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If this search engine ever gets popular, it will just push advertisers from ads to product placements. That's it. Good luck writing your own algorithm that det

If this search engine ever gets popular, it will just push advertisers from ads to product placements. That's it. Good luck writing your own algorithm that detects product placements from genuine human experience. (It would need an AI that is smarter than average human.)

lelanthran 2y ago
> If this search engine ever gets popular, it will just push advertisers from ads to product placements. For me, that would be an improvement over the current 'cover content with advertisements', 'interstitials', 'user-tracking', 'privacy-abusing', 'displace legitimate search results' situation we have now. > That's it. Good luck writing your own algorithm that detects product placements from genuine human experience. Pretty trivial to detect if the content-author (whether ChatGPT or human) is going overboard. A single page exhorting the benefits of 20 different products? Unless that page is performing a comparison or review, pretty easy to pick it up just from the links alone. And if it is performing a review or comparison, it's going to get excluded from search results for people not looking for reviews or comparisons. IOW, "working as intended", for me.
- nicce 2y ago
  > For me, that would be an improvement over the current 'cover content with advertisements', 'interstitials', 'user-tracking', 'privacy-abusing', 'displace legitimate search results' situation we have now. Now, we have possibility to separate ads and real content. With product placements, there isn't any way and you are forced to absorb all the content to see what is actually ad and real content, wasting your time endlessly.
oneeyedpigeon 2y ago
"Product placement" sounds vague/subjective - are the posts on Hacker News 'product placement'? I think, on average, most people would prefer a form of product placement to privacy-abusing, experience-debilitating, irrelevant ads.
- raincole 2y ago
  > "Product placement" sounds vague/subjective - are the posts on Hacker News 'product placement'? This is my point. You can't write an algorithm to filter them out. > I think, on average, most people would prefer a form of product placement to privacy-abusing, experience-debilitating, irrelevant ads. Perhaps. Personally I'd like my ads to look like ads instead of like contents. I'd like to watch a 15-sec irrelevant ads before a tutorial than a video titled like a free tutorial that you need to watch to the middle way to realize a paid plugin is needed.
  - cgriswald 2y ago
    > I'd like to watch a 15-sec irrelevant ads before a tutorial than a video titled like a free tutorial that you need to watch to the middle way to realize a paid plugin is needed. If I'm going to be wasting my time, I'd rather it be a single direct waste that I can downvote on search results and even block the creator from my future searches, rather than having my time wasted across all videos, forever. (Additionally without ad-driven algorithms videos might be shorter and more to the point.)

lelanthran 2y ago

> If this search engine ever gets popular, it will just push advertisers from ads to product placements. For me, that would be an improvement over the current 'cover content with advertisements', 'interstitials', 'user-tracking', 'privacy-abusing', 'displace legitimate search results' situation we have now. > That's it. Good luck writing your own algorithm that detects product placements from genuine human experience. Pretty trivial to detect if the content-author (whether ChatGPT or human) is going overboard. A single page exhorting the benefits of 20 different products? Unless that page is performing a comparison or review, pretty easy to pick it up just from the links alone. And if it is performing a review or comparison, it's going to get excluded from search results for people not looking for reviews or comparisons. IOW, "working as intended", for me.

nicce 2y ago
> For me, that would be an improvement over the current 'cover content with advertisements', 'interstitials', 'user-tracking', 'privacy-abusing', 'displace legitimate search results' situation we have now. Now, we have possibility to separate ads and real content. With product placements, there isn't any way and you are forced to absorb all the content to see what is actually ad and real content, wasting your time endlessly.

oneeyedpigeon 2y ago

"Product placement" sounds vague/subjective - are the posts on Hacker News 'product placement'? I think, on average, most people would prefer a form of product placement to privacy-abusing, experience-debilitating, irrelevant ads.

raincole 2y ago
> "Product placement" sounds vague/subjective - are the posts on Hacker News 'product placement'? This is my point. You can't write an algorithm to filter them out. > I think, on average, most people would prefer a form of product placement to privacy-abusing, experience-debilitating, irrelevant ads. Perhaps. Personally I'd like my ads to look like ads instead of like contents. I'd like to watch a 15-sec irrelevant ads before a tutorial than a video titled like a free tutorial that you need to watch to the middle way to realize a paid plugin is needed.
- cgriswald 2y ago
  > I'd like to watch a 15-sec irrelevant ads before a tutorial than a video titled like a free tutorial that you need to watch to the middle way to realize a paid plugin is needed. If I'm going to be wasting my time, I'd rather it be a single direct waste that I can downvote on search results and even block the creator from my future searches, rather than having my time wasted across all videos, forever. (Additionally without ad-driven algorithms videos might be shorter and more to the point.)