Ask HN: What's Up with Google? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: What's Up with Google?

#81

Post by zestyping » Sat, Jan 22, 2022, 3:50 AM UTC

taftster wrote: post #56

kyrra wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Googler, opinions are my own. For products that are core, large UI changes tend to just annoy a lot of users, unless there's something really amazing about the change. Even then, people are hesitant to like new UIs. Engineers and designers definitely want to try new things, but balancing those against messing with UIs that a billion+ people use is hard. My general take on drive and calendar, if they are trying to imp…

It's not "large" UI changes that are needed. (I mean, they are needed, the current google UI for most of their products sucks). But it's small improvements that make the big difference. A small user interface element added or removed to speed up an interaction. An updated user experience so that data can be found or organized in a slightly different way. I could pick on almost everyone of Google's products and have g…

Every product has obvious low-hanging fruit that could be improved in the UX — yet the company persists in spending effort on sweeping yet entirely cosmetic changes that deliver zero value.

A good example is changing the typeface of text labels in every product to match the new Google logo, which Google seem to have been continuously doing for years on end now. I would argue this even has negative value, as it creates a mix of two typefaces (Roboto and Product Sans) in every product that used to have one, which causes every future UI design decision to be saddled with the extra cost of deciding which of the two to use.

Re: Ask HN: What's Up with Google?

#82

Post by mrVentures » Sat, Jan 22, 2022, 3:51 AM UTC

Can someone explain to me why the video results are so bad? Half the time I'm looking for YouTube and YouTube never shows up? Was this due to a lawsuit or something? Half the time it's some random website that has a 2minute video before two 30second ad rolls, never what I want.

Re: Ask HN: What's Up with Google?

#83

Post by puregram » Sat, Jan 22, 2022, 3:59 AM UTC

richardsocher wrote: post #76

stephc_int13 wrote: post #62

I stopped using Google search (and most of their services) about three years ago. I used DDG for a while, but I was not convinced. Bing is average, not as good as Google once was, far from it in fact, but more relevant than the duck and less annoying than Google. But yeah, search is in a bad state.

Would love to hear your thoughts on you.com We're trying to innovate on various aspects of search, design, UX, AI, etc.

[dead]

Re: Ask HN: What's Up with Google?

#84

Post by wanderingmind » Sat, Jan 22, 2022, 4:03 AM UTC

Ublock Origin is your friend. Add custom filters to remove these from search results. For example you can remove Pinterest from Google result using filter

google.##.g:has(a[href="pinterest.com"])

And DDG using filter

duckduckgo.##.results > div:has(a[href="pinterest.com"])

Re: Ask HN: What's Up with Google?

#85

Post by thematrixturtle » Sat, Jan 22, 2022, 4:04 AM UTC

If you're looking for an alternative, try Kagi. Much better search results than DDG/Bing, but it supports all the DDG !bangs. No Google-style knowledge graph/instant answers though, and while the beta is free, they plan to eventually start charging.

https://kagi.com/signup?invite_code=morehumaneweb

Re: Ask HN: What's Up with Google?

#86

Post by PixyMisa » Sat, Jan 22, 2022, 4:05 AM UTC

taftster wrote: post #23

I think the utility of generic search engines is coming to an end. Services like Google, Bing and DDG are numbered in usefulness. Instead, I am guessing (maybe hoping) that we see a return of the moderated directories, like Yahoo or DMOZ of old. A 2.0 spin on these directories, with lessons learned from all the years. Imagine that you just go to StackOverflow and search there directly for your answer. Want a funny la…

Try DuckDuckGo. It has shortcuts for searching - at last count - 13,565 sites.

Re: Ask HN: What's Up with Google?

#87

Post by fault1 » Sat, Jan 22, 2022, 4:05 AM UTC

mrVentures wrote: post #82

Can someone explain to me why the video results are so bad? Half the time I'm looking for YouTube and YouTube never shows up? Was this due to a lawsuit or something? Half the time it's some random website that has a 2minute video before two 30second ad rolls, never what I want.

I always assumed it was because YT and Search were different groups at Google. This tends to happen all the time. The OneGoogle thing (having one Google account everywhere) must have taken an act of god!

Re: Ask HN: What's Up with Google?

#88

Post by thematrixturtle » Sat, Jan 22, 2022, 4:06 AM UTC

YXNjaGVyZWdlbgo wrote: post #24

If you can get a beta invite for https://kagi.com get it. Not only are their defaults really good you also have the option to customize your searches by blacklisting, creating groups with sites like stackoverflow, github, hackernews etc for a dev search and so much more. It feels like google in the 00s with better customization.

Psst: https://kagi.com/signup?invite_code=morehumaneweb

Re: Ask HN: What's Up with Google?

#89

Post by kikokikokiko » Sat, Jan 22, 2022, 4:08 AM UTC

kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #46

whakim wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a number of ways that you can expose paywalled content to Google without showing it to the user. The obvious one is paywalling content on the client side and hiding it from the user. I actually think this probably explains why client-side paywalling is so prevalent even though it's obviously far less effective. You can also serve your content in structured data that google's bots read (e.g. json+ld). I also t…

Hiding content is supposed to be against Google's stated policies.

Try searching for a news article, using the exact same title, as it's published on let's say... Breitbart. Now tell me that Google do not "hide" sites from it's users.

Re: Ask HN: What's Up with Google?

#90

Post by JimDabell » Sat, Jan 22, 2022, 4:10 AM UTC

SnowflakeOnIce wrote: post #74

I've noticed in the past 2-3 months that results from StackOverflow, Wikipedia, and official programming language documentation sites seem to have been abruptly downranked. They used to typically be in the top 3 results for me for appropriate queries, but now they frequently aren't even on the first page.

I’ve noticed that as well. I’ve been finding a lot of queries are now leading me to those awful sites that just dump StackOverflow content onto a page and surround it with ads. The original Stack Overflow page is nowhere to be found on the first page, but if I grab a sentence from the spam page and search again, I can normally find the original.