Comment by apeace | Hacker News Reader

Comment by apeace | Hacker News Reader

A lot of the comments here are about Google's motivations for doing this, and it seems the consensus is they want to hide URLs so that users don't notice as Google swallows more of the internet.

A couple question for those with this point of view:

1) Do you think users notice when they are using AMP articles today, even though the URL has not been hidden yet?

2) Do you think it would actually matter if they did notice a Google-hosted URL? Would they boycott Google or change their behavior somehow?

3) Do you think Apple has the same motivations as Google? Safari has been hiding www, scheme, and path for a while now. Do you think they have any valid reason for having done this?

4) What do you say to Google's stated reasons for making this change (simplicity and security)?

I think the point is that Google wants fuzzy boundaries between things that were never fuzzy to begin with, until they started confusing people - whether they intended to or not.

If you asked any person- How do go to your favorite website before the omnibox, they had a clear set of steps that worked. If you asked them, how do you search for recipes they had a clear set of steps for that too.

Google's omnibox/(aka keyword logger) made that boundary fuzzy and made it confusing for people. Earlier, people very quickly learned to recognize what is and isn't a valid url, because an invalid URL simply didn't work - this was a very very useful skill/knowledge to have. And every-time you had a typo you noticed it immediately. But then Google insisted on merging the URL and search bar and started correcting their typos and mistakes and people started losing this knowledge/skill. So now.. a lot of non technical folks I know type the url in google's search box in weird ways .. like "wwwfacebook" or "facebook .com" or other typos. So now, nobody actually knows what a valid URL is. That makes them easy targets for phishing and scamming. I'm not blaming this entirely on Google, but they did play a part. Google doesn't seem to realize how they're fucking up things even if that is not their intent.

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