https://www.termsandconditions.game/

It’s on a very old Heroku hosting plan. I should probably update that one day.

The aricle talks about AI overviews. As exemplified by the AI summary at the top of Google search results page. That thing is free.

2. Attract large user base

3. Sell user data and attention to advertisers

4. Extract maximal profit from sponsors

5. Earn billions from shit product

It's not simply enough that a product "makes money" it must "make more money, every quarter, forever" which is why everything, not even limited to tech, but every product absolutely BLOWS. It's why every goddamn thing is a subscription now. It's why every fucking website on the internet wants an email and a password so they can have you activate an account, and sell a known active email to their ad partners.

We're already at a wild stage of the rot caused by the growth-forever disease: the most successful companies are so enormous that further profit increases would require either absurd monopoly status (Chase, Wells Fargo, B of A all merge!) or to find increasingly insane ways of extracting money (witness network TV: First they only got money from ads, then they started leeching additional money streams from cable providers, now most have added their own subscription service that they also want you to pay for, on top of watching ads.)

ISPs used to just charge a fee, now they also sell personal information about your browsing behavior for extra revenue, cap your bandwidth usage and charge for more, and one of them (comcast) owns a media conglomerate.

Right now, we are lucky, because it is the least altered version of it ( and we all know how many filters public models have to go through ).

Citation needed?

Once AI content becomes monetized with ads, it's not going to look like the ads/banners we're used to. If you're looking into the past, you don't understand the potential of AI. Noam Chomsky's manufactured consent is going to look quaint by comparison.

As someone else said, you can probably filter responses through a small purpose-built/trained LLM that strips away dark patterns.

If you start getting mostly empty responses as a result, then there was no value prior to the stripping anyway.

this is already there and in prod but called AI "safety" (really corporate brand safety). The largest LLMs have already been shown to favor certain political parties based on the preferences of the group doing the training as well. Even technical people who should know better naively trust the response of an LLM well enough to allow to make API calls on their behalf. What would prevent an LLM provider to train their model to learn and manipulate an API to favor them or a "trusted partner" in some way? It's just like in the early days, "it's on the Internet, it has to be true".

I mean, I can tell when a page contains advertisements, but I still use an ad-blocker.

The point was not to help me detect when a response is ad-heavy, but to stop me seeing those ads at all.

> Arms race?

Possibly. Like with ad-blockers, this race can't be won by the ad-pusher LLM if the user uses the ad-blocker LLM.

The only reason ad-pusher websites still work is because users generally don't care enough to install the ad-blocker.

In much the same way, the only reason LLM ad-pushers will work is if users don't bother with an LLM ad-blocker.

Yep, because why let people make money from their work right? You should just get content for free!

> this race can't be won by the ad-pusher LLM if the user uses the ad-blocker LLM.

As per my comment it literally can.

If Google throws in a free AI summary in their search it only helps promoting Gemini in the long run.

This currently is the sweet phase where growing and thus gaining attention and customers as well as locking in new established processes is dominant. Unless the technical AI development stays as fast as in the beginning, this is bound to change.

The takeaway from Gemini is that subscriptions do lose money on some subscribers, but it is expected that not all subscribers use up their full quota each month. This is true even for non-AI subscriptions since the beginning of the subscription model (i.e. magazines, gamepass, etc).

The other surprising (to me, anyway) takeaway is that the AI providers have some margin on each token for PAYG users, and that VC money is not necessary for them to continue providing the service. The VC money is capital expenditure into infrastructure for training.

Make of it what you will, but it seems to me that if they stop training they don't need the investments anymore. Of course, that sacrifices future potential for profitability today, so who knows?

At that point the market may consolidate and progress slow, but not all providers will disappear - there are enough good models that can be hosted and served profitably indefinitely.

Even for the uses where it does matter, unless providers get squeezed down to zero margin, it's not that new models will never happen, but that the speed at which they can afford to produce large new models will slow.

Where did I say I think that?

You don't mention cross-checking the info against other sources.

You have the "make of it what you will" at the end, in what appears to be an attempt to discard any responsibility you might have for the information. But you still chose to bring that information into the conversation. As if it had meaning. Or 'authority'.

If you weren't treating it as at least somewhat authoritative, what was the point of asking Gemini and posting the result?

Gemini's output plus some other data sources could be an interesting post. "Gemini said this but who knows?" is useless filler.

What is also interesting is one of the biggest search companies is using it to steer traffic away from its former 'clients'. The very websites google talked into slathering their advertisements all over themselves. By giving them money and traffic. But that worked because google got a pretty good cut of that. But now only google gets the 'above the fold' cut.

That has two long term effects. One the place they harvest the data will go away. The second is their long term money will decrease. As traffic is lowered and less ads shown (unless google goes full plaster it everywhere like some sites).

AI is going to eat the very companies making it. Even if the answers are kind of 'meh'. People will be fine with 'close enough' for the majority of things.

Short term they will see their metric of 'main site retention' going up. It will however be at the cost of the websites that fed the machine.

Looking ahead, Search will become a de facto LLM chatbot, if it isn't already.

Oh bless your heart.

You don't even need to bring up corporate collusion, countless price gouging schemes, or the entire enshittification movement to understand that competition discovers the dark patterns. Dark patterns aren't something to be avoided, they're the natural evolution of ever-tighter competition.

When the eyeball is the product, you get more checks if you get more eyeballs. Dark patterns are how you chum the water to attract the most product.

If you'd rather the quick AI-summaries a la google you can put a question mark at the end of your search term. 'lawsuits regarding ferrets?'

And yeah as the sibling commenter pointed out, you can go into Kagi's preferences and explicitly rule out pinterest (or whatever site you want) from any of your searches for ever.

1. Someone prompts 2. Server searches for equivalent prompts, if something similar was asked before, return that response from cache. 3. If prompt is unique enough, return response from LLM and cache new response. 4. If user decides response isn’t specific enough, ask LLM and cache.

I never use those. I suspect that in many cases if there are "legitimate interest" options¹ those will remain opted-in.

----

[1] which I read as "we see your preference not to be stalked online, but fuck you and your silly little preferences we want to anyway"

- "Please don't track me."

- "But what if we realllly want to?"

A normal response to that would be an even more resounding FCK NO, but somehow the EU came to the completely opposite conclusion.

"Necessary" means "necessary for fulfilment of the contract". Your name and address are necessary data when you order off Amazon, your clickstream is not.

If someone blogs about woodworking, show static ads for tools they actually use and love. If they're into programming, show JetBrains, cloud providers, or anything dev-adjacent. Totally fine by me.

The problem is that almost everyone defaults to Google Ads—which then serves me wildly irrelevant junk, think brain-melting pay-to-win mobile games or even scammy dating sites that have zero connection to the content I’m reading and zero relevance to my interests.

It’s not just noise, it’s actively degrading the experience.

I think you'll find that GDPR says the opposite and the only reason this continues to happen is because authorities don't have enough resources to go after every at the same time and also because European authorities have a hard time against US companies.

End of recital (47):

> The processing of personal data for direct marketing purposes may be regarded as carried out for a legitimate interest.

That said, I read the rest of the recital and I think it is rather clear to the degree that such things can be clear that if you didn't expect it, it isn't legal. Here are some quotes:

- "[...]provided that the interests or the fundamental rights and freedoms of the data subject are not overriding, taking into consideration the reasonable expectations of data subjects based on their relationship with the controller."

- "At any rate the existence of a legitimate interest would need careful assessment including whether a data subject can reasonably expect at the time and in the context of the collection of the personal data that processing for that purpose may take place."

I can assure you the even after reading this, if I have clicked "necessary only" (as this discussion started with) it is not my reasonable expectation that any data are stored except those that are strictly necessary for the navigation and the user visible features[1] of the site works.

I'll admit that it seems some people think there is an argument that can me made that online ads can be direct marketing, but I would not risk any of my savings to defend that claim in court and I don't think Facebook or Google want to help you either as they seem to trying their best to prevent people from targeting individuals or at least pretending they do. And if it does, it is still covered by the conditions above.

[1]: and yes, that means user features, so unless you are creating an online ad-collection of some kind, that probably does not mean ads

I'm also grumpy about lots of this, but most? Can you point at any data that support this?

I always use the inspect tool to just remove the popup. Interacting with it could be considered consent.

[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/consent-o-mat...

I guess if my experience was as much degraded as yours I wouldn't bother with the web anymore, so yay for AI summarizers, at least for the time being. And don't get me wrong, a summarizer is a workaround, not a solution.

Sometimes it breaks the site so that you can't scroll or something, but that's quite rare. And most of the time it's solved by a refresh. Very infrequently you need to whitelist the site and then deal with the nag screen manually. A bit annoying, but way better than rawdogging it.

Works on desktop & mobile.

The article is about Google (and other traditional search engines) snatching away clicks from web site owners. What you describe is AI tools (for lack of a better word[1]) snatching away traffic from the ruling gatekeepers of the web.

I think the latter is a much bigger shift and might well be the end of Google.

By extension it will be the end of SEO as we know it. A lot of discussion currently (especially on HN) is about how to keep the bad crawlers out and in general hide from the oh so bad AI guys. That is not unlike the early days of search engines.

I predict we will soon see a phase where this switches by 180° and everyone will see a fight to be the first one to be accessed to get an opportunity to gaslight the agent into their view of the world. A new three letter acronym will be coined, like AIO or something and we will see a shift from textual content to assets the AI tools can only link to.

Maybe this has already happened to some degree.

[1] Where would I put the boundary? Is Kagi the former or the latter? I'd say if a tool does a non-predetermined number of independent activities (like searches) on its own and only stops if some criteria are fulfilled it is clearly in the latter category.

In this model, only monetizable content will be generated though.

As much as we abhor what advertising has done to the web, at least it’s independent of content: pair quality content with ads, make money.

In the brave new AI search world, only content which itself is directly monetizable will be created. E.g. astroturf ads

Huh, the exact opposite happened. Create as much filler content as possible, optimized for SEO, generate thousands of variants to capture search traffic, cover as much of the screen as possible with ads, use tricks to increase page view count, and then make money.

Publishers of quality content have moved to subscriptions, which is a different kind of trouble.

> only content which itself is directly monetizable will be created

We have already been here for a while and it can hardly get any worse.

I’ll take that bet.

Or content that is not meant to make money (e.g. opinion pieces arguing for a cause), or is very specific to products that make money (e.g. documentation, manuals), or is funded by governments or non-profits for the public good.

The term you're looking for is GEO (Generative Engine Optimization), though your "AIO" is also used. It's the new frontier.

And you've nailed the 180° turn: the game is no longer about blocking crawlers but about a race to become their primary source. The goal is to be the one to "gaslight the agent" into adopting your view of the world. This is achieved not through old SEO tricks, but by creating highly structured, authoritative content that is easy for an LLM to cite.

Your point about shifting to "assets the AI tools can only link to" is the other key piece. As AI summarization becomes the norm, the value is in creating things that can't be summarized away: proprietary data, interactive tools, and unique video content. The goal is to become the necessary destination that the AI must point to.

The end of SEO as we know it is here. The fight for visibility has just moved up a layer of abstraction.

i can definitely see LLMs companies offering content creators a bump in training priority for a fee. It will be like ad-sales but you're paying for the LLM to consider your content at a higher priority than your competition.

It was with the best of intentions but cookie banners have done more to hurt web browsing than anything else in the last decade

Even website makers who don't use predatory tracking end up including them as a CYA tactic

And to find that out you have to hit Page Down about twenty times, scanning as you, because the content is padded out to increase ad coverage.

Those data centers don't pay for themselves, you know.

Most of those are like:

    $movie release date
    
    <five paragraphs of garbage>
    
    While we don't know the actual $movie release date yet, ...

What is the price of the Switch 2?

The Switch 2 can be purchased with money. <Insert the Wikipedia article about currencies since the bronze age>

The dish in question is a ham sandwich.

It seems like it's more often than not that I'm coming across dishes that just do not make sense, or are poorly plagiarized by someone who doesn't understand the cuisine they're trying to replicate with absolute nonsense steps or substitutions or quantities. I used to have a great success rate when googling for recipes but now it's almost all crap, not even a mixed bag.

It's so sad, cause it drags down good pages. I recently did a lot of research for camping and outdoor gear, and of course I started the journey from Google. But a few sites kept popping up, I really liked their reviews and the quality of the items I got based on that, so I started just going directly to them for comparisons and reviews. This is how it's supposed to work, IMHO.

jesus wept.

Let's start at the beginning. I was born in 1956 in Chicago. My mother was a cruel drunk and the only thing my father hated more than his work was his family.

But I don't know, I feel like personal stories are what really makes a blog worth reading?

I don't like it when it's unnecessary "info dump" type. Like, "we all know the benefits of garlic (proceeds to list the well known benefits of garlic)". It's not personal or relevant.

I just want there to be a well formatted way of viewing the recipe at the bottom for quickly checking the recipe on a second or third visit.

I might come back later though.

https://marginalia-search.com/site/www.fontstruct.com?view=t...

https://marginalia-search.com/search?query=special%3Apopover...

Also, I felt like in long term that's going to kill off the good faith of all those smaller sites that are actually good, while the bigger ones still produce subpar contents.

The only inaccurate thing of that meme page is that you only need to uncheck 5 cookie "partners", when in reality there should be at least a few hundred.

    document.querySelectorAll("[type='checkbox']").forEach(c => c.checked = undefined)

Probably useless for mobile though, unless you can punch it in the omnibar with `javascript:` prefix

  src: "https://js.monitor.azure.com/scripts/b/ai.2.min.js", // The SDK URL Source
  crossOrigin: "anonymous", // When supplied this will add the provided value as the cross origin attribute on the script tag

Anyway, is it really not even possible to set up things like NoScript and uBlock Origin on mobile?

https://forums.puri.sm/t/nine-months-librem-5-as-my-only-pho...

https://forums.puri.sm/t/a-l5-review-1-week-to-my-ready-to-s...

Indeed... click the video play button :)

I needs to have 15+ to really capture that modern web experience.

for now! and we should enjoy it while it lasts. Ad-driven AIs are coming, it is inevitable.

My web experience has been reduced to a handful of bookmarks, X, and chatgpt or grok. Occasionally I’ll go looking for government sites to validate something I read on X. Everything else is noise

But this is because there is no viable monetization model for non-editorial written word content anymore and hasn’t been for a decade. Google killed the ecosystem they helped create.

Google also killed the display ad market by monopolizing it with Adsense and then killed Adsense revenue sharing with creators to take all the money for themselves by turning their 10 blue links into 5 blue ads at the top of the search results. Search ads is now the most profitable monopoly business of all time.

YouTube is still young, but give it time. Google will eventually kill the golden goose there as well, by trying to harvest too many eggs for themselves.

The same will happen with AI results as well. Companies will be happy to lose money on it for a decade while they fight for dominance. But eventually the call for profits will come and the AI results will require scrolling through mountains of ads to see an answer.

This is the shape of this market. Search driven content in any form is and will always be a yellow pages business. Doesn’t matter if it’s on paper or some future AGI.

Plus there is a subscription that eliminates ads. I think it’s a great experience for users. Many creators also seem to do well too.

I think this should be the model for a new generation of search. Obviously there will be ads/sponsored results. But there should be a subscription option to eliminate the ads.

The key part here will be monetization for content creators. People are no longer clicking links, so how do they get revenue?

I think direct payments from AI companies to content creators will be necessary or the whole internet will implode.

Ads are useful and have their place in keeping the web accessible to everyone, but Google's anti user policies really stretch that relationship.

The difference between my YouTube interface with and without premium is stark. Aside from the ads, it seemed like the algorithm pushed less slop in front of me to avoid. Purely anecdotal, and likely affected by A/B bullshit (or nowadays would it be more like A/B/C/D/E/F/G/H/I/J/K/L/M/N/O/P/Q/R/S/T/U/V/W/X/Y/Z).

Paying to remove Ads means I don't want ads, it doesn't mean I consent to all of the other invasive tracking they do.

If your experience with YouTube is primarily through browser then yeah I can see why that experience is shitty.

I'm fine with sites detecting adblock, in the sense that I will just not go to those sites. But if I already pay for an ad free experience then there's no reason for them to care about my adblock, unless they're just mad they can't track me, in which case, they can fuck all the way off.

And yes, I know that Google is in that camp, so they can indeed fuck all the way off.

> Ads are useful and have their place in keeping the web accessible to everyone,

No. Advertising is a cancer on commerce.

Another great feature of SmartTube-beta - and it's the feature that brought me to that app - is the ability to completely remove all "shorts" from the entire app. No more shorts. I've configured the app to eliminate them completely like they never existed.

I'm almost positive that SmartTube is using the SponsorBlock database, which does not depend on creator-submitted demarcation, but rather on user-generated/crowd-sourced segment tagging. https://sponsor.ajay.app/

I also pay for YT Premium, and I have maintained a family subscription since they initially offered one. I wish they would just provide Premium users with options for turning off shorts, comments (per-channel ideally, but across the board would be fine too), games, and everything else I don’t care to ever engage with.

I also run a self-hosted AdGuard service for DNS-level adblocking, but it sounds like Google’s getting around that as well. Next stop will be DNS with SSL and a proxy. I am a little concerned that I am having to establish what must appear from the outside to be a very sketchy anonymizing infrastructure, and it’s all just to use the web the way I always have, whilst avoiding the increasingly intrusive and anxiety-inducing tracking and advertising.

"Now people pay cable companies to watch TV shows. It's funny how easily people can be brainwashed into giving companies money for nothing."

Now cable has ads and costs a fortune; I didn't know anyone who has it. I do still watch a little broadcast though, the price is right even if the programming isn't great.

If there's nothing on I turn it off and look at my phone

No, the point of paying for cable was to get more TV. Most cable stations have always had ads. You're probably thinking of HBO, which is a tiny subset of overall cable output.

The first Cable channel was HBO. The second was TBS, it had ads from the beginning.

As I understand it, a chunk of your membership fee is divided amongst all monetized creators you watch on a monthly basis, proportional to your watch time. A different chunk of your membership fee is divided between the creators and record labels, for your watch/listen time of Shorts and Youtube Music.

So the size of the creator is only relevant insofar as it can determine whether the channel is eligible for monetization. View time is not worth a different amount depending on the size of the creator.

Why does that make it okay to use an adblocker?

You must be joking. YT is so insufferable, I can only watch it via Firefox with uBlock Origin and Privacy Badger active. And even then only if and as long as I absolutely have to.

YouTube also increased advertising some paying shows, YouTube shorts, and more. No way to say no, only "yes forever" or "no thanks not right now". And it comes back in a few weeks.

It also constantly sneakily lowers the video quality.

So I stopped paying. I combine ad block and sponsor block and I forget another one to cleanup the UI.

Often I download the video so that I can actually seek around without buffering (because YouTube buffers as little as possible to save cost, which I can understand).

Content nowadays is 30min instead of 5min. So you better be ready to skip and seek.

Netflix did the same. In fact they even silently downgraded us from 4k HDR surround sound during a software update. And nothing can get us back the max quality anymore. I stopped paying all together.

So you know what doesn't buffer, has the absolute best quality (like 4x the bitrate etc), all the languages and what not? pirated content.

It's just stupid how much easier it is to obtain predictable quality without stutter by downloading rather than actually paying a streamer service.

Plus the ads and other UX dark patterns are through the roof.

Have you seen how many ads are in a video on YouTube? On desktop its no issue, but I use the YouTube app on my Apple TV now and then, and I tried to watch a few relatively short video, and I saw easily 4-6 ads per video, some of which were 90+ seconds long. Its awful

And they have some kind of little games now, which I don't have any interest in, but they have no option to remove them from my suggestions.

I think a similar thing is happening with their crappy games too. They keep coming back (the games still say "don't show me this" though).

Adsense is just for little hobby websites, no actual businesses use it. They all use header bidding, which is (mostly) not controlled by Google.

[...]

> But Google moved quickly to reestablish AdX’s power. It created a competitor to header bidding called “Open Bidding,” which let Google take an extra cut of revenue. And under the adoption of header bidding, Google’s AdX ultimately got a “last look” advantage when publishers chose to feed the winning header bid into their publisher ad server — which most often was Google’s DFP. That’s because AdX’s advertiser buyers would then have the option to bid as little as a penny more than the winning header bid to secure the most attractive ad space.[0]

Google's header bidding-related shenanigans were a big part of the antitrust case against them, and they were found to be "monopolizing open-web digital advertising markets"[1], so I wouldn't say that it is mostly not controlled by Google.

[0] https://www.theverge.com/2024/9/24/24253293/google-ad-tech-a... [1] https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/department-justice-prevails-l...

If you did, that doesnt mean you should. If you can, that doesnt mean you should.

I almost spit out my drink.

Give it time.

The current subscription situation for LLM stuff actually makes me hopeful.

If I'm searching "how to get an intuitive understanding of dot product and cross product", any open source model right now will do a perfectly fine job. By the time that the ad-pocalypse reaches AI answers, the models I mention will be at the point of being able to be run locally using consumer hardware. Probably every phone will run one.

I suspect in the next decade we will see the business model of "make money via advertising while trying/pretending to provide knowledge" become well and truly dead.

[citation needed]

My intuitive sense—informed by media coverage, behaviors exhibited by AI companies and their investors, and a very foundational understanding of how it all works—is that AI models have largely hit a wall and have struggled to improve at all, in some very public cases the newer versions perform worse than their predecessors. The fact that most of the benchmarks are hardly more than internal tests designed to highlight very narrow performance metrics has made getting any reliable sense of the state of the art rather difficult. They do indeed have some extremely useful purposes, but I have yet to see anything that broadly justifies the expense of it all (in plain economic terms, but also in sociopolitical and environmental terms) and a lot of indications that they have recently reached some very firm limits.

But in a world where they do not improve, that actually just strengthens the point I made in the rest of my original comment :)

AI stole all the content from those websites, starving them from ad revenue.

The Google overview is made by the same company that puts those ads in those websites in first place.

What is coming next is that there will be ads in the overview and you will have no choice but to read it because all its cited links will be rotten.

ad-free? For now. That's just a matter of time.

Yesterday's SEO battles are today battles to convince LLMs to produce ad tokens. The corpus is already ridden of such content. And LLM make it even easier to produce more such spam.

This is naturally not addressed in the US "AI" Action Plan, same as copyright theft.

This is the huge one for me. If you search for something in natural language, the results you get on any search engine completely suck - yet ironically the AI overview is generally spot on. Search engines have been stuck in ~2003 for decades. Now the next 'breakthrough' is to use their LLMs to actually link to relevant content instead of using pagerank+ or whatever dysfunctional SEO'd algorithm they're still using.

Clicking on a video to mute it also needs to navigate to a sponsor’s page and break the back button. And then the page reloads which doubles the page view count. Genius web dev decision. I bet they said “there’s literally no downsides to doing this!”

Also, the ads need to autoplay on full volume, often bypassing my system volume somehow so they can play even though the rest of the audio is on mute and none of the mute functionality works. Surely the user simply forgot they had mute on so we should just go ahead and fix that.

They also need to play on 4K ultra HD to use my entire monthly cell plan if I don’t stop it in the first 3 seconds, which I can’t do because the video has to fully load before I’m able to interact with it to click stop. Or clicking stop pauses it and then automatically restarts playing the video.

These webdev chrome devs need to stop adding new random features and start fixing the basic functionality. I don’t want fading rotating banners that save 3 lines of CSS. I want the “DO NOT AUTOPLAY. EVER.” Button to actually work.

Some annoyed me so much I even disabled JS for them on my phone. I do that more rarely because of how unnecessarily convoluted that setting is in Chromium browsers on Android. You have to navigate 4 levels deep in the settings and enter the domain you want to block into a text field!

For example, I have JS disabled on everything Substack (and it really annoys me when I end up on Substack hosted on a custom domain).

1. Open safari

2. Type something so that it goes search google

3. A web results page appears

4. Immediately a popup appears with two buttons:

- They have the same size

- One is highlighted in blue and it says CONTINUE

- The other is faint and reads "Stay in browser" (but in my native language the distinction is even less clear)

5. Clicking CONTINUE means "CONTINUE in the app", so it takes me to the Google App (or, actually, to the app store, because I don't have this app), but this does not end there!

6. If I go back to the browser to try to fucking use google on my fucking browser, as I fucking wanted to, I realize that doing "Back" now constantly moves me to the app (or app store). So, in effect, I can never get the search results once I have clicked continue. The back button has been highjacked (long pressing does not help). My only option is to NEVER click continue

7. Bonus: All of this happens regardless of my iPhone having the google app installed or not

So: Big button that says "CONTINUE" does not "CONTINUE" this action (it, of course, "CONTINUES" outside).

I just want to FUCKING BROWSE THE WEB. If I use the google app, then clicking a link presumably either keeps me in its specific view of the web (outside of my browser), or it takes me out of the app. This is not the experience I want. I have a BROWSER for a reason (e.g. shared groups/tabs...)

Oh! And since this happens even if I don't have the app, it takes me to the app store. If I install the app via the app store, it then DOES NOT have any mechanism to actually "Continue". It's a fresh install. And, of course, if I go back to the browser and hit "back", I can't.

So for users who DO NOT HAVE THE APP, this will NEVER LET THEM CONTINUE. It will PREVENT THEM FROM USING GOOGLE. And it will force them to do their query AGAIN.

Did the people who work on this feature simply give up? What. The. Fuck?

This behavior seems to happen on-and-off, as if google is gaslighting me. Sometimes it happens every time I open Safari. Some other times it goes for days without appearing. Sometimes in anonymous tabs, sometimes not. Logged in or not, I've seen both scenarios.

I can't be sure, but I genuinely believe that the order of the buttons has been swapped, messing with my muscle memory.

Basically it's this image: https://www.reddit.com/r/iphone/comments/1m76elp/how_do_i_st...

Except a still image cannot describe the excruciating process of dealing with it — especially realizing "oh, wait, I clicked the wrong button, oh wait, no no no, get out of the app store, oh oh oh what did I type again? Damn I lost it all!..."

[1]I would quit before implementing this feature. It disgusts me, and we're talking about google, not some run-of-the-mill company whom you have to work for to barely survive. This is absolutely shameful.

Now. Nothing stopping them from injecting ads in their summary. And chances are that they will eventually