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Comment by ignoramous | Hacker News Reader

> ... we want to highlight our guiding principle: the content of the answers you receive on Perplexity will not be influenced by advertisers ... Ads will appear in the US to start and will be formatted as sponsored follow-up questions and paid media positioned to the side of an answer.

Isn't masquerading sponsored follow-up question a loophole around the "guiding principle" of not wanting to influence the user here? I must say though, there's no easy way out for pplx since ads, by definition, compete for user's attention (and an unrelated / unobtrusive sponsor link / question / reference would be no good for the sponsor; which is to say, the sponsor is pplx's customer, not the end-user).

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I remember a time when ads were clearly on the sidebar of Google's search results so users wouldn't mix them up with the actual search results and unintentionally click them.

Then somebody at Google realized that if they moved the search results into the middle of the search result, then a lot more users would mix them up with the search results and click them. I'm sure it increased click-though rates by a lot.

Yeah, and pair this dynamic with the need for ever-increasing returns, you have just derived the primary driver of enshittification

This is what Google did. Even if you technically don't manipulate the search results around sponsorships, you can devote more and more real estate to the sponsored results, and gradually make the distinction between sponsored and normal results less visually apparent.

Google search has essentially been eaten by its own ad-based funding model, but I'm sure they made a ton of money on it up to this point.

every business is trying to sell you something. or make money off you somehow. doesnt necessarily mean its a bad thing, in fact you could think of it like a service we want and willingly pay for.

But not every business finds it usefulness gradually eroded by its revenue model.

It also looks very much like what Google said about ads in their initial paper...

Also I don't see any excemption for pro users. They must be joking if they think I want to pay for a service that delivers ads too.

> Also I don't see any excemption for pro users. They must be joking if they think I want to pay for a service that delivers ads too.

You might not want to, but you will. If the offered service is better than others.

I don't see how this won't eventually converge towards some kind of AI-optimized SEO; presumably there's some algorithm which surfaces sponsored follow-up questions for a given query?

Having some follow up questions designed to promote particular services actually can be OK. I regularly use pplx, but the follow ups tend to have a lot to be desired anyway, as much of the time they're just a rewording of a previous question, and I do at times get to the point where I'm looking for recommendations.

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