Junk websites filled with AI-generated text are pulling in money from programmatic ads::More than 140 brands are advertising on low-quality content farm sites —and the problem is growing fast.

You are viewing a single thread.
View all comments View context
36 points

Yeah it’s even shit for dumb searches.

Decided to Google the most popular SUVs and I get a top 10 article where it expects me to click through each one so it can load a new page and ads for each item in the list.

Then you get the news tab in edge, msn news maybe and half the ads are literal scams.

permalink
report
parent
reply
16 points

The latter is infuriating to me. If I’m actually searching for a product, by all means show me an ad for the type of product I’m looking for. That’s a win-win scenario. How these mainstream sites put up literal scam ads I don’t understand. How can they be paying better than Ford?

permalink
report
parent
reply
20 points
*

We’ve come full circle. Original web searches sucked because you couldn’t trust the results to be ranked in a useful way. You could search for a historical fact and you were just as likely to get an 8th grader’s homework they posted online instead of a credible source. Then Google came along and solved that problem with their magic algorithm. Only took them a little more than 20 years to get to the point where their algorithm now sucks so bad that we’re back to where we started. But instead of an 8th graders homework, we get AI articles that appear to be trained from said homework. Fascinating.

permalink
report
parent
reply
1 point

Google overall has just turned to shit. You can’t trust any new thing they do, and their existing ones are degrading all the time.

permalink
report
parent
reply
11 points

Yeah ads are a plague and not just online.

I can’t walk around my town without having billboards and super bright ads shoved down my throat.

Driving down the motorway, yeah we’ve got ads here too. Don’t look at your phone but sure read this advert as you fly past at 70mph.

permalink
report
parent
reply

Technology

!technology@lemmy.world

Create post

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


Our Rules


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

Approved Bots


Community stats

  • 17K

    Monthly active users

  • 12K

    Posts

  • 544K

    Comments