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Comment by saagarjha | Hacker News Reader

> Google clarified these are not “ads.” The company points out that they only source free shopping listings for this widget and that the content is not sponsored.

I'm not sure I understand how these aren't ads? In any case, is this something that literally anyone asked for?

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The title in the screenshot says “Continue search for Office Chairs,” which sounds like it shows recent Google searches that have significant presence in the “Shopping” tab of google.com. Sure these aren’t “ads,” like the article says, but if they are links to Google Shopping then they indirectly generate revenue for Google by sending you back to google.com.

Agreed... who asked for this?

It's sort of like video search results. I search for a question. I get a result that looks like a video and not an ad. I click the link and get taken to YouTube where... an ad plays. And likely generates a higher RPM for Google than a text ad.

> is this something that literally anyone asked for

Google executives probably. This is what you get when you hand control of the entire web platform over to an ad company. And the only way to stop it is to depose Chrome as the dominant platform.

And no, that does not mean switch to Brave or Edge. Chrome forks by and large fall in line with Chrome's choices. Firefox or Safari are the only choices.

> And no, that does not mean switch to Brave or Edge. Chrome forks by and large fall in line with Chrome's choices

Not sure I'd agree with that.

Of course, Edge is built on Chromium, but Microsoft are free to make their own changes, and to reverse any changes from Google that they don't like.

So, in this case, Edge can give you all the performance characteristics of Google's own Chrome browser but without the ads... win-win I reckon.

Edge is better than Chrome, but only slightly: Microsoft has chosen to largely follow all of Google's platform decisions, including Manifest V3. The Edge PM is a former Googler, and is absolutely unable to grasp that he's collaborating with the enemy half the time.

With the increased privacy features built-in, it's definitely an improvement, and feeding Microsoft is less bad than feeding Google, but I'm not confident Edge's current developers have the backbone to stand up to Google's decisions.

> And no, that does not mean switch to Brave or Edge. Chrome forks by and large fall in line with Chrome's choices. Firefox or Safari are the only choices.

What choices? After seeing how they responded to Manifest v3 Mozilla seems pretty spineless compared to Brave.

So we're basically back to ad-supported Opera then?

Opera is also a Chrome fork now. Firefox and Safari are the only two major browsers not based on Google code.

Yeah. This doesn't seem like something that users would actually want, so there has to be a financial incentive for Google to do it. Perhaps they start off as "not ads" in order to minimise complaints about the feature, but intend to gradually allow companies to e.g. pay for prime spot.

For the average person, the definition of an "ad" isn't contingent on whether or not Google is getting paid for it. For the average person, a promotional 3rd-party text that is trying to get them to buy an office chair is an ad.

It's like Google claiming that if they give you free credits for adwords that it suddenly stops counting as an ad. Users don't care.

It's like when Mozilla says that the "Pocket recommended articles" they show on the new tab page are not ads.

These aren’t ads in that they directly profit Google’s baseline just by displaying them. Google profits from increased ad-spend on search result sites that those things link to. If however you think every product mention is an ad, of course these are ads.

Either way, these things shouldn’t happen. Browsers should enable everyone to use the web.

These are unsolicited offers to buy a good. In what world are they not ads?

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