Reminder that almost every Google search bashing thread on HN is most probably injected by DDG. They have been doing that for years and years and it proved to be very effective. It's a amazing that such a mediocre search engine like DDG can be popular only based on rants and accusations on the big guy. But it seems really to be a very effective marketing technique.
Every Google result now looks like an ad
191–200 of 1001 posts
Re: Every Google result now looks like an ad
#192Earlier quoted context omitted.
Releasing hundreds of open-source tools and donating protocols to standards bodies is really not what I would consider evil. The web is a thousand times better now than it was ten years ago. And despite the frequent misinformation, "Don't be evil" has never once left their code of conduct.
Were you even born 10 years ago? I'm assuming not if that is what you actually believe. I couldn't disagree more.
I'm flagging your comment for abuse. I've been developing on the web for over 15 years.
Re: Every Google result now looks like an ad
#193Earlier quoted context omitted.
AMP obscuring the URL is a side effect of the current technical implementation, not a goal – and they are working to fix it: https://searchengineland.com/google-announces-signed-exchang...
Cloudflare has an option for native AMP urls, at your own domain, as well.
Is any site using this? It requires a special certificate and signing your content (which admittedly Cloudflare will take care of for you) but even then it’s only for Chrome and Firefox and Apple have said they won’t support it. Over a year after announcing it I’ve yet to find a single site that does this.
Re: Every Google result now looks like an ad
#194Earlier quoted context omitted.
read. more. tech. history. You have no idea how furious your comment made me.
They've built browsers, standards, protocols, libraries, and frameworks for the web. They've contributed more to the web than probably any company outside of CERN.
There were browsers, standards, protocols, libraries and frameworks before Google and there is a plethora of them now, too, that have no connection to Google.
Without the web, there would be no Google, but without Google, there'd still be plenty of web.
Heck, if you want to talk inventions, it was Microsoft who came up with doing XMLRPC inside the browser and actually made a decent web port of Outlook using it. That alone is a pretty massive cornerstone of the modern web.
Google once did a great search engine, which they're well on their way to ruining. The only other thing they've accomplished is privacy-invading copies of already existing services, which has become popular because they figured out how to offer them for "free" (I.E. monetize other people's personal data to sell ads).
Re: Every Google result now looks like an ad
#195They also kinda build the web though
I thought that was Al Gore?
That gag's got whiskers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Performance_Computing_Act...
He wrote legislation that expanded federal funding for large-scale IT projects. (He also wrote thank you letters to those teams. I still have a photocopy in a box somewhere.)
Your web browser is probably free today in large part because Netscape had to compete with a tool built under a National Science Foundation grant. They sold Navigator in boxes in stores but they were free on the internet (chicken and egg problem that could be easily solved by the internet savvy and anyone they were friends with). Every web browser since copied the previous generation.
Re: Every Google result now looks like an ad
#196I'm confused. I noticed this aesthetic change a couple of weeks ago and I wondered what was causing it. So now when I saw this post, I turned off adblock on the search results page to see where the ads are, and I still can't seem to see any ads. The sidebar is blank. The main page has results from "Places", "People also ask" and "images", interspersed with the normal results (which now look more like the old ads), bu…
The ads look nearly identical to the search results now except the icon is replaced with "Ad":
Re: Every Google result now looks like an ad
#197Earlier quoted context omitted.
Releasing hundreds of open-source tools and donating protocols to standards bodies is really not what I would consider evil. The web is a thousand times better now than it was ten years ago. And despite the frequent misinformation, "Don't be evil" has never once left their code of conduct.
> The web is a thousand times better now than it was ten years ago. I disagree wholeheartedly. I think the web is much worse than it was ten years ago, and the trendline indicates that it will continue on that trajectory.
I honestly think peak web was reached some time around 2003.
Re: Every Google result now looks like an ad
#198Earlier quoted context omitted.
I did, first for any search that might include political bias, due to results' censorship, but then I accidentally discovered that programming related searches and other technical searches are often better in Bing too.
>> but then I accidentally discovered that programming related searches and other technical searches are often better in Bing too. They have gotten terrible at Google because the results are all ads. Any technical article explaining what an expert may want to know is not part of a corporate product page and therefore has no monetary value for anyone (Google included) to push it up in the results. Ask how to implement…
Yeah I had to stop using Google entirely because I just couldn't find anything relevant to what I actually wanted to know. They've worked so hard to make the results relevant to someone with like 1 year of experience that the results are no longer actually relevant to someone who wants to go deeper or know more or who already knows everything on the first page of results but needs more information than a magic library.
To be honest the Internet has gotten significantly less useful as a repository of information as it has aged, to the point where I now have to order books if I want to learn anything new in my field.
Re: Every Google result now looks like an ad
#199My assumption here is that this decision is one where someone had an A/B test that showed people are more likely to click on an ad when the content is structured the way it’s shown.
Which comes at the cost of a good user experience, where the feature PM didn’t truly ask: “does this deliver any value to the people using the search?”
Always trying to remember the wonderful excerpt[0] from Ken Kocienda’s “Creative Selection” on A/B tests - just because the data shows the outcomes are more significant does not make that a better experience.
[0]: https://mobile.twitter.com/kocienda/status/11134509457051770...
Re: Every Google result now looks like an ad
#200I've been in this A/B test for a couple of months now, so I've had time to adjust, and I still hate it. I've just become so used to seeing the complete URL in green. The complete URL! If you hover over the results, you'll see that they like to take bits like numeric components or the query string out. This is part of Google's attempt to de-prioritise the URL. Their destructive AMP service confusingly shows you Google…
How is hijacking the domain with Google for AMP not anti-competitive? I'm surprised a class action lawsuit hasn't erupted because of that.
AMP isn't being forced on websites, they choose to enable it or not.