Someone needs to fix Google! Non profit based search engine?
Every Google result now looks like an ad
961–970 of 1001 posts
Re: Every Google result now looks like an ad
#962It's been clear for a little while that Google no longer cares about giving the best experience with a lot of their tools and is just focused on maximizing revenue. More and more, Google is the modern equivalent of Microsoft in the early 00s, still good enough that most people use it, but each successive "version" piles on more frustrations than benefits. It's so ironic that Google has become that which they most des…
I watched this clip of Steve Jobs[0] recently, where was speaking about promoting/empowering Product vs Marketing people. Some of his comments seem especially applicable: "[...] the companies forget what it means to make great products. The product sensibility and the product genius that brought them to that monopolistic position gets rotted out, by people running these companies who have no conception of a good prod…
Ironically, Jobs installed Tim Cook as Apple CEO and have publicly said that he is "not a product person".
Re: Every Google result now looks like an ad
#963It's been clear for a little while that Google no longer cares about giving the best experience with a lot of their tools and is just focused on maximizing revenue. More and more, Google is the modern equivalent of Microsoft in the early 00s, still good enough that most people use it, but each successive "version" piles on more frustrations than benefits. It's so ironic that Google has become that which they most des…
Your fate is sealed the moment you go public. No public company can withstand the shareholder pressure forever
It's not the fate. Google has more cash in the bank than any other company in the world (in tune of $130 billion). They could choose to use this cash to invest in creating new business, new products and the market would reward them handsomely. This is how Amazon's stock had meteoric rise despite of poor margins and a series of failures. Amazon has spent out a massive amount of cash in trying to build one business after another, everything from Fire phone to Alexa to kids tablet to Prime Video to grocery delivery to the pharmacy and so on. Many of these has failed and Bezos have pushed on with eyes on long horizon. People don't realize but Amazon is not its web site or AWS but a product factory, a sort of meta product. This keeps the market hopeful that they would have another big hit and the stock keeps going up on speculation. The majority of CFOs/CEOs of big tech haven't understood this and they keep twisting arm of existing cows to squeeze out more milk while a mountain of cash waiting to be utilized. It's also not that there is a dearth of new opportunity. Every sector from health to education to transportation to energy to finance is waiting for the next revolution. Its only gutsy leaders like Elon Musk who come in out of nowhere and start out things like Boring company or Tesla or Solar City. The market rewards them for taking a risk and being visionary (Tesla market cap is now more than GM and Ford combined despite selling 98% less vehicles!). So, the market is working fine and in fact doing exactly what it should do.
So don't blame fate. Don't blame market. Don't blame wall street. Don't confuse a lack of visionary CEOs or their willingness to take a risk with fate or dysfunctional market.
Re: Every Google result now looks like an ad
#964It may also be an attempt to work around Ad blocking browsers like Brave.
Re: Every Google result now looks like an ad
#965I'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…
I hate to be that guy, but have you considered moving to another search engine? For example, DuckDuckGo is very decent once you adapt to it. And for the few cases where you absolutely need Google to read your mind, just add "!g" to your query and you're automatically there.
The thing which I use Google most for is typing some random place’s name in and it gives me that little card which shows how busy it typically is, what time it’s open, directions, contact number, etc. DDG just gives me a search result and 90% of the time that’s not what I want. I’m looking for information, not a list of URLs.
Re: Every Google result now looks like an ad
#966Earlier quoted context omitted.
Mission accomplished?
Depends on what Google’s mission is. If it’s to show you ads, it doesn’t matter how long you’re on their page as the destination will (almost certainly) have more. If it’s to help you, it’s not successful.
>mission
Making profit, obviously. You to be less efficient at distinguishing ads and results, increasing time you look at ads, increasing chances of you interacting with ads.
Re: Every Google result now looks like an ad
#967I finally switched to duckduckgo and its fine! No complaints so far.
Re: Every Google result now looks like an ad
#968Earlier quoted context omitted.
wow does that ... still exist? is it maintained? (I thought the creator stopped 15+ years ago?) does the user interface still look weird and green? :)
The creator died 16 years ago... but the (rather small) community has made a lot of patches and continues to work on filters. Given that it's basically the equivalent of running all the sites you visit through sed, with a syntax that's more suited for filtering HTML than plaintext, the strength lies in its flexibility and generality. Yes, the UI is still skinnable, and the default skin is rather... psychedelic.
Ohhhh, right! I remember when that happened, forgot ... Amazing that the software is still in use. And that it's still useful given the temporary nature of these filters. Its syntax was pretty neat; writing your own cosmetic filters was pretty easy. And I suppose that the community wrote some code to auto convert public block lists maybe?
There's something to be said about the adblocker being a filtering proxy, it can really get anything before it hits the browser.
Do you know how it compares to Privoxy nowadays? Way back then it was the open source but harder to configure alternative, that didn't quite work as well as Proxomitron. But maybe Privoxy continued development and got better, I don't know what direction that project took.
Oh and I personally always really liked the default skin :D
Re: Every Google result now looks like an ad
#969Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because web browsers default "home screen" has a large text box by default. People think that's where the address goes, but not really, that's actually a web page which does search. Shame on us for designing it that way. But on another note, it will be the day when your mother (or anyone else for that matter) types in 'www.walmart.com' and actually goes to 'www.target.com' (names taken from other examples that I've s…
That is already happening I made a new webpage for my father, and my mother cannot open it, since google does not know about that and there are no links to it.
Maybe Firefox should change the default screen from containing search to containing the address bar instead. That way if you type in a proper URL there it should go directly to it rather than doing a search.
Re: Every Google result now looks like an ad
#970Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Unless I misunderstood, that is something you disable in each (google)app that has that "feature". > In Gmail for instance: settings: General settings: > Open links in gmail. Turn on for "faster" browsing. I changed this setting, but now I clicked a link in gmail and indeed it opens via Firefox, but it still gets redirected through a google-URL before getting to the real page. I want to disable that behaviour most…
Then use a generic email client instead of Gmail mobile app or web email interface.
The Fastmail app is very good, for example.