141–150 of 320 posts
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For people who don't know them yet: use DDG bangs. For example "!m restaurant [citynmae]" will immediately bring you to Google maps, "!w chemistry" will open Wikipedia etc. Super easy and powerful :)
DDG was great anyway, but discovering their !bangs was a revelation. Super cool stuff!
9 minutes ago: > Since this has now been posted to HN, I'll be locking this thread. This bugtracker is a work place, not a discussion forum. We have a bad fame.
Well, tradeoffs and whatnot with hosting your bugtracker on the most open code platform on the Web.
“Conversation limited to contributors until popular site calms down”Given Google's size and market share, they should be fined whenever they break access to a competitor's website (e.g. Chrome update breaks access to DDG) or if their websites break in competitor's browser (e.g Google breaks on Firefox). They have more than enough resources to run automated checks on this, so it's hard to not see malice instead of incompetence in this case.
What if it is done during testing as a beta release? If that's acceptable, Googs will just turn into one of those companies that never releases full versions and is always just in some form of beta release
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For people who don't know them yet: use DDG bangs. For example "!m restaurant [citynmae]" will immediately bring you to Google maps, "!w chemistry" will open Wikipedia etc. Super easy and powerful :)
It's better to lose the inconvenient ! and use a browser that supports prefixes in the search bar Then you can "w chemistry" to open Wikipedia with a list of suggestions from the same Wikipedia ("Chemistry (Girls Aloud album)") in the same place
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The only thing that I've found that works properly for my use case (regularly switching between three locales and languages) is Kaggle with the lenses. The only thing missing is disconnecting the locale from the language so I can have proper decimal characters but still search for US-specific things. Right now, I have to chose between having 10,000.10 or 10.000,10 and what language/region I'm searching, together, whi…
I think "Kaggle" is supposed to be Kagi but was typoed or autocorrected or something? (If not and you're talkign about Kaggle the ML/AI company, please disregard) I also use Kagi lenses and it's been good, though for me the killer Kagi feature is being able to uprank/downrank/pin/block domains. Such an obvious and simple feature, such a powerful effect. There is a psychological barrier to overcome in paying for searc…
Yes! This alone is worth the subscription to me.
And I despise and avoid software subscriptions, Kagi is my third.
The fact that I didn't notice because I'm using Kagi anyway is probably one of the first hints at Google's downfall w.r.t. search dominance.
Why would Google return an empty page based on any UA string? This is such a bizarre bug.
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Or experience with the internet? Of course outrageous GitHub issues get low quality comments from HN. The guy probably reacted like this because of the dummy comment he marked as off topic and probably made the connection. > 'now you have two problems' b-bazinga. Software engineering is hard. He might have said the same of Reddit, or any social network. It's pretty reasonable and I think he made the right call.
You are 100% correct in your assumptions. This isn't my first incident, and it won't be my last. As much as some folks here want to call me an asshole for that, we have a very good understanding of how this ends if we don't lock comments.
I have to smirk a bit every time I see the public do this to themselves. The public: "Why are companies never honest? Why is press-release-speak such a space-alien way of communicating?" Also the public: reacts like this when someone takes a simple, clear action and explains it directly.
(And yes, I know I'm guilty of broad-strokes reasoning lumping everyone in as "the public" and anthropomorphizing that entity. In this context, doesn't matter. Only takes a few bad actors to wreck the signal).
The fact that I didn't notice because I'm using Kagi anyway is probably one of the first hints at Google's downfall w.r.t. search dominance.
Just because a few techy or aware people use Kagi (or another alternative), is still a drop in the bucket of overall search engine choice
Google search is still widely dominant, as much as we might not want it to be.
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What I don’t understand is why this isn’t just a rollback, or at worst a revert commit and redeploy. I can forgive an issue with a slightly obscure browser, but the fix should be trivial for Google engineers?
Perhaps it's been a while since it's broken? url-bar search works so this seem to only happen if you navigate to google.com directly. How many people navigate to google to search, while using firefox on android? Just a hunch though. OTOH, it's amazing that apparently they don't have UI tests for FF mobile.
Why? They don't have UI tests for Opera on the Nintendo Wii either, and at this point I bet the install base for Wii-Opera is still larger than the install base for FF mobile.
TBH, when I was there it surprised me that Google didn't have a dedicated hardware test-bench room with rows upon rows of browser deployments that every UI change needed to be burn-in tested on, but... They don't. They never did. In general, their strategy is to be nimble and deploy rapidly (with the expectation they can roll back rapidly). In that context, it actually makes sense why they don't have that warehouse of test-bench installations... They'd slow-down rollbacks as well as rollouts.
A handful of projects have dedicated testing targets. They're driven mostly by the ideology of individual Googlers (some people really like Firefox) and a handful of high-value users that have specific installs Google isn't interested in pissing off. Since they do very little (relatively speaking) B2B business, that's a very short list of names.