Hey Google, I want my cache links back • Hacker News Board

Re: Hey Google, I want my cache links back

#151

Post by polshaw » Thu, Sep 29, 2011, 12:20 AM UTC

icebraining wrote: post #11

wladimir wrote: post #5

I don't agree this is necessarily bad. Arguably, "view cache" is a feature for power-users that know what they're doing. Moving the cache link into that pop-up did simplify the user interface in the most common case, in which the user just wants to view the real link. It no longer has to be rendered for every result. IMO it just takes some getting used to that the cache link has been moved. Or are you viewing pages f…

Personally, I'm not using the mouse, so any mouse moves are problematic. But I won't demand Google to change just for me, of course.

Kind of screws over tablet or smartphone users however. (and no, google, i do not want to use your crappy mobile version, that is why i set my useragent to 'desktop', yet you don't listen!)

Re: Hey Google, I want my cache links back

#152

Post by ChuckMcM » Thu, Sep 29, 2011, 12:22 AM UTC

bradleyland wrote: post #57

jannes wrote: post #37

Just google for cache:http://www.example.com/ and it will take you directly to the cached site. This is particularly nice in combination with Chrome's omnibar where you just have to prepend "cache:" before the current URL, hit return, and it will automatically show the cached version of the page you are viewing.

Cool trick. Completely fails at discoverability though.

Caches are kind of a touchy subject. I have no information that they are, but I would not be surprised if Google was inexorably moving toward a 'no user accessible cache' policy. The reasoning is pretty simple, people push things they don't mean too, then they 'fix' it, but if the GoogleBot was in the area your 'fix' may not be as durable as you hoped. Recent examples are iPhone 5 leaks on carrier sites, mis-priced sales at Walmart.com, and support sites at HP for products that were going to exist but now aren't.

Clearly its not Google's fault that people screw up and they happen to look at the wrong time, but a strict interpretation of Google's mission would suggest that keeping bad pages 'cached' isn't part of it. And while the vast majority of cached pages provide a great service like when HN exposure overloads a web site you can still see the content, Google cannot practically fix every cache page where the owner doesn't want it cached (they might not even know it is) and then fix it. (Yes you can email them to have them spike the cache but how many people realize that?)

A couple of the newspaper types went after them claiming the cache was an 'illegal copy' but of course the page didn't say 'no-cache' (which would keep it out of most CDN's as well so its painful).

So the cache feature is useful, but not everyone thinks its a good thing. If they have annoyed Google enough, Google may have just said 'screw it, lets get rid of this capability for end users.' But again, that is just speculation based on seeing it get harder and harder to 'discover' that Google has a cached copy somewhere.

Re: Hey Google, I want my cache links back

#153

Post by latitude » Thu, Sep 29, 2011, 12:25 AM UTC

emp_ wrote: post #74

masklinn wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like I'm missing relevant and useful results a thousand times a day. More and more, DDG is just a !gateway to google.

I used DDG for about a month as my main search engine, I love the bang syntax and lots of other goodies, but for me down in Brazil DDG just responds 10-15x slower than Google -- so my commitment is that I will keep coming back to test for latency improvements until I can switch over completely.

Same here, but in Canada. DDG response time is a major showstopper. From a brief examination the issue appeared to be rooted in DNS response time, which is something that I wasn't able to fix by trying different DNS servers. So, regretfully I had to switch back to Google.

Re: Hey Google, I want my cache links back

#154

Post by epi0Bauqu » Thu, Sep 29, 2011, 12:39 AM UTC

latitude wrote: post #153

emp_ wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used DDG for about a month as my main search engine, I love the bang syntax and lots of other goodies, but for me down in Brazil DDG just responds 10-15x slower than Google -- so my commitment is that I will keep coming back to test for latency improvements until I can switch over completely.

Same here, but in Canada. DDG response time is a major showstopper. From a brief examination the issue appeared to be rooted in DNS response time, which is something that I wasn't able to fix by trying different DNS servers. So, regretfully I had to switch back to Google.

That's weird (on DNS). We have been having an issue with in Canada where one of the major ISPs is dropping packets on route. If you'd email us I'd love to investigate this further.

Re: Hey Google, I want my cache links back

#155

Post by icebraining » Thu, Sep 29, 2011, 12:40 AM UTC

sixtofour wrote: post #148

12334454 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you know that they think that scroogle is not a net minus to them?

That they've been operating for a long time gives me that impression.

Or they just don't want to deal with the PR problems.

Re: Hey Google, I want my cache links back

#156

Post by stordoff » Thu, Sep 29, 2011, 12:41 AM UTC

william42 wrote: post #81

ssp wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder whether they split test these types of things? They probably do, but Google is unlikely to be immune to corporate pathologies, where for example it is politically impossible for some team to leave well enough alone. I suspect that could easily end up trumping split test results.

Isn't Google incredibly famous for their dedication to A/B testing?

A/B/N testing from what I heard. One of the examples I know of it that they split the users into about ten groups, and very slightly changed the blue hyperlink colour between them. They found that even a slight variation made a difference to the click-through rate.

Re: Hey Google, I want my cache links back

#157

Post by throwaway32 » Thu, Sep 29, 2011, 1:09 AM UTC

patio11 wrote: post #145

rhizome wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only if Google can’t find anything – which makes a lot of sense. For me it doesn't, and it violates the Law of Demeter. If there are no results, tell me. Don't make me waste time wondering if any of the results have what I'm looking for, since there is no indication that the results I'm receiving are ancillary. Treating your users like they're idiots is evil.

But users are, on average, demonstrably ... not as savvy as search engineers as to the optimal way to operate their search engines.

well perhaps somewhat understandable, why should i be happy with an inferior interface because of it? This falls very squarely in the category of "not my problem, but you just made it my problem anyways"

I see this as part of a big trend towards software and software designers that think they know what you want better than you do, and its an endless source of frustration for me, and im sure many others.

Re: Hey Google, I want my cache links back

#158

Post by Matt_Cutts » Thu, Sep 29, 2011, 1:26 AM UTC

thaumaturgy wrote: post #141

Matt_Cutts wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm just speaking personally, but I'm on the side of most of the folks here. A senior engineer is looking into the ["society of spectacles"] search now, for example. What would be most helpful would be constructive examples of bad queries, bad experiences, or concrete proposals for how to improve Google's results page or results UI.

Back in May, I started keeping a log of Google annoyances, mostly funky search results. Here's most of it, minus the cussing and snark. :-) 05/23/2011 Search for "tricycline", got 139,000,000 results, mostly spam. Search for "tricycline quack", get results for "tri cyclen" and "ortho tricyclin". 05/23/2011 Search Google Images for "cloudmin screenshots", get 423 results, not a single one is a screenshot of the Cloudm…

Thanks very much--we'll dig into these.

Re: Hey Google, I want my cache links back

#159

Post by nicksergeant » Thu, Sep 29, 2011, 1:54 AM UTC

epi0Bauqu wrote: post #48

nicksergeant wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel the same way. I keep trying to switch back to DDG and then run into results that just don't have what I want (and Google does). I'm going to switch again and start sending DDG results that aren't helpful.

Thank you!

Actually, something else that bothers me, but I'm not sure there's much you can do about it. I really like the Chrome location-bar search completion thing. Most of the time, when I start searching something, I can see if my search terms are good by seeing whether it's been searched before. If it comes up with nothing, I know my search terms are probably not well-worded.

Not sure how you could provide for that, though.

Re: Hey Google, I want my cache links back

#160

Post by naner » Thu, Sep 29, 2011, 2:57 AM UTC

guelo wrote: post #23

Another thing that has been annoying me lately is that it seems like like I have to add a + in front of every word or Google might decide without any indication that it will completely ignore it.

Amazon started doing this about a year ago, too. I think search engines are now catering more to people who aren't extremely adept at using search engines.