Long ago, Google search used to be its own product. Now it's the URL bar for 91% of internet users. This is no longer fair.
Google gets to not only tax every brand, but turn every brand into a biding war.
International laws need to be written against this.
Searching for "Claude" brings up a ton of competition in the first spot, and Google gets to fleece Anthropic and OpenAI, yet get its own products featured for free.
Searching "{trademark} vs" (or similar) should be the only way to trigger ads against a trademark.
I get the intention here, but how do you limit the collateral damage? (Or do you not care about it / see reducing the ability to advertise as a positive?)
There are a lot of trademarks, and they have to be scoped to specific goods and services, but Google has no way of knowing if you're actually looking for something related to that trademark.
e.g. doing a quick trademark search, I see active, registered trademarks for "elevator", "tower", "collision", "cancer sucks", "steve's", "local", "best", "bus", "eco", "panel", "motherboard", "grass", etc. etc. I'm not familiar with any of those brands, but that's just a small sample of the fairly generic terms that would no longer be able to be advertised on.
e.g. Vice Media has a trademark on "motherboard" that covers the tech news blog website service.
Is it now impossible for Asus to place an ad for the official Asus motherboard blog on the search term "motherboard"?
Is it legal to advertise for "motherboard" for any good or service other than a tech news blog website?
Is it now illegal to advertise a website featuring in-depth motherboard reviews using the term "motherboard"?
If I search for "motherboard website", what is Google allowed to show me for ads, given they don't know if I'm looking for the Vice website, or motherboard reviews, or the Asus homepage?
If a plain search for "motherboard" results in Vice's website not being in the top results, is Vice allowed to advertise on their own trademark to put it above other results? (Either above organic results, or above paid results for motherboard manufacturers, depending on whether you're allowing the latter.)
this was one of the biggest problems of AdWords from beginning on: You could do brand-bidding unlimited, even today you see it every day: Search for brand X and competitor Y will show up with same words
That has caused some companies hosting conferences to pay for some of those ad spaces in advance.
It's visual and cognitive pollution on public space that I've never consented to - I find it viscerally offensive.
We don't accept billboards on hiking trails, or in elementary classrooms, or in courtrooms (as far as I'm aware, though I wouldn't be surprised if someone turns up a real-life grotesque examples) - we shouldn't accept them in other public spaces either.
But for your specific example - I get where you're coming from, but I'm skeptical that the ad market is even that functional.
Firstly, if I google "leatherman", every sponsored result for Leatherman brand multitools anyway. (And no amount of refreshes or re-searches gives me anything other than Leathermans.)
Secondarily, I'm not convinced that the set of advertisers (not counting Leatherman itself) that will advertise for "leatherman" are actually on average a better products for the consumer. (e.g. as opposed to lower-quality, higher-priced knockoffs.)
If I want them, I can use them. No need to justify ads for this use case.
But thanks, still useful on desktop.
This isn't true, there were many other ideas. It's just that only KPI was how much money they can make, thus ads won. Companies don't have an axis of ethics or morality.
The other day I had a DMV appointment scheduled on my Google Calendar with the office address saved in the location field. I opened the event and clicked on the address to navigate there.
I didn't realize initially but the first few Google Maps results were ads! When clicking on an exact address link!! I almost ended up at some apartment complex 2 miles away. Absolutely bewildering.
I bet they run some metrics, and while hyper-intelligent persons like you are annoyed, there is a chance that avg joes representing 95% of revenue are fine with that.
Steve Jobs looking back now is incredibly rare - someone who was wealthy but had the spirit of innovation to keep going again and again.
And.... the world is crying out for a google alternative. If it ever appears, the tech savvy people will be the first to move, followed by everyone else.
Use ChatGPT for getting answers, and use Claude for detecting the ads in ChatGPT, or vice versa!
I think invasive might be close to the right word, but in a different context. Not invasive to the content, but invasive to your psyche. AI + personalization goes past dystopian into terrifiying.
I know Anthropic made these ads about not having ads but Apple also made ads about thinking different, yet once they became successful they ended up thinking the same as every other business.
And once upon a time, Google did not do evil.
So yeah, the assumption unless shown otherwise is that things will get worse, and the user is just there to be sold whatever shit is paying most.
Their Go plan, which is paid, is getting ads.
Netflix?
Hulu?
Youtube?
Spotify?
Adobe?
Duolingo?
X?
Like if Netflix let showrunners inject ads into their shows and provided a technical platform for that, and the Stranger Things creators added ads to every episode... nobody would be like "it's not Netflix showing ads, it's the Stranger Things creators".
I don't think anyone has to worry about that.
If OpenAI plays their cards right, they can definitely end up in a similar position. Yeah a lot of programmers would probably pony up for Claude, but every lazy high schooler in the world would gladly hear about Raid: Shadow Legends to have ChatGPT do their homework for them.
Don't get me wrong it's definitely sucks, but man is it ever a profitable way to suck.
1. Focus on businesses and developers
2. Make money on productivity and API platform
Enterprises are particularly sensitive about their data being farmed (e.g. note that paid Google accounts don’t have their emails used for ads.)
Keeping that trust is not a differentiator and existentially important to Anthropic.
I think that, despite Anthropic's present statements, they will move to ads if ads prove successful for ChatGPT or Gemini.
It would be viewed as "leaving money on the table" by their board and shareholders if they didn't.
trust is lost in other ways.
1. many competitors
2. ways to pay for the subscription but no tier exists to remove ads
i can't even think of one.