221–230 of 301 posts
I'm seeing a whole lot of hyperbole around here for what still seems to be pretty much a non-issue. Don't like SPYW? Don't use it. It's one button . Click it, and move on. Between the Don't Be Evil script stunt from facebook/twitter and the content-free blogspam from Sarah Lacy/pandodaily, it seems like there are a few people out there who really, really want this to be an issue. It isn't. Get over it.
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Mostly, I'm able to search what I want but it takes me so many extra clicks that I can tell they don't respect my use cases. For example, if I could I'd set synonym replacement on but turn off assuming I misspelled what I typed. Where's the option for that?
Out of curiosity ...what's an example search? Where, you typed a word, that looks convincingly like another word had been misspelled, but in fact is correctly spelled - but has synonyms that you want to look for?
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Just to show what I see when I search Bing versus Google: http://i.imgur.com/b3Oig.png I didn't find a relevant result at all (I searched the first 3 pages - didn't bother going further). Bing may be improving - I hear Bing Maps is pretty good - but the search is not even close.
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=SPYW Looks the same as it did for me a few hours ago when I searched on it, and duck duck go uses bing search. I see definitions in the extracts at #4, #6, #7, #8 and #10. It's hard to believe half of the top ten changed in the last 3 hours. EDIT: I do agree that bing's results are slightly-somewhat below google's as I do redo a search in google maybe 5% or 10% of the time, but from the poin…
I would be much more interested at working at the new Page dominated Google than the old Schmidt one. At least he's trying to do what Steve Jobs did so well: make big leaps forward. Apple found it necessary to own more and more pieces of the stack to innovate. Google is finding itself in the same position. Almost all of the best products are restricted/closed/proprietary systems. Macs, OSX, iPhone/iPad, Facebook, Twi…
Google search, Gmail, Facebook and Twitter are built on HTTP, HTML, JavaScript and PHP, which are all free and open source. The Internet would be a bunch of walled gardens if it were built on proprietary technology, and every one of those gardens would be orders of magnitude crappier than the Internet we have today. Apple products are great for the 10%-20% of the population that can afford them, but mostly irrelevant…
These are all walled gardens, they just happen to be built on open technologies.
I would be much more interested at working at the new Page dominated Google than the old Schmidt one. At least he's trying to do what Steve Jobs did so well: make big leaps forward. Apple found it necessary to own more and more pieces of the stack to innovate. Google is finding itself in the same position. Almost all of the best products are restricted/closed/proprietary systems. Macs, OSX, iPhone/iPad, Facebook, Twi…
"Almost all of the best products are restricted/closed/proprietary systems." This makes me really sad. It might be necessary, but you also miss out on a lot of innovation that happens when people can build off the work of others. To steal your examples, would there be a market for the Mac or OS X if IBM had not licensed PC clones? Would there be Facebook/Twitter/GMail if the Internet had not been public-domain?
Proprietary technology may even give back more to open technology than it takes.
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Wow, I go to some trouble to research your question for you, but you reply in complaint without trying it out. e.g. try it with more than one language selected for search. You can also test your questions with specific queries (e.g. using terms that seem unlikely to be translated). Also, consider that you didn't know what results Google wasn't returning in the first place, years ago (e.g. by not having indexed them).…
To be absolutely clear, I'm complaining about Google, not you, and I already said Google's behavior is better for most users. I'm not really sure what more I can say to be "nice" and still be honest, because I am angry that I was missing search results because of a behind-the-scenes change that I would only have discovered if I was regularly checking my preferences to see if the choices I made have been superseded an…
You can add more than one language. If you'd checked up on it, you would have seen that. I perceive this as complaining about advice without following it, and I find it annoying.
If you're still angry (and it sounds legitimate, especially if there was a subtle hint of a problem, but not enough to register fully), that explains where you're coming from, which puzzled me.
Aside: Unfortunately with webpages/webapps, they can and do get updated continuously, without explicit version changes or any notification at all. Ideally, all changes would be back-compatible, but then you end up with a mess (both in user interface and implementation). Continuous notifications amounts to spam, and is usually ignored (I do). Change is a problem. I'm not sure there's a solution.
I think back-compatibility is a deep, abiding, practical problem, in general.
EDIT "if the choices I made have been superseded and contradicted": just realized this is more than merely "backcompatibility of UI". In effect, they have destroyed your data. Although that sounds overdramatic, since the data itself is very minor (perhaps one bit, a binary checkbox), it's a clear trigger for notification. There might be some grey area for when your configuration is still there, but has a different meaning - but I think you're saying that your config is no longer there, and/or no longer has an effect.
I used to use Yahoo finance, and they had a nice display of 9 user-configured stocks at the top. In their latest redesign, this disappeared, and I couldn't find an option to bring it back. This was enough to make me spurn their product, and switch to google finance. It makes me think they have no idea what they are doing. I guess in this case, I had notification (as I could see it was gone). But if they had an explicit reference to it going away, even if it said "sorry, this is going away", I would feel better about it. And I have a sneaking suspicion that maybe it is still available somewhere, and I just couldn't find it.
So, changing the meaning of a user-specified configuration should probably trigger an explicit notification (and force the implementer to consider it); and deleting user-specified configuration should never happen, even if it has no effect. I think it should be treated as sacrosanct as other data stored (e.g. gmail emails, dropbox files etc). If changes render it ineffective, it should still be there, but with a notice: "this no longer works, use this instead". Again, this forces the implementer to thin about what they are doing.
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I love the idea, but there is no way I am moving to the US, especially not to start a tech company, even if you pay me. Silicon valley may have a lot of talent and money, and Y combinator is awesome, but I'd rather not deal with the TSA, the DEA and the DHS. Fascist oligarchies are not conducive to startups.
| Fascist oligarchies are not conducive to startups.* *except almost all the ones that get talked about here every day.
I'm seeing a whole lot of hyperbole around here for what still seems to be pretty much a non-issue. Don't like SPYW? Don't use it. It's one button . Click it, and move on. Between the Don't Be Evil script stunt from facebook/twitter and the content-free blogspam from Sarah Lacy/pandodaily, it seems like there are a few people out there who really, really want this to be an issue. It isn't. Get over it.
I keep turning it off and it keeps turning itself back on.
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How did you disable this "bullshit personalization of search"?
i find changing my search from standard google to; http://www.google.com/pda eliminates instant preview and instant results that really annoy me.
If you disable Instant, you can also crank it up to 100 results per page. Hell, you can manually block gplus.google.com, facebook.com, and twitter.com and pretend the whole "social" thing never happened.
I think duckduckgo works like google should. That's why I changed , and will never go back.
Most search tasks I do are "hand me that spanner" tasks. I don't want you to give me a big spiel about how great your business is or to show me how thoroughly you can erase all semblance of privacy via data mining - I just want the damn spanner so I can get back to work.
I switched to Google in the first place because they did the best job of getting the right spanner with the least amount of fuss. They're getting much worse at choosing the right spanner vs. feeding me a bunch of spam and ad content, and they're simultaneously taking longer to do it.