I agree. The moment I saw this was the moment I configured my browser to use DuckDuckGo instead of Google. Good riddance.
If your browser is Chrome it’s still working for Google, not for you
Firefox has been my main browser for about 15 years. Never saw the advantage in Chrome, aside from using it once in a while when a webpage didn't work correctly on Firefox. These latest years we are seeing very aggressive behaviour from Chrome (reducing effectiveness of ad blocking, for example) and that just reinforces my decision.
That's what happens when MBAs and not engineers run your tech company
There are enough unethical engineers in the world (in fact, many of them work at Google!) that you don’t need to make this accusatory statement.
Your statement has unquantified "enough, "many" and unqualified "in fact". It also completely misses the point - it is the proportion of unethical decision makers that matters. Not the absolute numbers.
In my experience, Wikipedia has been relegated lower and lower in search results. So much so that I now specifically use their search tool rather than go through google just in case some interesting thing pops up.
Having to search for “xxxxxxx wiki” more and more now. No I don’t want Healthline and Medicinenet links above the Wikipedia entry, thank you Google. I wish by each search result there was a button that said “banish this domain to oblivion, I never want to see it again.” You could improve search really fast that way if you still cared about things like that.
If you know which site you want to search, and its search feature is as decent as wikipedia’s, I suggest adding it as a search keyword. Saves me some time to type e.g. ”wk turtle” in the address bar instead of going through the front page or lazily searching via some third party search engine.
I've been in this A/B test for a couple of months now, so I've had time to adjust, and I still hate it. I've just become so used to seeing the complete URL in green. The complete URL! If you hover over the results, you'll see that they like to take bits like numeric components or the query string out. This is part of Google's attempt to de-prioritise the URL. Their destructive AMP service confusingly shows you Google…
>Thanks for ruining the Web, Google. When does the mass-migration to DuckDuckGo go mainstream?
Why not just use Bing then? Why drink the same wine from different bottle?
I've been in this A/B test for a couple of months now, so I've had time to adjust, and I still hate it. I've just become so used to seeing the complete URL in green. The complete URL! If you hover over the results, you'll see that they like to take bits like numeric components or the query string out. This is part of Google's attempt to de-prioritise the URL. Their destructive AMP service confusingly shows you Google…
> This is part of Google's attempt to de-prioritise the URL. URLs have always been an implementation detail and not a user feature. From the very beginning it was intended that users would follow links, not type in URLs. HTML was built on hiding URLs behind text. Then AOL keywords happened. Then search explosion happened. And short URLs. And QR codes for real-world linking. And bookmarks because yet again typing in U…
This is categorically wrong. URL is the fundamental part of the web and without it, the Internet couldn't be decentralized. Imagine if I must reach tweeter by typing "tweeter" somewhere then that somewhere now becomes the gatekeeper. The URL allows distributed gatekeepers. A mechanism with a distributed structure will need something like URL infrastructure.
"Steal"? If customers searching for your brand are happy to buy from your competitor with a different name, maybe your brand isn't so strong? And if you are profiting from advertising your brand to people who don't choose your product over alternatives, isn't your marketing just "stealing" purchases from competitors?
Yeah, that's not how it is working right now. It's more like: User: "Google, how do I get to Costco?" Google: "Here are directions to Target." User:"But I asked for directions to Costco." Google: "Target gave us a lot of money. So, firstly here are directions to Target. If you still want Costco, keep scrolling, but Target is great. You should shop here." When you literally search for one brand and the first result is…
That's naive way of looking at things. Do you know how many brands and trademarks exist in the world? It's over 40 million! Do you know how many brands easily gets mixed up with normal English? When someone searches for best buy, do they always want to go to best buy store? When I type subway, do I want a sandwich shop or subway station? Doing things at scale is very different. And you can't be unfair to small brands while only taking care of big brands. While I understand your issue, there is no clear cut solution here.
The google books link appears to have died: "You have either reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing limit for this book" (I'm fairly certain that I have not viewed anything from this book, nor any book for that matter, this year.)
Very much a way to mitigate the FTC's requirements on making advertising more distinct than organic results. It is an unpopular opinion but I believe Google is dying. They have been for a long time. The cancer is that nothing other than search ads generates the revenue and margins they need and the margins on search ads are now down 90% from where they were in 2010. Personally I'm long on Microsoft/Bing as a candidat…
To be honest I’m not sure what everyone else is searching for on Google the search engine anymore. I personally use it as a Wikipedia search engine in 90% of the cases while 9% is for stackoverflow queries, other than that I get all the info I’m interested in from dedicated FB groups and different sub-reddits. And I’m also a 40-year old guy, from what I can see at people younger than me they spend almost all their we…
Just looked at my browser history and looks like I roughly performed 110 searches during past 24 hours and that's probably because I'm having bit slow day. Vast majority of searches were in fact work related (research papers, deep learning, coding, python, pytorch etc). I can't speak for others but I feel ultra-accelerated because of tools like Google. The knowledge hunting would be approximately 3-5 orders of magnitude slower otherwise.
Very much a way to mitigate the FTC's requirements on making advertising more distinct than organic results. It is an unpopular opinion but I believe Google is dying. They have been for a long time. The cancer is that nothing other than search ads generates the revenue and margins they need and the margins on search ads are now down 90% from where they were in 2010. Personally I'm long on Microsoft/Bing as a candidat…
Google’s biggest opportunity is Cloud. They’re playing catch up but with the culture and staff they have, that’s where I’d be focussing my efforts. I think the 2020s will be the biggest decade for cloud adoption.
Nope. Cloud is being commoditized as we speak which means there will be a race to the bottom when it comes to the margins. Bezos has already boasted that he is willing to turn down the dial for margins all the way down if it comes to that. Right now there still lot to eat for everyone but soon scarcity of finding new customers will take hold. THen you will find companies to cut down prices to get more customers and huge margins we see now evaporate very quickly. In that setting, only Amazon has good survival skills.
In my view, the biggest opportunity is AI. If I was CEO of Google, I would make a massive investment not just in research but engineering turn-key AI systems that can give businesses a massive boost.