It's all subjective but I love the new Gmail interfaces, Hangouts is much better than Talk and keeps getting better. Google+ photos is so much better than Picasa, I love how I can search for 'blue cars' in my photos and it returns them even though I've never tagged any of them. Android has seen enormous improvements, I love stock 4.3 and Google Now. Chrome's new 'native' apps wrapper-like thing is neat. Even Youtube…
The Hangouts experience on Android is an abomination. Its why I disabled (yes, fully disabled) Hangouts and switched to Whatsapp. Its that bad.
We notice some changes too since june, you think it's too push people to buy adwords? I feel too that small websites have trouble to rank against bigger ones.
This is no conspiracy. Ignoring that larger sites have better page rank, they can also spend more on SEO. Ma and Pop's widget shop is a wordpress clunker built by their teen son. He's not spending 20 hours a week watching metrics and messing with SEO. $big_shop_webmaster certainly is.
That's a bug. Google claims that quality content wins over SEO. And WordPress is professionally written software.
I think this is interesting because it matches my user experience with Google products in a very inverted way. Google search has gotten worse and worse lately, forcing me on to other search engines with worse UIs just so that I can get useful results. Youtube UI gets worse every time they update it. They cancelled the RSS reader. The email UI keeps getting worse and featuring more ads. But the stock value hit $1000.…
This is because Google has started optimizing for the 99% use case, which most HN'ers usually don't fall under. They originally optimized for what most Googlers like (who are generally the 1%) and have since learned that you can't run a business just pleasing the elite and whiny ones.
Data shows differently.
Google AD CLICKS increased by 22% and PPC went down 4%-8% so Googe made it up on volume. If showing more ads and/or making ads better than organic search is "optimizing for the 99% use case" then you aright.
But as shown on a few comments below Google in many cases shows only ads on the first browser screen. Terrible for users and terrible for Google long term. They should enjoy the steroid boost while it lasts.
I think this is interesting because it matches my user experience with Google products in a very inverted way. Google search has gotten worse and worse lately, forcing me on to other search engines with worse UIs just so that I can get useful results. Youtube UI gets worse every time they update it. They cancelled the RSS reader. The email UI keeps getting worse and featuring more ads. But the stock value hit $1000.…
I hate the new UI for gmail, (mobile and web) is the worst aberration in the history of google UIs. For example for web, now they hide the "from", "cc", "cco" fields, also they moved the reply, reply to all and forward to a drop down menu. The attach, and format buttons now are tiny and moved to the bottom. In the mobile they removed the check-boxes so when you want to select multiple mails you have to keep pressed a mail until it becomes blue and to select the other mails you have to tap where it used to be a check-box and if you mistakenly tap the title of the mail then your selection is lost and it opens that mail in a new view. They also hided the "from", "cc", "cco" fields in the mobile version. I seriously considering to use other clients.
The value of a company is not measured in its individual stock price, but instead measured in its market cap. The real headline should be: Google hits $330 Billion market cap, making it the 3rd most valuable company in the world.
$1000/sh seems like a more momentous headline than $330B market cap. On the other hand, It's more likely that we see the headline "$1T company" than "$3030.30/sh"
They could've hit this years ago by doing a 10:1 stock consolidation. Fetishizing over share prices is meaningless. What if they had only six shares?
Share price is relatively meaningless. It needs to be paired to total shares outstanding. It's arbitrary by itself because it's a function of shares outstanding and total market value, one of which the company can (relatively easily) control via stock splits.
I don't think stock splits usually result in "X stock price plummets by 50%" headlines.
Ads depend on your location etc. We have had a discussion about this same example before and plenty of people got similar results: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6533287 e.g. http://i.imgur.com/mhJhc5W.png and http://i.imgur.com/2iFv7Yf.png And for what it's worth, this is the result I got just now in the UK: http://i.imgur.com/YHXngwR.png
Interestingly I (also UK) got the same, except missing the ad about mining. Isn't this tailoring (presumably with some basis in the users' behaviour) a substantial part of what is increasing their revenues (thus share price)?
Anti-competitive lobbies, hugely funded by Google's competitors, have tried to make that stick in the US and EU. They have largely failed to do so both times. Prove it :)
I guess since Google got a court verdict stating that their search results are their "opinion" and thus "free speech", they cannot be really attacked from this point. Add to that the fact that their algorithm is top-secret and probably heavily compartmentalized and it becomes even harder. I am not arguing whether Google breaks a law or not, I simply say that they hurt the smaller players. Getting rankings is getting…
You do realize, that because of the increase of content publishers, getting ranking becomes harder anyway (independent to Google).
I guess the June search-algorithm updates really worked. (Kicking out everyone that earns without giving Google it's piece of the pie). Google keeps removing small business websites from its results, forcing them to use Ad-Words. This strategy cannot be sustained unless they want 100% commercial / 100% junk results. I wonder what will they do in the future.
I'm no Google fanboy but what you are saying is a pretty strong accusation. Where is the data to back what you are claiming Google is doing?
Data straight from Google's mouth. Their Google properties ad clicks increased by 22%, an astounding number when Adsense stayed flat. All ads above fold is a great steroid shot but horrible long term strategy.
Just to show that sharkweek's reply isn't an outlier, here is the same search with adblock turned off, from a US address. http://i.imgur.com/Ed0UYER.png
me too! (California Bay Area) http://i.imgur.com/yaEh1xY.png This is kinda fun. I'd like a website that showed screenshots of popular search-results on Google from across the world.