Why Google's bookmark manager and Docs have purposefully bad UI

Long time ago I made a proxy service that did that (2004 or so). The idea was that it logged everything you visited and then you could search your own logs. I used it for a few years but sadly nobody else really did. I think I actually wrote it in C of all things.

It optionally worked in combination with a browser plugin that did a tree view that showed a true navigation history (one site could have many children). So you could find the site and the context and the time you saw it and trace back the multi-path journey you took.

I have no idea where the code is. Probably some old cvs repo somewhere.

Wouldn't be of much use now since everything is https. Back then my inability to log https was the "method" to make sure that I didn't log anything sensitive such as banking details because only that stuff was in https at the time.

The same goes for Google Photos. Instead of providing folders and other organisational features known for human kind for thousands of years, Google removes them. But not only to use search for pleasure. It is also to train their neural networks maybe?

We have to become compulsive hoarders, to train a bot that will help us find things, we could put in the right place in the first place.

I have to agree with this. The search in macos is really broken. There are so many problems with it. It could be so much better but they havent improved it in years. Even using Alfred i dont get what i want sometimes. Maybe its because alfred is using spotlight indexes? I’d have to look it up.

> I seem to recall that this was intentional, to improve acceptance of motor vehicles in the early days.

The link I shared previously (Fonseca, 2020) mentions this:

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Why do we talk about crashes like this? It didn't happen by accident.

You may know the history of how early carmakers turned "jaywalking" — a term initially meant to shame pedestrians out of the street — into an actual crime. But the emerging auto industry also had a hand in influencing how the public perceived fatal collisions.

In the early days of the automobile, reckless drivers were killing pedestrians, mostly women and children, at alarming rates. Newspaper coverage in the 1910s and '20s painted drivers as "remorseless murderers" and angry mobs reportedly dragged drivers involved in fatal collisions from their cars.

So the industry went into damage control, with one national auto industry group even creating a free wire service for newspapers, which incentivized reporters to send in basic details of a traffic collision in return for a full, ready-to-publish article. What a thoughtful convenience! Except, unsurprisingly, the narrative in those articles largely shifted the blame to pedestrians and used the term "accident" to describe crashes, which helped embed the term in the minds of news readers across the nation.

In the face of the rising death toll, a 1926 editorial in The New Republic titled "The Murderous Motor" proclaimed: "...much of the present waste of life is inevitable and will continue no matter what preventive measures are taken."

Imagine if outlets today were publishing stories about data privacy from a free wire service run by Facebook, Google or Uber. That's essentially the ethical breach many newspapers allowed back in the '20s and '30s — and the echoes and effects can still be seen in news stories today.

The auto industry exploited the power of the press because its leaders understood that language and perspective (and growing ad revenue) can shift culture — and recent scientific research backs that up.

It’s absurd to think that any and all suggestions mentioned here won’t be continually coming up in feedback or testing sessions. Is it more likely that Google have negligent designers, or they design for business goals?