Live data from Hacker News

Google timer

google.com

111–120 of 157 posts

Re: Google timer

#111
post #85

For those of us Europeans where this doesn't work: it works on Incognito Mode in Chrome.

I'm in the United States and it doesn't work for me, not even in Incognito Mode in Chrome. I feel like I'm really missing out on the party.

Re: Google timer

#112
post #43

Yet again I am reminded that my google is not necessarily the same as 'your' google Just like how "define: something" doesn't show a dictionary definiton for me anymore, a functionality i used all the time. And now can't be sure whether was actually removed, or just removed for me!

They've been playing with the "define" feature for a while. It was gone for a bit, but it works for me now. The colon is now optional, which is weird.

Re: Google timer

#113
post #68
post #43

Yet again I am reminded that my google is not necessarily the same as 'your' google Just like how "define: something" doesn't show a dictionary definiton for me anymore, a functionality i used all the time. And now can't be sure whether was actually removed, or just removed for me!

Ha, yeah. When I'm in the US, I deliberately navigate to a European Google site (usually google.co.uk) in order to get their onebox flight schedule search results. I really enjoy seeing a full timetable of published flights for the week when I do a search for "[flights lhr fra]". Doing the same search in the US, and seeing the new Google Flights ad instead of the old timetable onebox, is infuriating.

I noticed that Google Flights ad box only pops up when your query is served by Google Flights (eg it starts in north america).

So "flights to LON" will not bring up a schedule, while "flights from LON" will. And for most of my purposes, I only care about the destinations, not exact times, so this works fine.

Re: Google timer

#114
post #110

This totally freaked me out. I clicked the link to be opened in a new tab - and continued what I was doing. I heard that beeping sound, and was completely baffled where it was coming from (didn't sound like it was coming from the speakers). You should have seen me picking up papers on my desk listening to them. I listened to every potential port on my phone to see if it was giving off this sound. I felt like I was go…

Typical Google. Uninformative, trite, bland, uninspired user experience. That's the best auditory indicator they could find? The following may not be a popular statement here, but it seems Google is still overrun by engineers that are humanoid-challenged. With all due respect to engineers, engineers are not human readable.

Pretty sure painting with a broad brush is one of the quicker ways for your opinion to be ignored.

#justsaying

Re: Google timer

#117
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google has been keeping users from calculator web sites with its calculator/unit converter since before Mark Zuckerberg even wrote Facemash[1]. A fairly obscure timer feature that only shows up when you search for a particular phrase is nothing like search portals of old, nor is this a departure from the different search result widgets they've had for a decade now. This feels like a feature that the OS should have bu…

Agree. What Google did replaced plenty of functionalities that are available on desktop (math, spell-check, dictionary). But their recent card-based solution to a lot of searches seems to show that they're trying to keep users on Google-owned properties. Try searching for a movie review. You'll notice that everything that pertains to the movie is shown on top and on the right. Clicking on actors lead to yet another g…

You're right that they keep you on Google, and that they're taking market share from sites that used to serve such queries. From a consumer's perspective, it's possibly a better experience than it used to be, though. The only risk (which you alluded to) is that they lose focus on making a good quality search engine because they're too busy making little widgets. I don't think there's any evidence that's happening, though.

Re: Google timer

#119

This totally freaked me out. I clicked the link to be opened in a new tab - and continued what I was doing. I heard that beeping sound, and was completely baffled where it was coming from (didn't sound like it was coming from the speakers). You should have seen me picking up papers on my desk listening to them. I listened to every potential port on my phone to see if it was giving off this sound. I felt like I was go…

One of the reasons I'm really happy about the feature to show what tab is playing sound in chrome. I was somewhat freaked out as well but only until I saw the movement in one of the tabs.

Re: Google timer

#120
Works better than timer / alert functionality of Google Now which is horribly broken. (At first I thought it was just rounding errors, with 25 minutes being set to 24 minutes, but I can't explain a 3 minute difference easily with rounding errors, which has happened to me. )
Post reply on HN