If I hadn't already ditched Google long ago, this would be more than enough to chase me away.
They are forcing my further and further towards kagi. I do hope the fawning on here is at least partly justified.
google.com/goto: Google's anti-scraping update
31–40 of 545 posts
Re: google.com/goto: Google's anti-scraping update
#32Google Search is dying, and it is showing all the standard symptoms.
Re: google.com/goto: Google's anti-scraping update
#33I've been using DuckDuckGo for years now, ever since it became noticeable that two different people searching for the same search term would get two different results back from Google. Meaning they were no longer completely reliable: they might show one person a result that they hide from the other person by burying it on page 3 where few people ever look.
DDG's search results have been poorer recently than they used to — I often see completely unrelated results (to the point of my saying "Why in the world did that come back as a search result??!?") starting from page 2. And yet, I still use them, simply because they aren't Google.
Re: google.com/goto: Google's anti-scraping update
#34Re: google.com/goto: Google's anti-scraping update
#35It hasn’t provided direct URLs for decades? Not exactly new behaviour. I’ve got something that will blow your mind. Google now has tracking analytics, for get this, your business’s phone number. Some “Adsense partner” convinced our web admin to install a little script which changes your phone number on your website so they track phone call enquires back to search engine leads / advertising spend. Yeah no thanks, that…
This is nothing - Google has had things like the ability to track in-store conversions based on Android/Gmaps tracking for years.
Some of the things TV companies do will shock you too.
Re: google.com/goto: Google's anti-scraping update
#36I use ChatGPT for almost all my searches now. I’m not joking.
I wish one of those free AIs made a search product already. I don't want my search results to be interspersed with text I guess that the web chat can have a search skill to remove the prose and give only links, plus maybe an excerpt of each result
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Re: google.com/goto: Google's anti-scraping update
#37It hasn’t provided direct URLs for decades? Not exactly new behaviour. I’ve got something that will blow your mind. Google now has tracking analytics, for get this, your business’s phone number. Some “Adsense partner” convinced our web admin to install a little script which changes your phone number on your website so they track phone call enquires back to search engine leads / advertising spend. Yeah no thanks, that…
Would it be different to you if a third company (not Google) provided that same phone number tracking service?
Would that company then sell that data back to Google? The consolidation of control of information under a single actor is certainly a factor, but it's not that simple, and it's not the only factor. You shouldn't be so eager to outsource as much of your business intelligence as possible.
Re: google.com/goto: Google's anti-scraping update
#38I've been using DuckDuckGo for years now, ever since it became noticeable that two different people searching for the same search term would get two different results back from Google. Meaning they were no longer completely reliable: they might show one person a result that they hide from the other person by burying it on page 3 where few people ever look. DDG's search results have been poorer recently than they used…
Personalized search results are not ipso facto unreliable.
Re: google.com/goto: Google's anti-scraping update
#39If I hadn't already ditched Google long ago, this would be more than enough to chase me away.
They are forcing my further and further towards kagi. I do hope the fawning on here is at least partly justified.
Kagi is what I settled on a couple of years ago. I do think sometimes the fawning is over the top, but it is a solid search engine and tended to give me a bit better results than Google out of the box. The real win, though, is that you can give various sites a weight, so the search results will prefer or avoid sites according to your desires. Once I had that going, my search results tended to be much better than Google.
Re: google.com/goto: Google's anti-scraping update
#40Direct URLs in Google search results have been replaced with redirect URLs in the form of www.google.com/goto?url= . The base64 data appears to consist of a very basic protobuf structure, containing a long string of bytes in field 2 which presumably identify the URL. Sometimes, these redirect URLs take a perceivable amount of time to load, which is very irritating.
> Sometimes, these redirect URLs take a perceivable amount of time to load, which is very irritating.
Great. On top of my on-going battle with Windows + Firefox + DNS/TLS resolution sometimes stalling for seconds at a time, another few second server-side stall is introduced.
I swear that every day modern computing scenarios get slower and slower instead of snappier and snappier.