Technology

59405 readers

2910 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.

Our Rules

Follow the lemmy.world rules.
Only tech related content.
Be excellent to each another!
Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
Politics threads may be removed.
No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

318

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

submitted 1 month ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 month ago

Honestly, switching over to SearXNG was the best choice I ever made. Not only do I not have to see this AI bullshit, but it's so refreshing to not have to append "reddit" to the end of nearly every search I do to find anything even remotely useful. Being able to self-host it is also really nice now that I've gotten it and nginx set up.

It ain't perfect, but the last time I felt like I discovered such a big improvement to using the Internet was when I found out about ad-blockers.