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Google backtracks on search results design

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Re: Google backtracks on search results design

#321

Post by dangrossman »

Marsymars wrote: post #320
dangrossman wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As long as you realize the web without ads is a much smaller and less commercial one. That may be fine with you. But a lot of things hundreds of millions of people use every day would have to go away. Subscriptions can't replace ads, as individuals don't have nearly as much discretionary money to spend as companies have in their advertising budgets. We've already given them that money when we bought our groceries, an…

> We've already given them that money when we bought our groceries, and gas, and paid our bills for rent, internet, TV, phones, insurance, etc. I expect the goal of people advocating for less advertising is to stop giving them that money on a going-forward basis.

That's not something we have any control over, is it? Whether it's allocated to internet or some other channel, these companies are going to advertise to acquire and retain customers, and that advertising cost is baked into their prices. If a new federal law was passed banning all advertising on the internet, I doubt Ford will drop the MSRP of the F-150, or that the price of a bar of Proctor & Gamble soap will change.

Re: Google backtracks on search results design

#322

Post by Marsymars »

dvdkon wrote: post #148
anonytrary wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember that, and I am a still a tiny bit salty about how it impacted me as a user. Ever since, it has been so unnecessarily tedious get the raw image link from Google. Half the time, I end up with a data url, sometimes I get taken to the backing website, who usually don't know anything about accessibility, sometimes I get the image. It's all just so much worse now. That said, it is absolutely theft for Google to…

$1 per 1000 clicks is ridiculous. Google make a lot of money, but that's because of their scale, not because they have somehow made search a miracle source of income. Would you also argue that, say, indexes of literature or libraries should pay the authors money per item viewed, because the data isn't "theirs"? Paying websites with good SEO would make filtering out abusers of search engines (no meaningful content, sc…

Libraries do have to get special non-consumer licenses for electronic books. Typically they pay several times more than a the retail ebook cost for a library license that lasts the lesser of two years or ~50 views before expiry.

Re: Google backtracks on search results design

#323

Post by lesquivemeau »

okareaman wrote: post #125

I just switched to Edge and Bing (Will do DDG in the near future) and I'm not looking back. Edge is very snappy and crisp compared to Chrome. Bing doesn't show tons of ads as the top links. I wonder if Google noticed many people like me switching and became concerned. Edit: Edge operates just like Chrome. Microsoft has made a better Chrome with less memory usage.

Do you use edge because you don't like firefox or because it's preinstalled ? I personally prefer ff but i'd love to hear what you prefer in edge

Re: Google backtracks on search results design

#324

Post by lopmotr »

userbinator wrote: post #301
lopmotr wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If URLs are read by humans, they need to be human readable. If you use a prominently displayed name to contain crap like "?id=22107823" which is meaningless to most users, then get off a search engine. Nobody needs to see that. Give it a human readable name if you want humans to read it or hide it completely if you don't. It's amazing how long unreadable URLs have lingered. I'm all for them being as hidden as HTML co…

"?id=22107823" which is meaningless to most users Absolute rubbish. That is obviously a number identifying the item. I wish a lot of URLs would be shorter , but that's different. I also offer this piece of evidence: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7678729 People are intelligent. They can learn and see things if you give them a chance, and you're basically advocating for keeping them stupid and unknowing by hidin…

People figured out how to make phone calls with numbers too, even area codes and special 0's in front. But it was an ugly mess necessitated by the technology. This isn't necessary.

Even if you know what it means, it's still not suitable for reading. If you saw that in search results, how will you decide if you prefer ?id=7678729 or ?id=22107823 ? They're not even sequential. You can't remember it from something you've seen before.

Yes keep them stupid and hide things from them. That's an important part of how computers became popular. A lot of people were excluded in the days of command line everything.

Re: Google backtracks on search results design

#325

Post by userbinator »

lopmotr wrote: post #324
userbinator wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"?id=22107823" which is meaningless to most users Absolute rubbish. That is obviously a number identifying the item. I wish a lot of URLs would be shorter , but that's different. I also offer this piece of evidence: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7678729 People are intelligent. They can learn and see things if you give them a chance, and you're basically advocating for keeping them stupid and unknowing by hidin…

People figured out how to make phone calls with numbers too, even area codes and special 0's in front. But it was an ugly mess necessitated by the technology. This isn't necessary. Even if you know what it means, it's still not suitable for reading. If you saw that in search results, how will you decide if you prefer ?id=7678729 or ?id=22107823 ? They're not even sequential. You can't remember it from something you'v…

No, no, no!

There's another comment here which sums up my thoughts on this perfectly: "Don't make me think" has turned into "Don't let me think", and that is a disturbingly dangerous direction for freedom from corporate/government control.

Society would be very different today if, several hundred years ago, the "ruling elite" decided that literacy should be discouraged.

Re: Google backtracks on search results design

#326

Post by scarface74 »

clarry wrote: post #310
scarface74 wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You realize the entire purpose of HN is to advertise jobs for YC companies?

I don't need HN critically, and there are alternatives. Even if I did, let me clarify something. When I go to amazon.com and start looking for pens, I don't really consider the product listings to be ads at that point, even though each is obviously advertising a product. The listing is the content I am there for. If I go to a company's website to learn about their products, they are clearly advertising their own (fir…

How would you categorize Computer Shopper back in the day? Most people bought them for the advertising not the content.

Re: Google backtracks on search results design

#327

Post by kennyadam »

shadowgovt wrote: post #283
AJ007 wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The URL seems way more important to me than the favicon / ad issue. Its an issue, but the users who can't see the difference didn't know they've been clicking on ads for the past 10 years. #1 What does Google want the web to look like? Look at Google News. #2 Google gets to hijack 20%~ of the screen space to get users to install their own apps, and go back to Google, not onward to the publisher's own website. #3 Remo…

> where no one but the most technical users can go where they want In what sense?

A lot of people just do not understand how to use URLs and EVERYTHING they visit online is done through Google search. I work in a large school and the majority of the students only use their phones to access the internet and everything is abstracted through apps or Google search bars and they just don't understand URLs.

Re: Google backtracks on search results design

#328

Post by 3xblah »

userbinator wrote: post #68
svnpenn wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Blocking 3rd-party scripts, 1st-party scripts and even inline scripts doesnt do what you say it does. It not as easy as you say it is, theyre using server side scripts to mangle the URLs.

A filtering proxy can still fix the results by substituting the real URLs, since they are still unmolested in the href= attribute of the anchor tags.

Long live privoxy.

However, I wonder how privoxy users handle TLS.

I use localhost proxies to decrypt TLS before it reaches destination programs as well as encrypt outgoing plaintext HTTP traffic from non-TLS enabled programs.

Using proxies allows me to edit incoming and outgoing traffic where needed.

From the privoxy FAQ:

4.15. How can Privoxy filter Secure (HTTPS) URLs?

Since secure HTTP connections are encrypted SSL sessions between your browser and the secure site, and are meant to be reliably secure, there is little that Privoxy can do but hand the raw gibberish data though from one end to the other unprocessed.

The only exception to this is blocking by host patterns, as the client needs to tell Privoxy the name of the remote server, so that Privoxy can establish the connection. If that name matches a host-only pattern, the connection will be blocked.

As far as ad blocking is concerned, this is less of a restriction than it may seem, since ad sources are often identifiable by the host name, and often the banners to be placed in an encrypted page come unencrypted nonetheless for efficiency reasons, which exposes them to the full power of Privoxy's ad blocking.

"Content cookies" (those that are embedded in the actual HTML or JS page content, see filter{content-cookies}), in an SSL transaction will be impossible to block under these conditions. Fortunately, this does not seem to be a very common scenario since most cookies come by traditional means.

Re: Google backtracks on search results design

#329

Post by shadowgovt »

kennyadam wrote: post #327
shadowgovt wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> where no one but the most technical users can go where they want In what sense?

A lot of people just do not understand how to use URLs and EVERYTHING they visit online is done through Google search. I work in a large school and the majority of the students only use their phones to access the internet and everything is abstracted through apps or Google search bars and they just don't understand URLs.

How does that restrict them from going where they want online?

Re: Google backtracks on search results design

#330

Post by kennyadam »

shadowgovt wrote: post #329
kennyadam wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of people just do not understand how to use URLs and EVERYTHING they visit online is done through Google search. I work in a large school and the majority of the students only use their phones to access the internet and everything is abstracted through apps or Google search bars and they just don't understand URLs.

How does that restrict them from going where they want online?

For example, some students use their personal laptops in the sixth form. To access the student intranet, they need to enter the URL (and you ain't finding it on Google) and that's a huge struggle for many of them.

Not understanding URLs also affects their ability to see through any bad emails that make it through the spam filters. If you understand URLs, you can hover over a link, see that it's pointing to bankcom.fzzaa.net and see that it's obviously not something you should click on.

Quite a few students have asked me how to access the online resources that come with the revision guides they have purchased. Somewhere in the book will be a URL to whatever they need and they just don't recognise what a URL is. They see something beginngin with https:// and it's meaningless to them. Visit this link? How? What is it?

This isn't an exhaustive list of reasons, it's not even close. I don't think it makes sense to argue that being completely oblivious to the very basics of something so fundamental to all our lives is something to be dismissed as irrelevant. I also thinking it's bad that Google is the only way so many people know how to access a website. Remember when some blog was ranked #1 for 'facebook login' for a day or so? People were filling the comments section with stuff like "ugh this new facebook is so bad". I think that highlights a serious problem that we're lucky enough to have mostly avoided... so far.

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