Unprecedented, Google has added ads on both its search page and Chrome://newtab

I am not sure why you're being downvoted. Both the newtab (at the bottom of the page) and the search page have had subtle "ads" for google's new product launches. I remember seeing it for Stadia, and I remember seeing it for "Google One"

They also use it for non-google products.

For example the funeral of Queen Elizabeth II had a hyperlink to "See todays events" on both places.

Wasn't the Nexus 7 (2012) the first such ad? Aside from chrome itself bring advertised this way, that is.

I suspect ungoogled-chromium[1] is not affected by google's changes to chrome://newtab . If anyone wants to stop using Chrome but isn't drawn to any of the alternatives, perhaps you'll like ungoogled-chromium.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ungoogled-chromium

Who still using chrome? Use safari, brave, or Firefox.

I'm so tired of seeing people recommend Brave. Firefox is what the web needs. Organizational shenanigans aside, Firefox is the best browser on the market right now.

Brave works, Firefox don't, simple as. I tried Firefox numerous times and I always stumble upon glitches, and it still measurable slower. Chromium won, deal with it.

Firefox has had ads on its "new tab" page by default for ages now.

> Who still using chrome?

According to statcounter[1], Chrome had 65.52% of the browser market share in August 2022.

[1]: https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share

I just wanted to nit-pick and state that this includes mobile (ie. Android) but on Desktop it is not better (67.33%) as Safari is not that strong there. And Firefox still loses on Desktop (0.5% compared to last year). Wow.

Mine too. But it unfortunately doesn't change the fact that Chrome is the most popular browser.

Hope its domination, just like anything Google, ends soon though.

Brave is not customizable at all, Vivaldi is much better.

On the Android phone it's easy choice since only Kiwi Browser supports extensions.

Notably, this is not Google showing random search/display ads.

Those look like ads for Google's own product.

I don't think this is the first time. IIRC, Google used to show an ad for Chrome if you used the search from any other browser.

I'm surprised they advertise their own product in those places... It's such an obvious thing for the EU to go after. "Google has a monopoly position in Browsers/Search, and (ab)used their homepage to advertise their entry into a new field of business, immediately giving it free advertising the competitors could never access."

If I were Googles legal team, I would immediately put an end to such cross-product advertising (at least from Search/Chrome/Android).

Google does not have a monopoly in browsers or search.

To my knowledge, Google has 90% of search engine traffic in some regions, and Chrome makes up the majority of Web browsers, even disregarding Chromium

The poster above you said "monopoly position," which is defined in the EU as more than 25% of the market. Google unquestionably has a monopoly position in both areas.

The US similarly defines monopoly as having significant control over a market, not as a literal 100% stake.

It was inevitable, you gotta get the infite growth from somewhere. Ane the next move will +1 this and so on, until google becomes less attractive than leaner competition. Because of inertia, legacy and people benefitting from the status quo, they won't be able to correct course.

This is textbook "how empire falls" and why things that seem indestructible eventually dies like anything else.

This will be the mile stone people will remember as the first sign of google decline.

The first sign was when they killed google reader, like 10 years ago.

How would they +1 this? Require users to watch two ads Youtube-style before rendering a website? Place a persistent banner ad along the bottom of the browser window?

These days Bing is increasingly my goto search engine, my switching costs are essentially zero

I finally got fed up and pay for Kagi. Very happy so far. Cents per day is worth it

Because hating on Micro$oft (ha! Remember that?) is a 2000s thing.

If this harms their business then why would they keep doing it

Say you're a decision-maker at Google (or Any Large Corp). You have a KPI to increase revenue by 5% this year. If you hit this KPI, then you get a bonus. If you get the bonus, then you can afford the thing that your partner has been wanting forever (or that will make your neighbours jealous, or whatever), and you get a happy life.

You know that doing X will harm the company in the long term (defined as anything past your likely tenure in this role, so usually 2 years max). But doing X will bump revenue in the short term, and get you your bonus and your happy life.

WDYD? Given that to get to a level where you have the power to make this decision, you had to have a particular personality type and set of priorities, it's extremely likely that you decide to do the thing that helps you and hurts everyone else.

How do we fix this loop in companies? It is a very serious problem for humanity’s future. It exists in government too. How do we reward long-term thinking and decisions?

Short term rewards would need to be less enticing than the long term ones. Doing so would involve restricting many rights and privileges and people would hate that.

We are restricting our long term rights and privileges though...

That only works if leadership can spot the difference between long term and short term, and more importantly that they even cares about it.

"Reward long term" is easier to say than to do.

Private ownership of businesses, so long term consequences fall on someone with the authority to steer them right.

This is essentially what corruption is. Fixing corruption is extremely hard, especially when it is less overt like this. The main thing you can do is to teach people how to spot bad apples and push them out, fire them or in other ways punish them and reduce the damage they can do. It shouldn't be culturally acceptable to be a bad apple, but that requires a cultural change and those are really hard to do.

And it's turtles all the way down. Every single incentive and system is optimized for some goal like periodic revenue increase. It's not one personality type and the desire to buy a new car, it's the intentional structure of a public corporation. We have high minded ideas about sustainability and corporate citizenship, but those views don't drive decisions in the bear market.

Yes that's true. I just think it's particularly easy to forget how your company actually works--e.g. what puts the bread on the table--when the markets are high. Therefore we see more monetization strategy in this type of financial cycle.

Why do you care if you harm the company long term? It’s not like you are tied to it’s performance forever. When equity and labor markets are liquid, why wouldn’t you make decisions that help you now, and cause long term hurt something you have no long term stake in? If you don’t, your peers will.

The incentives they have are not sustainable

Because it helps in the short term, and Wall Street doesn’t mind destroying companies over the long.

Why blame this on Wall Street?

This idea is the idea of someone at Google, it was implemented by someone at Google, the decision to go ahead was approved by someone at Google.

The someones at Google are compensated significantly by shares of the company, traded on Wall Street, and some of them are compensated with even more shares if those shares do well.

Pretending the two are at arms length is a bit silly.

Long term, systemic damage to both product and company reputation.

Google Stadia case in point. Nobody serious backed Stadia because almost everyone expected Google to kill it off so nobody jumped to it and then it was inevitably killed off because it didn't bring in the cash Google was expecting. Even when the stars had aligned for them with the pandemic and supply shortages that should have given them tons of players Google just couldn't convince enough people to go for it.

I wouldn't be surprised if there are high level talks going on about the sustainability of some of this exact lines of thinking. Chasing growth organically is fine. Artificially generating it by shifting costs or cutting corners elsewhere to maintain the illusion of growth eventually sinks the whole ship.

Nobody cares though. Investors only care about short term. When it stops making money they will just move their money somewhere else. When you can get out of the game at any time there is no incentive to think long term for those at the top. The Executives are told to make money today. And why not? They will leave soon too. To run another company for a few years doing the same thing. The only people who are interested in long term viability are customers and low level employees. And their opinions don't matter.

You are assuming that capitalism pushes individual actors to act in their own best self-interest. It does not. It pushes people to serve capital

I agree with this statement, but it's pretty academic. At this stage of the game (metastatic capitalism), people aren't generally allowed to have interests that don't serve capital. Like, there may be some philosophical "best self interest" which is beyond the capture of capital markets, but it's not part of our culture.

Besides, look at context. We are talking about what a company does and the agents of the company. Of course it all collapses to serving capital. I read GP as "why would company take short money over long?"

Annoyingly, the new tab page used to have an exclusion for these "announcements". The flag was removed.

I've ended up installing one of those "inspirational new tab page" extensions, just so I don't see an ad. I am sure that means someone else is siphoning my data.

Both in Chrome and Firefox, I always set my new tab page to `about:blank`, or in other words, absolutely nothing. Why? Because the address bar is all I need to get where I'm going. I type faster than I click.

There's no setting to set the new tab page in Chrome - not even in the policies json.

I had to use an extension that redirects it. It's annoying, and overrides the content of the address bar if you start typing too quickly -- but it's better than ads.

There is a setting for what the home icon does, and it defaults to new tab...but is settable. Maybe that's what was meant?

There is no home icon in Chrome, at least I don't see it. Or is that also some setting?

I use one that just lets me use some custom HTML, I just have some plaintext bookmark type links

I woke up to ads in my new tab page in Firefox yesterday; sponsored links to Amazon and Nike.

Browsers don't seem to serve users anymore. They, like everything else, are mostly ad delivery mechanisms.

Funny you say that, I just opened Safari, no ads.

Safaris default new tab page is the Apple store and most don't know how to change that.

edit: turns out I was wrong.

> Safaris default new tab page is the Apple store and most don't know how to change that.

There are a list of alternatives in Safari that the user themselves can choose from, including Favorites, Frequently visited, and so on.

None of the choices are the Apple AppStore.

The first part is correct, but the second certainly isn't.

I'm not even sure the first part is. I logged into a Guest Account on my Mac and the default for 'New tabs open with:' is the 'Start Page', which is a blank page with history, bookmarks, frequently visited, etc.

Oh forgive me, I've just checked are you're right. The new tab page is now frequently visited sites.

Our family Mac we got in ~2011 did show Apple as the new tab page, or at least the start page when you opened Safari after booting. However this must have changed in the last few (read: >5-7) years.

> Our family Mac we got in ~2011 did show Apple as the new tab page, or at least the start page when you opened Safari after booting

Pretty certain this is also incorrect.

My recollection seems to accord with the Wikipedia page on the history of the Safari browser which (although it doesn’t itemize the default StartPage for each version) doesn’t cite any inclusion of an AppStore link, as far as I can see.

[O] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safari_(web_browser)

Not the "Apple Store", but apple.com

I believe it is correct. It was back when we didn't call it a new tab page, but 'homepage' and it was set to an actual website.

Of course Safari defaulted to apple.com, what else was it supposed to default to?

It is correct, back in the Panther days when Safari was new the default home page was Apple.com.

I’m not sure how long they did that for, but like you said, what else were they supposed to do? It was a different time, homepages were treated differently.

Having a home page set to something isn’t the same as having ads that you can’t disable.

You can disable the ads in Firefox though

Software still serves its users... to advertisers.

Annoying, yes. But you can turn them off in the settings page.

You can, but it's not about that. Ads don't belong in browser UI, full stop.

> Browsers used to be paid software.

AFAIK the big ones have always been free, except for Netscape between 1995 and 1998.

why? there's no standard or moral law that says this.

there have been countless examples of watch-ads-get-X schemes. I remember back in the dialup era it was seen as a way to get online. (then fortunately technology and the market progressed and these died out.)

also, let's not forget that the browser market was always fucked up.

The browser is traditionally the “user agent”. An agent operating in my interests does not advertise to me.

I personally believe that the goal of ads should not be to hook you on new products just because they can. They should not be to sell you on a problem that you don't have. They should not be to pile on tons of "marketing" and look professional and presentable and whatever.

Ads should show you things that you needed anyway; things you wouldn't have known to look for, or didn't find when you did. Things that actually solve problems that you actually have, where you see the utility as soon as you see them.

For example, 45drives has their ads down. They contain nothing more than a little joke, a product image, and a link to their website. You'll know if you need it; they're not trying to market to you or convince you of anything. They know you will come when you're ready.

Advertising culture is currently extremely hostile and I hate it.

Well that's a new low for Firefox. I'm a little surprised because I didn't think it'd be that quick.

Come on man, go easy on them. They're in a downturn. They're suffering. They're going to suffer more. Facebook is just a year ahead of the curve. What's happening there will probably happen to many more tech companies in the next 12 months...

I see the ad, and I'm not amused. I would be more at ease if the line said "You know what? We need money after all this browser-making. Give us yours and we will let you go on with your day."

Not entirely unprecedented:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18800175 ("Mozilla: Ad on Firefox’s new tab page was just another experiment" (2019))

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30608022 ("Why am I seeing this adorable red panda?") (2022)

It's notoriously difficult to have a new tab page without ads/Google connections, but still keep the 8 thumbnails. One can change the search engine and then an alternate new tab page appears which is the right one: Only thumbnails. Unfortunately there is code in chrome to detect the search engine one confiured and activate the matching new tab page. I think they have one for ddg?

Even creating a custom search engine in chrome settings, pointing at google does not work, they detect the google url.

I have yet to create my own "search engine" url which would redirect to google, to put this search engine in the chrome settings!

It's very annoying, because despite it being Chrome from google, chrome is quite reasonable with data protection and settings in many areas and can be tamed with group policies. In our company GPO we have to turn off the new tab page, but my goal is to have one without ads.

Firefox had/has "snippets" for a while. You can turn them off, but the point still stands.

There has been a blank new tab extension in Chrome for ages.

> Users are reporting banner ads such as "New! Track your health and fitness with the..." below the search box on both google.com and chrome://newtab.

Do we know more? E.g. do we know if this is an A/B test or a rollout in progress? Where are the users reporting this? Are there any screenshots?

Can confirm (https://i.ibb.co/ygp2x49/Fitbit-Ad-Google-com.png).

It actually reminds me of old Google announcing "New! You can now search for images" or such except repurposed for things outside of Search. The first one is reasonable (there are people that do want to search for images or research papers), but the current incarnation reminds me of a corporation solely running on inertia.

Proves the saying, "If you are not paying for the product, you are the product"

You're still the product for a whole bunch of paid services. The line has blurred significantly since that saying became commonplace.

Logic 101: "If A, Then B" does NOT imply "If not-A, Then not-B".

No website I have worked for has ever called users the product. The products are what is being built by various teams. For ads the product at a high level is everything from the parts that show ads to users to the tools that allow advertisers to create ads.

> No website I have worked for has ever called users the product.

Sure, and folks putting lead paint in children's toys don't call their wares "poison". Doesn't change anything.

Advertisers wouldn't buy all that fancy ad tooling "product" on a platform with zero users.

Firefox has ads too. At least you can turn them off, until they add another category and you have to go figure out how to turn off the new ones.

It's times like these that I'm glad I use about:blank as my new tab page.

Having an Amazon and Nike sponsored links in the new tab page is having ads strictly speaking but they are nor intrusive nor targeting you specifically, so they can be "tolerable". To be honest my mind just skip them. The day they change this for worse, then I'll complain as well.

I don't think I've ever seen a single ad on Firefox (including on any website thanks to uBlock working better on FF than anywhere else), what ads are you talking about?

I was mainly thinking of the ones on the new tab page. Years ago they had "tiles" or something and I turned those off, then they added "suggestions" and they're not different but the old setting doesn't apply to them.

There are ads in the urlbar, ads on the newtab page, ads, ads, ads!

This is on desktop.

I've had something similar happen to me before. Google showed me an advert for Pixel 6a on the bottom of the search bar in both the new tab and Google.com main page

That thing on the google.com page is really annoying. Google is probably trying this out but I am really hoping that this is some behind the scenes look at the fact that google might be a dying company and are grasping for straws. Not that I think that is really real, but because it would be glorious.

They are changing their natural listing results to be multi media photos and video content will be prioritised on search results, it is going to be released in America first this month I believe

They are also seeing the results will be far more varied and scrolling down will likely give you a result that you are looking for, and the traditional way of looking with the top result, being the one that you wanted may not be the case anymore

I think they are maybe trying to replicate the TikTok experience when looking for a result, you will end up scrolling different content relative to your search keyword

All of this will benefit content creators. If you have an ability to create video content, this will give you a competitive edge.

> All of this will benefit content creators.

Could they do something to benefit the users instead?

Rest assured, it'll hurt both equally. Or do you think Google would treat content creators as equals?

Here's a reminder to everyone in the thread that Google owns YouTube. Content creators are, literally, the product. YouTube would not exist without them. They are not equals.

> They are changing their natural listing results to be multi media photos and video content

I’ve been unfortunate enough to see this, it’s absolute hot garbage and made it way harder to find what I wanted.

Is this a knee jerk response to TikTok kids using TikTok as their generations google?

I don’t think many understand how much Google land is up for grabs right now. Google Images is right there for the taking if you just supply the same experience as 10 years ago Google Images.

I hope this means that all the SEO bullshit will move to videos and the textual web will become usable again.

It's not unprecedented, they did that when Google+ launched too.

The internet doesn't work without advertising. Almost as if the money to build all this infrastructure has to come from somewhere.

If only we could create a digital token that would be in such demand it would generate its own network and infrastructure effect.

Oh wait... they ruined that, too.

>Oh wait... they ruined that, too.

I lost you there, who is "they" referring to?

Lol, the advantage of domination?

Tbh, I really want Apple do something innovation for browser. However, looking back to Webkit on both iOS and macOS, I can see no hope...

I can't believe how many people here still use Google search and Chrome browser.

Well, Chrome is inexcusable because of ungoogled Chromium and Chromium Web Store. But Google search still delivers more complete results and will be hard to switch from until Bing or other competitors improve.

There are entire categories of search I perform on a daily basis in which Bing ignores the most relevant result (usually from a domain that just doesn't appear on Bing for some reason).

Why is this so surprising? Google search gives me better results than DuckDuckGo for my purposes (especially when using the "site:" search syntax). Some web apps and websites are buggy on non-Chrome browsers or a lot faster on Chrome (e.g. Google Workspace apps like Google Sheets are often a lot faster).

If I want to submit high quality work on time, it makes sense to use the best (most performant) tool for the job. Firefox, DuckDuckGo, and other alternative tools are helpful for personal use, but I have less to worry about when using Google and Chrome for work.

Unfortunately quite some things only work entirely on Chrome. My default is still Firefox but it’s no getting around it at times.

I use brave browser for those sites. Alas, it is still chrome underneath...

I also don’t understand “why people still watch TV. I haven’t watch TV in 20 years” (tm Slashdot 2002)

It looks like they're testing it on a small portion, but not sure what's the pattern

Stupidity is contagious. If MS does it, why should't Google ?

I wouldn't say it is stupidity.

MS seems to have stopped innovating and exploit as much of their business before it dies.

Possibly Google realised the same?

If IBM is any indication, it takes decades for big corp to die.

I'll go out on a limb and suggest that you might have an add-on doing that.

But add-ons cannot run on pages in chrome:// namespace

No addons, same behaviour in incognito.

I think I've been seeing ads for things like the Nest and Pixel phones in AU for a few months now.

Seen it too !

It's strange how our brains work - I actually never look there, but somehow I did notice it.

It's their own product ads though... It's not very problematic, you're using their product and they're announcing they have more products for you.

Did you see what they did to YouTube? It's now like watching the Superbowl. Ads ads ads. I guess they are trying to convert as many people as they can to premium. But I think it's also because they don't know how to grow their revenue besides displaying more and more ads.

The more ads they put in, the more people get an ad blocker, so they have to add more ads to compensate.

Google on Android has already been stupid for a long time. You can swipe right from the home screen of a Pixel phone to get to Google search, which is a Yahoo!-style portal with news, etc under the search bar. And then you click on the search input field, and you get suggestions based on trending searches (a week or 2 ago one of them was something about King Charles). Luckily both idiocies can still be disabled, and I use DDG for my searches anyway.

BREAKING NEWS: Ad company shows ads. Footage at 11.

Have you seen this banner by yourself? Tried from a few different locations with no luck

Yep, Fitbit smartwatch ad for us in Sweden, no Chrome plugins (even shows up in incognito).

Might be exclusive to a portion of users or locations.

> Might be exclusive to a portion of users or locations.

Probably they are testing on a selected range of users.