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Google Drops Discussions Search Filter and Others

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Re: Google Drops Discussions Search Filter and Others

#61
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't really trust bookmarks either. Most of my bookmarks are dead either because the site is now gone or because some blog author decided to change their path format and didn't bother setup 301 redirects.

Microsoft's help pages are the worst for this. "Oooh, confusing .NET problem I'll google a response - Hey, a nice forum-post explaining that MS has a document telling me how to handle this issue click NOOOOOOOOOOOOO".

There used to be a whole slew of helpful msdn (technet?) blog posts which now not only redirect but also require logging in with an MS account to read them.

It's really unhelpful.

edit: Actually I just checked and it looks like they've eased up on the need for logging in, I guess they saw too much of a backlash. (Or just flip flopped their own decision again.)

Re: Google Drops Discussions Search Filter and Others

#62

I keep dreaming of an open source, distributed search engine and social network. But I guess things will have to get much worse before they get better.

Open source, distributed search engine: http://yacy.net/

Open source, distributed social networks are a dime a dozen: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_software_and_prot...

Re: Google Drops Discussions Search Filter and Others

#64
post #59

Everyone is dissing Google here. Perhaps understandably so since most folks in HN are advanced users and an advanced search feature was removed. Google is driven by data and sorry but advanced users are a mere blip in that data. I can bet there was a gazilion user studies that showed that your grandma was super confused when 10 options would pop up when she pressed 'More'. The same studies showed that she was much le…

I don't get your point. Is it that people should not complain about Google removing a feature they like, because you have presented a guess as to why they removed it? (FWIW - I agree with you that it was not maliciously removed)

Personally I like it when users complain loudly about decisions that impact them. The idea of negative publicity might deter such actions in the future (in theory anyway).

Re: Google Drops Discussions Search Filter and Others

#66
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft's help pages are the worst for this. "Oooh, confusing .NET problem I'll google a response - Hey, a nice forum-post explaining that MS has a document telling me how to handle this issue click NOOOOOOOOOOOOO".

Whenever I have a C# problem and google it, I always skip the MSFT documentation and go straight to any possible Stackoverflow or discussion page.

Same here, it's not even worth going on their site.

Re: Google Drops Discussions Search Filter and Others

#67
post #8

The promise was that, as search engines get better, there would be no need for bookmarking and downloading, since all the content in the world is only one sloppy search query away. Somehow, I seem to have ignored this stubbornly and instead bookmarked pages, downloaded videos and copied strings (!) out of the web for years. Not that it did me much good, I now have thousands of inconsistently sorted bookmarks and a bu…

You can't really trust bookmarks either. Most of my bookmarks are dead either because the site is now gone or because some blog author decided to change their path format and didn't bother setup 301 redirects.

For keeping local copies, https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/mozilla-archi... is a good add-on that improves Firefox's save functionality. I use it very frequently: ctrl-s, Enter, and I get an .mht of the page I'm reading.

For remote copies, https://archive.org/ can be instructed to keep a copy of a page, e.g.

https://web.archive.org/web/*/http://news.ycombinator.com/ to check for copies

https://web.archive.org/save/https://news.ycombinator.com/ to record a copy

These bookmarklets can be used to go from your current page to /web/ or /save/:

  javascript:(function(){window.open('https://web.archive.org/web/*/'+(''+window.location));})();

  javascript:(function(){window.open('https://web.archive.org/save/'+(''+window.location));})();
Unfortunately, this won't work on sites that robots.txt-block Internet Archive, and existing archives may be made inaccessible by a future robots.txt block.

http://archive.is/ is another useful site that executes all of the JavaScript and captures the post-JS-execution DOM.

Re: Google Drops Discussions Search Filter and Others

#69
post #11

Maybe this is a good spot to mention how much the updated Google Maps also suck. Pretty though.

I still can't figure out how to get street view without actually searching first.

Click where you want it, it should appear in the upper left.
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