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I am no longer able to use Google with Lynx

blind.guru

21–30 of 333 posts

Re: I am no longer able to use Google with Lynx

#21
post #5

w3m works fine for me. Any reason people prefer lynx over w3m or eww?

It doesn't work for me for quite a while now (for up to a year), even with recent versions from git [0]. My preliminary guess is that's because Google renders each result with (block element) inside an tag. I didn't have any extra spare time to test that further (and report) though, so I simply ditched Google and just went with duck.com from that point.

[0] https://github.com/tats/w3m

Re: I am no longer able to use Google with Lynx

#23

Another person notes that ddg is inferior. Maybe people get used to a certain way of searching with Google that doesn't translate to ddg. Haven't noticed a drop in quality myself and I think I might have been retrained to use different patterns and techniques in structuring my queries.

DDG results are so much worse for me, especially anything longer tail or in Spanish, that I switch to Google when I'm actually getting work done. I find myself adding "!g" to an important search just to check for any results that DDG doesn't know about and it's almost always an upgrade to see Google's results.

Search is hard.

I don't like to chime in to say something negative about an underdog like DDG, but I see this "people probably just don't know how to use DDG" suggestion a lot and it's quite the opposite: Google feels like it can practically read my mind with minimal context, like knowing I also may be talking about a recent event that shares the name with a generic search term. And I'm not talking about personalized search.

Or consider how "elm dict" in Google takes me to https://package.elm-lang.org/packages/elm/core/latest/Dict (#1 result), but https://duckduckgo.com/?q=elm+dict&t=h_&ia=web in DDG doesn't (nowhere on page 1).

Run into this enough and it becomes hard to willfully use DDG when you know you're likely missing out on good results when trying to do real work.

Re: I am no longer able to use Google with Lynx

#24
post #11

The redesigned version of Google Search that is being A/B tested no longer shows links. Despite being a developer, I'm anxious to click search results, especially because when results are filtered to be from the last day or week, they are full of phishing sites and pages with scraped content that immediately redirect to malware. This change can't possibly be beneficial to users. It makes people even more ignorant abo…

They took urls away and then added this: https://i.imgur.com/RI4xxgs.png For example, searched "hierarchy" and it'll show "en.wikipedia.org > wiki > hierarchy" above the wikipedia search result. > This change can't possibly be beneficial to users. You're right if the url/domain isn't even shown at all. But I can think of a few benefits of showing the domain as it currently does, like to avoid phishing. It also basica…

Multiple versions are being tested. The one I've seen does not contain the domain, not even in a tokenized form.

It looked like this: https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-is-testing-search...

Re: I am no longer able to use Google with Lynx

#26
post #7

I feel like many of the text-mode browsers have failed to keep up with changing web standards. We were all mad when IE was holding back the Internet, and I'm not sure we should give lynx and w3m a pass because they're geek tools. (Accessibility is an important concern, but web browsers running under a GUI system support screen readers.) https://www.brow.sh/ is a console-based browser that claims to support modern sta…

[deleted]

Re: I am no longer able to use Google with Lynx

#30
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They took urls away and then added this: https://i.imgur.com/RI4xxgs.png For example, searched "hierarchy" and it'll show "en.wikipedia.org > wiki > hierarchy" above the wikipedia search result. > This change can't possibly be beneficial to users. You're right if the url/domain isn't even shown at all. But I can think of a few benefits of showing the domain as it currently does, like to avoid phishing. It also basica…

Multiple versions are being tested. The one I've seen does not contain the domain, not even in a tokenized form. It looked like this: https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-is-testing-search...

Yeah, the iteration I'm being served is definitely an upgrade over that. The one shown in your link is what I had previously, so it seems that mine is a refinement of it and a middle ground that I don't think is so bad.
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