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Google are removing URLs entirely from search results?

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Re: Google are removing URLs entirely from search results?

#221

Post by skinnymuch »

cdata wrote: post #183
malvosenior wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Speaking as an employee at Google (but not for Google; opinions are all my own), I will offer you this anecdote: 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…

Think of all the “evil” or awfully run companies people will refer to. AT&T, Comcast, Facebook, Oracle, Uber, WeWork, Amazon, Walmart, Monsanto, Phillip Morris, Halliburton, Goldman Sachs, 3 letter government agencies, or in general, major private equity firms.

Obviously good people work at all those companies too. Doesn’t mean the company as a whole isn’t a good force.

Funnily enough I was talking to a friend of a friend who works for LinkedIn. He essentially said the same thing you said wrt not hearing about the negative things about LinkedIn in his every day life. He had no idea that there’s a big tech literate and otherwise chunk of people who find LinkedIn’s dark patterns awful. He didn’t even think LI had any because in his daily life at the company, that sort of stuff didn’t come up.

Another anecdote is my uncle works for Comcast. Same with him, he doesn’t hear about the negatives of the company in his every day life.

Your situation seems like this friend if friends. It makes sense. What company wants to be seen as evil? What sort of normal employee wants to think of the company they work for as a bad company? Nonetheless, there’s good reason people have issues with Google, LinkedIn, and Comcast.

Re: Google are removing URLs entirely from search results?

#222

Post by nullc »

The fact that google rewrites the displayed URLs as you click on them to intercept the traffic (and that firefox continues to allow them to do it: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=229050) is bad enough.

Google's current behavior makes it so you can't copy URLs from search results so your only option is to copy the displayed URL (if it's short enough) ... so of course, they're going to remove the displayed URL.

Copying the search results URLs is something that I need to do almost every day to copy scientific paper urls to people in chat ... usually I can't click the url to get it, because clicking it just launches a PDF viewer.

This single obnoxious bit of user spying behavior that Mozilla continues to facilitate has probably already wasted a full working week of my life.

On the plus (?) side, now that google is removing the one remaining work around I'll likely get stuck using a non-google search regardless of the worse results.

Re: Google are removing URLs entirely from search results?

#223

Post by bitL »

marcosdumay wrote: post #151
jsilence wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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's actually weird to see that in a DDG x Google comparison... But yes, DDG has started giving me results with entire terms removed from the search since recently, and I have to add quotes all the time to get them back. But at least with DDG we have to option of quoting the terms. Google is much worse at this in any way you care to measure.

No, they actually started removing even quoted terms from search like 2-3 months ago or so; as a consequence I am now looking for DDG alternatives. First Google results became bad, now DDG seems to copy the same "failure" of the "dominant player" instead of standing out and being useful.

Re: Google are removing URLs entirely from search results?

#224

Post by MayeulC »

bharam wrote: post #90
austhrow743 wrote: post #68

Left gmail just over a year ago which was the biggest anchor holding me to Google. Appears this was what was needed to get me over to duckduckgo on search. Results have been fine for everything I've searched in the last hour.

What was your process for leaving Google? I'm on Android, have a GMail account and so on. If you want to leave where do you start?

Not the parent, and you might consider me biased/extremist, but it might give you ideas: I've been moving to a self-hosted (yunohost for now) solution on a re-purposed computer. Unfortunately, this isn't for everyone. This covers mail, cloud (with nextcloud: calendar, contacts, pictures), and many others.

On Android, I mostly use F-droid, as I find apps there are of better quality anyways. The only other apps left on my phone are for banking and transportation, plus maybe a few select services.

I will likely move over to a pinephone when they are available. I can't wait to have a serviceable phone, both hardware and software.

The self-hosted way maybe isn't for everyone, but if every person that does it offers access to family and friends, it wouldn't take that many hosts... and there are commercial/nonprofit orgs that provide some hosting options.

I do not self-host a search engine, though (searx didn't work well, and isn't really a search engine). It took me a few weeks to get used to ddg, but I find it very hard to use Google nowadays, as I got used to bangs, instant answers, the way to enter search terms, etc. I actually use my old (ca. 2010) Google-fu, which works well, but not on Google anymore.

Re: Google are removing URLs entirely from search results?

#225

Post by ddingus »

backtoyoujim wrote: post #143
yyyk wrote: post #50

This is a purely anti-user move. No user gains anything by it, this actually helps phishing sites. Oh, and it happens to help Google's AMP effort, which can now pretend to be the original site even more effectively. Time to get everyone to use Duck Duck Go, and to get rid of those Google CAPTCHAs which are an even bigger data harvesting operation than search.

Does Duck Duck Go use google ?

With the URLs missing, that just got harder.

Re: Google are removing URLs entirely from search results?

#226

Post by skinnymuch »

izacus wrote: post #213
zrobotics wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a counterpoint, consider that just because good people work there does not mean that the company isn't evil. I'm sure there are NSA employees who are nice folks, but that doesn't mean that the organization is good. Even the originator of 'embrace, extend, extinguish' had good people working for them. That doesn't mean that early 2000s Microsoft wasn't a fairly evil organization. To Natella's credit, they have radi…

> As a counterpoint, consider that just because good people work there does not mean that the company isn't evil. This isn't a comic book or a Marvel movie. Companies are just that, companies. They're incentivized to make money. Google is as evil as BP, Oracle, Microsoft, Apple, Ford or Tesla. Instead of doing comic book analogies which don't apply to real world, perhaps start thinking in terms of incentives that dri…

It’s not as black and white as you make it seem either. Oracle is not the same as other big tech companies. Is WeWork the same as other companies too?

Re: Google are removing URLs entirely from search results?

#227

Post by tzs »

swebs wrote: post #89
jsilence wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Duckduckgo uses Bing search in the back end, which is dogshit

Bing seems fine to me.

When I got a Surface Pro 4 three years ago, I decided to give Edge a try to see if it would do as my main browser, and left Bing as its default search.

Three years later, I've not felt the need to change that.

Re: Google are removing URLs entirely from search results?

#228

Post by iKevinShah »

9HZZRfNlpR wrote: post #220
iKevinShah wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any link for that please?

CIA grants. As conspiracy it sounds, it's perfectly public knowledge and true.

Again, any link even for the conspiracy theory / discussion, as farfetched it seems.

Re: Google are removing URLs entirely from search results?

#230

Post by Jagat »

davidy123 wrote: post #61

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…

Confirming that it's not a hoax. Here's what I see on my two browsers https://imgur.com/a/0tcLhBe
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