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Google backtracks on search results design

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331–340 of 356 posts

Re: Google backtracks on search results design

#331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.fz…

> 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.

Sorry, copy and paste or clicking on a link they were emailed is a huge struggle? How are they receiving these URLs that they aren't immediately usable?

>Not understanding URLs also affects their ability to see through any bad emails that make it through the spam filters.

I've seen too many people who ostensibly understand URLs get phished to think it much matters.

Re: Google backtracks on search results design

#332
post #201
post #200

Only slight related: Google's last big search update has been a complete disaster for me. Very naive and arrogant assumptions of the semantics of my search. I can't search anything more than a few words strung together. If you try to search a sentence that you don't precisely know (like a couple words are different) then you're shit out of luck now even though it used to work great. Google is literally becoming worse…

Why not give a few examples?

Google is now totally useless for any error message from popular software. I was getting an esoteric error from nginx; pasting the long error in quotes to google gave a full page of irrelevant ads with no organic results. DDG and Bing both had a forum post from Igor himself explaining the error as the first hit.

This sort of highly targeted search used to work so well in GOOG and now it doesn’t work at all and hasn’t for a while. I moved to DDG a year ago and never even seem to use !g.

Re: Google backtracks on search results design

#333

I go to bing.com and honestly it is more egregious. I couldn't tell which were the Ads and which were the search results. As a Google employee, I am not a fan of the new design and can appreciate consumers' dissatisfaction with it and will be happy if it is reverted. But, I can't help feel like there is a double standard, here. For instance, Google didn't even opt to bid on the recent giant contract to be the cloud p…

[deleted]

Re: Google backtracks on search results design

#334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for letting me know. This is great news.

Don't get too excited, it doesn't yet support add-ons like ublock origin...

Well that would be life-ruining. What's the alternative? (Somehow I didn't see the last sentence of what I was responding to.)

Re: Google backtracks on search results design

#335
post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 S…

> 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

Except if you use YouTube, which is a pretty significant service but impossible to use domain-based adblock like pi-hole with since both ads and content are served through the same Google domain. If you use the YouTube for Android app that means you have to sit through ads.

The alternative is something like invidious[0], but last time I tried it was impossible to seek videos more than half an hour because the seek bar shares its space with the player controls so it ends up occupying only ~15% of the viewport. That or waiting for Firefox Nightly to support WebExtensions.

[0] https://invidio.us

Re: Google backtracks on search results design

#336
It seems every time Google ruins the user experience for its products, the reason is money. I guess that sounds obvious by now.

For example, the the size of the skip button on YouTube ads on Android changed so it only has the width of the seconds counter instead of including the "Skip in N" text. Before you could keep pressing the button before the timer ran out without triggering the ad, if you were impatient, but now you have to be careful not to accidentally click on the ad since the button is so small.

Why? Because it results in more accidental clicks, if so many people have the habit of tapping it over and over. Which means more money. At the expense of user frustration or worry over clicking it unintentionally.

Look at Dropbox's redesign. They slapped a bunch of completely useless collaboration tools that have nothing to do with my singular use case for Dropbox: syncing files. And that's because, as they say, syncing is a feature, not a product, so they probably had no choice to find new ways to "keep growing" and making revenue or simply die out. Because they can't afford otherwise. But Dropbox was the one company with the capital to fine-tune their algorithm so it "just worked" across network instability and numerous system configurations (until they dropped support for everything until ext4 on Linux at least), so that's what so many people used.

I believe that if the only goal was to develop a program to sync files across devices, then everyone at Dropbox would have declared all the extra features unnecessary. But people have to eat.

I keep wondering if the limitless pursuit of capital growth is worth the downsides. It can give us things like Dropbox, but ultimately Dropbox is not worth the hassle for me anymore due to the bloat. As a naive question, will there ever be point where we've had enough growing?

Re: Google backtracks on search results design

#337
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…

AOL Keywords are back!

Is it wrong for me to be happy?

Re: Google backtracks on search results design

#338
post #7

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22107823 Does this mean they'll also "backtrack" on their destruction of the URL? I was extremely disturbed and horrified when I realised that not only did they replace / with >, but also seemed to arbitrarily remove and rewrite pieces of URLs shown in the results (e.g. all articles from HM would show nothing more than "news.ycombinator.com > item", which was…

I opened Chrome on a friends phone (first time on Chrome mobile in years) and was shocked to see the url bar is no longer editable. It just gave me a weird context menu with a copy icon. I guess they really want to funnel everyone through search...

I'm actually a fan of this. I rarely edit URLs, mostly copy them to share. Before, that always needed several clicks. Now I have the option to directly copy/share/edit it. Editing is at most one click more, sharing and copying is much easier.

Re: Google backtracks on search results design

#339
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I opened Chrome on a friends phone (first time on Chrome mobile in years) and was shocked to see the url bar is no longer editable. It just gave me a weird context menu with a copy icon. I guess they really want to funnel everyone through search...

It's really scary. And it's a shame Firefox is so slow on mobile...

Is it? At least on Android it's the same as Chrome for me with no addons enabled. With ublock origin, Firefox is much faster.

Re: Google backtracks on search results design

#340
post #110
post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect you greatly underestimate how much the average person didn't really care here. In the moment, yeah, this matters - but Google still beats DDG for certain classes of results and people go where the easiest experience is. I say this as a user of DDG. ;P

People don’t really compare that hard. If DDG’s experience is intuitively easier than Google’s in the first minutes (because there are no ads and results are good enough), people will switch. The real problem is the “embedness” level of Google is much higher than any search engine achieved before: a switcher must make a pretty serious effort to change browser settings, change tools etc, and you can bet top dollars th…

Local (esp foreign language) results are so much worse on DDG. For many users it's just not an option. And people don't care about text ads, as long as they are relevant. I love DDG but if they can't get results with a quality close to what google offers, I don't think they'll ever become mainstream.
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