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Comment by wslh | Hacker News Reader

Are Google's driverless car just a way to show more ads? Instead of driving a car you could be watching an ad.

Automated cabs would be a great place to advertise for nearby businesses and things. "Google, what restaurants are nearby?" which gives a list sorted by relevance ( X of Y users returned to restaurant Z more than twice ), with a few purchased restaurant advertisements proceeding them

Unfortunately, as per the article, the response would most likely be:

"sponsored suggestion to “Buy a restaurants are nearby at Wal-Mart.”"

You know, after using Google Now on my phone, I'm confident that Google can deliver context-sensitive results that make sense. Not always, not for everything, but I bet they could pull it off in a cab just fine.

EDIT: I guess it's worth pointing out, however, that Google Now doesn't show ads.

> EDIT: I guess it's worth pointing out, however, that Google Now doesn't show ads.

Not yet.

Google Now shows unsolicited restaurant recommendations. They might not be paid (I don't know), but they are certainly ads.

That's a very loose definition of ads. Advertising typically implies that it's the restaurant promoting itself.

This is a reply to those below you, because I can't reply to them specifically.

Word of mouth is considered the best form of advertising you can get. Almost 100% of the time it's not even paid for.

I think being paid is pretty integral to the concept of an ad.

Well, don't forget, they bought Zagat. So even if it doesn't look like an ad, 'recommendations' are probably just another form.

While there's surely some nice research being done, it always seemed like a PR project to me.

And Google Glasses? Chromebook? Nexus? Jesus this guy is plainly wrong.

Glass doesn't have a compelling use case yet. At least they have not unveiled it.

With iPad, for example, it was very clearly positioned as a media consumption device from the very beginning.

With Google Glass, potential customers are being asked to brainstorm what they would do if they had Glass.

Does not seem particularly innovative to me.

And don't forget to mention Google Shoes :P

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/03/11/google-shoes_n_2853...

But the phone is good (i'm iPhone owner), and the rest of the projects looks promising.

My Chromebook and Nexus are full of ads.

No, they are a way to more effectively collect photos for Street View and WiFi AP locations for GPS-free location based services... both are which are products of Google Maps which itself is a vessel for selling advertising.

that sounds very far fetched.

I believe the overarching focus at Google is search. To search Google must index.

To continue indexing and searching Google has to make money. The most obvious path to billions is leveraging the indexing and searching into ad revenue.

What makes me more nervous than Google being capitalistic is Google not having boundaries about who/what/when/where/how they will index the whole world's data.

No , that is the first foray of Skynet .. much more interesting than ads.. and provably the single handed elimination of human drivers from taxi services ;-).

Absolutely. American spend more time communing than ever before. That's a lot of time spent steering that could be spent swiping.

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