willing to pay for a solution) just because they could potentially be quite well matched to the specific thing I want, or if they're not quite as well matched but offer other benefits, explain the difference.

At the moment search ads aren't very helpful because you have neither of those things. You always get them for any type of query, and when you do get them you don't know if the thing being shown will exactly solve your problem, or only approximately, and the work is much more on you to find that out by reading the product's marketing pages further.

If all that could be done for you up front, reasonably honestly, then I could see it being useful. I mean to be sure, in some small percentage of searches I really am looking to buy something and really do want to be usefully, honestly pitched on available options.

[whynotmaybe]

I have seen 1 "helpful" ad yesterday.

When searching for sonarqube, I received an ad for a competing product I'd never heard of and I'll check them today to see if it fits my need.

[stackghost]

>I have never seen a helpful ad in google search

I have never seen a helpful ad, anywhere, in my life.

"Ads help people discover new products" is a lie that people who work for companies supported by advertising revenue tell themselves. If $deity exists, and they were to delete all ads from the world tomorrow, never to return, everything would be just fine.

Truly great products sell themselves by word of mouth.

[wraptile]

I agree, maybe "ads are useful" could have been true long time ago before the world was not as connected.

You could maybe argue that ad revenue could subsidize the costs of information delivery but information delivery costs are basically non existent today - it's all about attention delivery and thats an entirely different thing.

[jorisboris]

It seems techies collectively try to avoid ads, but clearly other segments of people actively click and buy through ads. I would love to get a marketing expert's view on this. It differs by product obviously, but there must be some common character variables (gender, wealth level, ...)

I bought once through facebook ads, and now I actively try to avoid any ads

[bombcar]

Advertisements have multiple purposes - brand awareness, product awareness, sale awareness, etc.

Coca Cola advertising is mainly brand awareness - remind you they exist but not really directing you to buy one “right now”.

Product awareness is how you learn about new product - usually trying to convince new customers, but sometimes just trying to swap existing customers. These can be “offensive” (a new product aimed at taking a competitors market share) or “defensive” (keeping existing customers from switching away). Of course this overlaps with above.

Sale awareness is how you “scoop” up customers who have been exposed to the above but haven’t bought - you’re offering a “deal” so they’re more likely to buy. Most online search-targeted advertising is this kind, and is the most immediate (click and buy) - the other two are just to make it so when you want product, you want their product.

[Eldodi]

Some might argue that Adwords got so successful because ads competed like search results, on bid AND relevance, not just bid.

If your ads inventory is big enough, ads can actually be a better answer to your intent than organic content, because the companies behind the ads have a much stronger incentive to satisfy your need.

[_heimdall]

Paid ads always negatively distort the results.

If AdWords or search consider both relevance and the fee collected, the end user will never be shown the most useful results consistently. If the goal was usefulness they would only pick results by relevance and take no fee at all, or take a flat fee that isn't based on a bidding system.

[ZetsuBouKyo]

For people who think often, ad is only useful in very few situations.

The ability to think often is ultimately a capability that only a minority of humans possess. Therefore, for the vast majority of people, ad is very useful.

For example, my retired parents enjoy buying little gadgets from ads.

[kccqzy]

A pretty high percentage. But that’s only because the ad goes to the same destination as the first organic search result. Just search for a brand whose web address you don’t know, and usually both the ad and the first results goes to the brand’s home page.

[RulerOf]

I saw a helpful ad once.

The organic search results didn't offer what I needed at all, but the ad took me straight to an e-commerce site that sold what I wanted. I had it in my hands at a reasonable price about 5 days.

It was for a Nintendo Wii component video cable, back in 2007.

[Humorist2290]

An exception that proves the rule, but KRAZAM's channel on Youtube has legitimately helpful ad reads. Rare Data Hunters [0] for example ends with a 1 minute Cloudflare ad that's basically a crash course in their services. Having worked with GCP and AWS but not so much with Cloudflare, that ad gave me a surprisingly clear idea of what the important pieces would be.

Truly an exception though. I think generally the only people for whom ads are helpful are advertisers.

0: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IU4ByUbDKNc

[NDlurker]

Personally, I sometimes like targeted ads. If I'm intentionally shopping, it is nice to see ads relevant to my interests. Not saying the whole Internet should be a highly surveiled mall, but they do have their place

[AlexandrB]

It would be great if I was shown things "relevant to my interests". That's not what targeted ads are because ad placement depends on who is willing to pay the most, not on what optimally matches what I want. The most obvious example is search ads in the App Store that show you a competitor's product (or an outright scam) as an ad when searching for a specific app. Now extend that kind of dynamic to any other product category and you start to see the problem.

[NDlurker]

True. I guess I forgot about the whole auction process.

[croon]

I understand your thinking, but I have never felt that the "promoted result" in any search when shopping around inspired confidence in them being the best fit or value for me, even though they're technically a relevant result.

More directly: Someone paid to have them surface that result for me, instead of having me find them for being the best. I can understand the need to bypass the SEO arms race of yesteryear, but it still rubs me the wrong way.

[beanjuiceII]

this might sound wild but..on some platforms that are good with figuring out the types of things i like, I get many ads that I actually like. facebook for example i almost exclusively go there just to see what kind of products i wouldn't otherwise know about that it might show me (some of which i've bought). plus if it helps pay for services than i'm all for it.

the part that crosses the line for me is when the platforms are peddling malware and scams through ads. google search would have a ton of this suprisingly..so i hope in AI mode they can improve things

[netdur]

I find helpful ads on Google Search sometimes, and it can be the easiest way to get results, but most of the time, ads (and SEO) ruin search accuracy to the point that it's becoming totally useless

[arational]

Someone on here said his wife got upset when he set up adblocker for her.

[ulfw]

The only helpful ads are the ones that waste money on Google (namely those companies/products/results that show up on top anyway, right below the sponsored very same ad)

[bombcar]

The fact that a brand has to pay money to outbid competitors on their brand is something that feels it should be illegal. Google “forcing” Coca Cola to pay for ads on the search “coca cola” so Pepsi doesn’t appear at the top is somehow wrong.

[Antibabelic]

I don't have an ad blocker on my laptop. The ads I get are pretty much entirely generic and irrelevant to me, I don't remember ever consciously clicking on an ad.

[BurningFrog]

The targeted ads in Google Search were hugely helpful, at least in the beginning.

Suddenly, you could search for something obscure and get ads about that exact topic. This enabled a huge number of small niche businesses to exist and prosper.

We now live in the world Google Ads created, and we take for granted the there will be someone selling Bulgarian accordion cleaning kits out there that I can easily find. But targeted ads made this world possible!

[reaperducer]

I have never seen a helpful ad in google search

That's a good thing.

I don't mind ads, as I understand that without money, web sites go away. But I'm very careful about being tracked. That, I don't think is cool.

It's not unusual for me to see ads for companies hundreds or even thousands of miles away, and often selling things for which I do not possess the correct body parts.

I consider that affirmation that I am mostly successful at staying off the ad-tech radar.

[prepend]

I mind ads and don’t think sites would go away. They’d just be less profitable.

I mind ads because they crowd out less profitable margins and result in worse products. Imagine how nice and useful Google could be if they optimized for search instead of ads.

[bigstrat2003]

And even if you pay for the product - a business model where the incentive should be for them to make the product better for you - you still get greedy executives who decide to try to juice their revenue with ads (cable TV, streaming services, etc)! I don't know what can be done, but honestly ads have gotten to be an intolerable business practice.

[IshKebab]

> I have never seen a helpful ad in google search

I have, fairly often in fact. That's why Google makes such a bucket load of money from their ads - they're actually vaguely relevant.

I've don't think I've ever seen a relevant ad outside of Google though, and I still wouldn't say "yeay, helpful ads!". Nobody is going to want them even though I occasionally get relevant ones and click on them.

[eithed]

Maybe one or two in an ocean of crap. And even the ones I do see which are interesting I start despising, because I will see them hundreds of times. Base44 - I will never use your services because of the ad bombardment. Same with that fucking toothbrush that doesn't have bluetooth. It never amazes me that ad agencies just serve me 1 or 2 same ads all the time, but :shrug:

[illwrks]

I have to wonder if helpful ads most likely refers to the type of add for the exact search result… So, for example if you search for Coca-Cola the first ad will be something Coke has paid Google for. That helps Google earn $ and helps Coke not loose to a site with better SEO and confusion. Does it help you… maybe.

[thih9]

It’s because you haven’t given them enough access to your data. Otherwise they would be able to offer more personalized and accurate ads.

I should know, I block tracking and see annoying and unhelpful ads.

And I browse social media with their algorithmic feeds, where the content is hyper personalized, helpful and mostly ads too.

[cucumber3732842]

I remember the good ol' days when you'd search for the specs on a 10yo server you pulled out of the dumpster and then a day later you'd see "Aging HPC infrastructure, upgrade to latest IBM X-series blade architecture" banner adds in hilariously irrelevant places like thepiratebay or a certain hub of videos.

Those "naive" ads from 15+yr ago are far more relevant than anything I've ever seen since.

[rib3ye]

Recently I’ve been starting up quick web projects and a number of external services are recommend (Neon, Resend, Railway), and if I just let the agent rip, signed-up for and implemented. Is it confirmed any LLM producer or provider has been receiving kickbacks for these technical decisions?

[_heimdall]

Legally they would gave to disclose with the recommendation that its a paid advertisement. That said, they were also legally not supposed to scrape the entire internet for training so if they are getting kickbacks I wouldn't expect a confirmation.

[bluecalm]

For me ads on Instagram are often spot-on, same with Facebook although I don't check that too often. Google search always seemed completely off, I don't remember seeing one helpful ad here (helpful being defined as an ad of something I might be interested in buying).

[baal80spam]

> I have never seen a helpful ad

There, I fixed it!

[iso1631]

I sought out the He Man trailer because I thought I'd be interested in it. I decided I was and will watch it at the cinema next month.

That was a helpful advert.

I also sought out the Supergirl trailer and decided I wouldn't bother seeing it. Again a helpful advert.

In both cases I chose the advert.

[HelloUsername]

Actually it should be:

> I have never seen an ad in google, because I use adblockers

[Eduard]

Assume the article reader / audience to be someone buying ads on Google and how unhappy they are with how ineffective ads have become in recent years, and you understand AI Mode ads are presented here as more helpful for advertisers.

[nibblecid]

In my case I haven't seen a single helpful ad in google search. They try to make the ads related to my work or hobbies but it's not helpful at all. Aside from Google, Instagram seems to be nailing the ads algorithm better.

[com2kid]

When AdWords first showed up (decades ago) they were legitimately useful at times. They were a dramatic improvement over previous ad tech that just used plain word matching to try and find "relevant" ads.

[small_model]

When I want to buy something I search for it or ask AI for recommendations etc. Why not have a toggle, this is a search for product so shower me with ads related. Not all the time when I am just causally browsing.

[BLKNSLVR]

I use an ad blocker, but I'm occasionally exposed to YouTube outside of my ad-free bubble and I find the ads useful for identifying brands to actively avoid.

[foobarian]

Tbh that is a pretty vague statement. Could be 0.01% more and it would still be technically correct. Could be doubling the number of non-helpful ads in the meantime

[freedomben]

I use an adblocker and despise most ads with a burning hatred, but the absolutist position of "never helpful" isn't right. My example: A game I've been wanting to buy for a while recently went on sale on Steam. I saw an ad when I opened Steam. I bought the game for the low price, and it is now one of my favorite games I've ever played (Burnout Paradise City - highly recommend, but wait for a sale)

[rastrojero2000]

Those ads do help them, though. They're an ad company now

[bryanrasmussen]

I used to see helpful ads every now and then about 18 years ago.

[iLoveOncall]

I never have on Google Search (I also block them to be fair), but I've booked a lot of shows through Instagram ads actually. Shows I learnt about only through those ads and I would have been disappointed to miss.

But yeah that's literally the only platform where I've ever had useful ads. Even other meta products only have absolute garbage ads.

[LightBug1]

Just came here to say the same thing. Local gigs and the like, instagram is actually decent.

And I'm a to-the-bone hater of ads. Ad-blockers up to my eyeballs. Except for that one niche of local gigs on insta.

[gloosx]

Well, they are definitely helpful for Google incomes

[ajross]

> I have never seen a helpful ad in google search, but well I have been using adblockers forever so I would not know.

That this self-awarely-self-contradicting quip is the top comment on the page is about as essential a summation of HN's collective thought as I can think of.

I remain amazed at the pathology that results in the truth that, even in the world as it exists today, the one enemy that truly unites the supposedly-elite techno-leaders of our increasingly advanced society is...

...horror about seeing advertisements for products we're probably buying anyway.

[2OEH8eoCRo0]

I search for Converse sneakers and top result is an ad for Converse sneakers! Genius! Pay these genius engineers more! So incredible. How are they smart enough to show me exactly what I search for?!

But seriously. What are we paying advertisers for? Converse pays Google so that they don't show Vans when I search for Converse? Sounds like extortion or protection money.

[chistev]

None.

[Razengan]

> I have never seen a helpful ad

I have never purchased anything [just] because of an ad, nor do I know anyone who has.

But I have been turned off from EVER buying some things because of their obnoxious ads.

The whole ads racket is a case of the emperor with no clothes, an ugly self-justifying cancer infesting human civilization.

And to those perpetuating the racket who'll say "but how will people find out about products??" the answer is fucking better search and filtering systems.

[otikik]

“Helpful to our short-term bottom line”