www.google.com – The page is blank when accessed • Hacker News Board

Re: www.google.com – The page is blank when accessed

#151

Post by the_snooze » Tue, Jan 09, 2024, 3:59 PM UTC

ravenstine wrote: post #123

Draiken wrote: post #93

Another reason to stop using Google. Don't waste the opportunity! Switched to DDG ages ago, and even though it's not amazing, it's already better than Google. Although, if we're honest, searching these days is absolutely atrocious everywhere. Any keyword search will only net you ads or "top X" articles full of SEO garbage most likely written by AI at this point...

Not necessarily everywhere, or at least not quite as bad as you're suggesting, in my experience. I used to advocate for DDG, but they've gone so far downhill that I rarely waste my time with it. They've decided to go PG-rated everywhere even if you have safe search turned off. This is a problem because, even if they just want to block porn or illegal things, this can have an impact on legitimate academic research. An…

>Bing

DDG works well enough for me to be my daily driver, but it's absolute garbage for any kind of news search. Bing prioritizes MSN repost spam from dubious sources, so I'm better off going just directly to news sites I trust.

Re: www.google.com – The page is blank when accessed

#152

Post by robblbobbl » Tue, Jan 09, 2024, 4:02 PM UTC

Hilarious

Re: www.google.com – The page is blank when accessed

#153

Post by lagniappe » Tue, Jan 09, 2024, 4:06 PM UTC

pmontra wrote: post #4

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.

at least it wasn't a testicle in an egg cup like that other site

Re: www.google.com – The page is blank when accessed

#154

Post by joelthelion » Tue, Jan 09, 2024, 4:06 PM UTC

This is going to happen more and more as firefox's market share decreases. And then we'll be left with chromium-based browsers...

Re: www.google.com – The page is blank when accessed

#155

Post by shiomiru » Tue, Jan 09, 2024, 4:08 PM UTC

Somewhat related fun fact: if you send the Google search home page an unknown UA string (e.g. curl/8.5.0) from a German-speaking country, Google will serve a latin-1 encoded page declared as UTF-8 in a meta tag. (I spent quite a while trying to fix this on my end before realizing what was going on.)

Re: www.google.com – The page is blank when accessed

#156

Post by sumeno » Tue, Jan 09, 2024, 4:10 PM UTC

ravenstine wrote: post #123

Draiken wrote: post #93

Another reason to stop using Google. Don't waste the opportunity! Switched to DDG ages ago, and even though it's not amazing, it's already better than Google. Although, if we're honest, searching these days is absolutely atrocious everywhere. Any keyword search will only net you ads or "top X" articles full of SEO garbage most likely written by AI at this point...

Not necessarily everywhere, or at least not quite as bad as you're suggesting, in my experience. I used to advocate for DDG, but they've gone so far downhill that I rarely waste my time with it. They've decided to go PG-rated everywhere even if you have safe search turned off. This is a problem because, even if they just want to block porn or illegal things, this can have an impact on legitimate academic research. An…

> Kagi (which relies on Brave Search instead of Bing)

This is misleading. Kagi uses multiple external sources including Google and Brave as well as their own internal indexes

https://help.kagi.com/kagi/search-details/search-sources.htm...

Re: www.google.com – The page is blank when accessed

#157

Post by JTbane » Tue, Jan 09, 2024, 4:11 PM UTC

Draiken wrote: post #93

Another reason to stop using Google. Don't waste the opportunity! Switched to DDG ages ago, and even though it's not amazing, it's already better than Google. Although, if we're honest, searching these days is absolutely atrocious everywhere. Any keyword search will only net you ads or "top X" articles full of SEO garbage most likely written by AI at this point...

Unfortunately I'm locked into gmail, migrating away from it would require days of effort and I would never be sure I moved everything.

Also, YouTube is still the best video site despite going full mask-off on adblockers.

Re: www.google.com – The page is blank when accessed

#158

Post by plugin-baby » Tue, Jan 09, 2024, 4:16 PM UTC

fooqux wrote: post #114

NekkoDroid wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Setting stuff up for that in any browser worth it's salt isn't too difficult, skipping the entire middleman of any search engine.

But it's already set up for you in DDG, so why not use it? Aside from the fact it's another HTTP request, but these days on the majority of computers and connections, that's a trivial thing. I'll add that !aw to search the Arch Wiki and !aur to search the AUR are my two most favorite commands.

> Aside from the fact it's another HTTP request

You’d think DDG could avoid this via JavaScript if they wanted to. Might be better for privacy, if not for their usage stats.

Re: www.google.com – The page is blank when accessed

#159

Post by eviks » Tue, Jan 09, 2024, 4:19 PM UTC

rpdillon wrote: post #144

eviks wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I think everyone in the thread knows about "search engines" in Chrome and bookmark keywords in Firefox. The crux of the issue is that there are more than 10,000 bang commands in DDG. Setting up even a popular subset in any given browser is a significant investment. It's fine if it's the browser you use 99% of the time, but for those spanning multiple computers, phones, and other devices, simply using bang commands is…

99% of the time you use <0.1% of the bangs, so setting those up isn't a significant investment. Then there are also the downsides mentioned above (less convenient, no preview, not portable across search engines), so no, it's not a strict win, but an inferior alternative which is superior only in those cases where you can't setup something better

Re: www.google.com – The page is blank when accessed

#160

Post by TheCoelacanth » Tue, Jan 09, 2024, 4:20 PM UTC

lopis wrote: post #135

jchw wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get why people want to assume bad faith but it's pointless, it's hard to intentionally sabotage Firefox when nobody tests shit in Firefox at Google. There's (or at least was) still an internal group of Firefox users a few years ago, but it's small, and internal tools may have poor or no support for Firefox at any given time. When I worked there I made some attempts to fix things (e.g. once Google Cloud was accident…

To me, the fact they don't run automated checks on Firefox is in itself malicious and anti-competitive.

Yes, deciding not to test in Firefox is a decision to break Firefox. Sites with a tiny fraction of Google's resources manage to test Firefox. There's no way they just forgot.