Digital ad tech may be mature but search is not. If it was then the experience of using any search engine would be very much the same but in my experience that is not close to being true yet.
But isn't the experience pretty much the identical? Google, Bing and DDG look essentially the same; the two main differences are the colour of the lipstick, and the search index. The main experience - type in words, get suggestions while typing, confirm and have it show relevant webpages + various info/image/videoboxes - it's universal now.
Re:The death of corporate research labs
by joshuamorton on Thursday May 21, 2020 @03:59AM
(#23255889)
Right but the visual experience isn't as much a differentiator as the "does this answer my question" experience, which relies on fairly sota methods in NLP, clustering, etc.
I say that tongue-in-cheek, but only partly. There actually is a ton of research that goes into following things like cultural trends and human psychology to ensure maximum ad consumption. Advertising in the middle of a mobile game or on Netflix requires an entirely different school of thought than advertising on traditional cable TV or news websites.
A notable “innovation” (though many may not respect it very much) is the new paradigm of advertising stuff via Instagram influencers and the functionality built into the app to facilitate it. Someone had to research and design that, just like such companies now are probably trying to find the best way to advertise in VR/AR platforms or in rideshares.