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 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.
Nah man, you want New Coke. Catch the wave.
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.
Cool, now it’s terrible and annoying. Use another search engine.
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.
Done with Google. Now paying $5 a month to use Kagi.com. Worth it.
I’ll stop going online before I have to pay for a fucking search engine.
If you are not paying then you are the product.
I don’t think that means what you think it means.
why would any of google’s customers pay to stuff its ads into such a broken feature?
it’s like embossing your logo within a toilet bowl – sure, a lot of people will get to see it but mostly only when it’s submerged in shit.
I sure hope there is some mechanism to compensate content creators because without traffic, there will be no new articles.
On the upside, maybe the ads won’t be as horrible as the AI results.
if it was terrible before then this doesn’t change anything
