✍️ New post: Ad Infinitum

[matthiasott@mastodon.social]

️ New post: Ad Infinitum

Google announced the biggest change to Search in 25 years at #GoogleIO. But where are the ads…?

Ad Infinitum · Matthias Ott

Web design engineer, UX designer, teacher, and speaker – helping teams build websites and digital products with a focus on CSS, accessibility, and performance.

Matthias Ott – Web Design Engineer (matthiasott.com)

[chriskirknielsen@front-end.social]

@matthiasott It's mind boggling. It's like blockchain all over again, some person has the idea of "let's use it for everything" except this time it made it to some stakeholder at Google and they're killing their flagship product for… sloppy results which won't drive any traffic to the very sources they slurped up? Eesh, count me out. (well I am already not using Google Search personally, but count me out twice then?)

[ameliabr@front-end.social]

@matthiasott This is an excellent write-up Matthias, following the money to find the gotcha under all the gloss.

I still suspect they will eventually include conventional advertisements, but covert ads in AI answers are more concerning.

Most countries have either regulations or media-industry standards requiring advertising & paid placement content to be identified. Public pressure will be needed to keep that so. And ideally require info about all personalization data used in the ad auction.

[mantish@indieweb.social]

@matthiasott great article!

"Google is betting its entire future on a world where people eagerly hand over their emails, their files, their habits, and their trust"

They have such a big market share and they know people don't really make this choice consciously. Most people are unaware or don't make a big deal out of this.

[codecapitano@social.vivaldi.net]

@matthiasott another thing is that I can‘t decide anymore to not see ads. Currently we can use content blockers to get a more peaceful and less distracting browsing experience. We are able to decide which sites we support by selectively allowing ads to be visible. This isn’t that easy anymore with the new ad mode (maybe using local ai to rewrite the results to cut out the intrusive content but might be hard because of a much higher level of personalization). Which furthermore might make it even harder for people to dissect ad content from real content.
// ps: sorry this put in in a bit of a doomsday mode. There might be positives as well.

[matthiasott@mastodon.social]

Oh! Listening to my favorite podcast @shoptalkshow reminded me that I forgot to connect the dots to another, probably totally unrelated detail: that Chrome just shipped with the Prompt API and a 4GB Gemini Nano model, despite pushback from other browser makers.
https://matthiasott.com/notes/lazy-and-prompt