181–190 of 337 posts
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Would love to switch to DDG, but it consistently gives me search results that do not contain s search term at all, even when I wrap it in double quotes. So they give me thousands of non relevant search results.
Duckduckgo uses Bing search in the back end, which is dogshit. Alternatively, you can use Startpage, which uses Google results, but anonymized.
First of all, I hope this is just an tiny experiment or better a hoax, and won't be widely adopted. Google deserves constant critique, but they also deserve credit as a company that often promotes the open way first (for example, schema.org as a way anyone can describe their information, which can be ready by anyone). But if it's not an experiment, I'd start putting my energy into moving away from Google. In the Alta…
Google very, very rarely promotes the open way first, and when they do it's step 1 in embrace, extend, extinguish. They have no good intentions. I don't think they ever did, they just had "do no evil" branding until the evil got too obvious to ignore.
I have met a lot of people in my career who are motivated to do work for the public good in order for the whole world to benefit (e.g., standards, open source, public speaking/education etc.) and not just one company. I met the vast majority of those people after I joined Google, and many of the others had previously worked at Google.
As a lowly engineer, it is difficult for me to speculate about the true motivations of upper management. But, I do feel confident saying that I work alongside a lot of people who are not motivated by evil or "embrace, extend, extinguish" mentality. My colleagues have good intentions, and they act on them.
That said, Google is a big place. It's so big that usually I only hear about user-hostile things like this from the news. I personally find it demotivating and sad, because it undermines the good work that I know is being done elsewhere in the company. It seems like the latest in a long string of incidents, and it probably won't be the last.
So, take that for what you will. But, please also consider that it may not be as binary good/evil as you make it sound.
Also don't forget that not too long ago, Google decided to start hiding pieces of URLs and convincing the web standards groups to make that a standard:
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/google/google-chrome-h...
(In that article there's a very visible email address of a product manager at Google responsible for this, be sure to let her know your thoughts...)
I think that's just more proof that "web standards" aren't necessarily good for the user, especially if they're controlled by anti-user corporations. It's not unlike what's happening with open-source too: "we can do all these horrible things to oppress you, but it's open-source so you can see exactly what we do to you."
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It doesn't tell you that. For example, it could be an experiment to learn how much weight users put on the URL in choosing between results. (Disclosure: I work at Google, but I don't work in Search and don't know anything specific here)
It could be. But I would put my money on this being what it actually looks like: a way to test the waters on what kind of effect dropping visible URLs in results would have. And if you work at Google, wouldn't you want to know? Maybe ask the search team and report back what you find, I'm really curious.
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Would love to switch to DDG, but it consistently gives me search results that do not contain s search term at all, even when I wrap it in double quotes. So they give me thousands of non relevant search results.
It also doesn't have the good locality of Google search. It's like a timewarp back 15 years ago when I had to put "Canada" into every Google search query to tell them I want the Canadian version of the site.
The Google way is to reduce complexity for the user as much as possible. This may be in contrast to what most HN users expect from a search engine (transparency and control). Google has been ignoring this segment as most use adblocker anyway so the cost/benefit appears bad, for now.
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I meant Google in general. It’s yet another tiny step in a terrible direction. At this point I would love to legislate most of Google out of existence, personally.
I don't really buy using legislation. Alternatives exist and people don't seem to care to use them. That's the market at work.
Google is engaged in using its market dominance in one segment to gain or maintain dominance in others, while suppressing the competition. This is illegal behavior for which Google has been fined several times over the past few years.
Just consider that in past Android versions there was a hard-coded Google search bar on the default home screen that you could not remove. Google has been forced to ask users and offer a set of alternative search engines on devices with recent Android versions. Same goes for Chrome and competing browsers [1].
Right now Google Search detects the Firefox for Android user agent and serves a second-tier search experience for Firefox users on Android. They have been doing this for the past 6 years [2].
[1] https://mashable.com/article/google-browser-search-engine-ch...
They also do open most links in their own google.com wrapper. Time to break them up
Which is extremely annoying when it’s a pdf or other document that’s set to immediately download; it’s rather tricky to get the actual URL if you want to share it as it won’t ever show up in the address bar.
When I'm looking for an image, I expect my search engine to return me a URL with .png or .jpg at the end of it.
I've noticed that if you change your user-agent to something really old and turn off JS, you can still get more "normal" looking results, complete with the option to view the cached page right there, but I'm not sure how long that will last... Also don't forget that not too long ago, Google decided to start hiding pieces of URLs and convincing the web standards groups to make that a standard: https://www.bleepingcomp…
Designing for small screens is tricky. You can still get the whole URL easily.
You could send email but it's just going to come off as badly informed, unless you show that you understand what they're trying to do and still disagree.