Every Google result now looks like an ad
twitter.com
twitter.com
This is part of Google's attempt to de-prioritise the URL. Their destructive AMP service confusingly shows you Google's domain instead of the website's — and as they can't fix that without losing out on tracking, they're trying to change what the URL means.
Thanks for ruining the Web, Google.
Then Google relented and provided a non-solution in the form of an obscure bar on top of AMP pages (in which the link to the original page is deliberately designed to not look like a link).
The signed exchanges is a bone thrown towards standards committees after all the damage has already been done.
And the "solution" has been directly called by Mozilla harmful, they are not going to implement it. Safari shares Mozilla's concern.
Enjoy the popups, video ads, autoplay, bloated sizes, etc.
I find the non-AMP version to be superior every single time, but I use NoScript so I don't see the popups, video ads, autoplay, etc.
Your "choice".
Bing also uses the AMP standard: https://blogs.bing.com/Webmaster-Blog/September-2018/Introdu...
All these certificates do is make it so Google's browser (and only Google's browser) will mask the fact you're on Google's domains if you sign the file a certain way.
If anything, this shows more anti-competitive practices -- they're adding features into their browser that specifically benefit a features of their search engine.
If the criteria is just "needs extra work" then unfortunately almost nothing can change and we're all going to live with the existing technology. Change inherently has friction and requires "extra work" with the hope that's an investment which provides returns long term.
In other words, say you are a large Internet company that is trying to improve web page loading times. You profile why most web pages are slow and identify issues. You publicly report on those issues and develop guidelines and criteria. Nobody bothers because "extra work". You develop new technology that directly addresses those issues, this technology works within the existing environment but it requires both client and server support to be most effective. Do you think anyone cares? No, because of "extra work". That's why there needs to be incentives. Now you have a "penalty" for not doing that "extra work". You can file it under "it's anti-competitive" (maybe it is) but if you do the "extra work" then suddenly the anti-competitive part works for you, not against you. IMO that's why it's not anti-competitive.
Other examples: why do you think there are so many people that complained when iPhone released with Flash reader? "extra work". Similarly when it removed the audio jack. Change is friction and friction is extra work. But most of the time that's not anti-competitive...
HTML is already fast (see HN for an example). HTML is already universal across devices and browsers. HTML is already published and easily cached for billions of pieces of content.
AMP is a fork of HTML that only targets mobile browsers specifically linking from Google search results. It's useless on its own, but AMP is required to get higher placement on search results pages, so publishers are effectively forced to spend technical resources to output an entirely new format just to maintain that ranking.
If Google wanted faster pages then it can do what it always does and incentivize that behavior by ranking results based on loading speed. These signals are already collected and available in your Google webmaster console. There's nothing new to build, just tweak ranking calculation based on existing data. Sites would get faster overnight, and they would be faster for every single user because HTML is universal.
Do you know why they didn't do that? Because it's the ads and tracking that's slow, not the HTML. Google's Doubleclick and Google Analytics are the biggest adserver and tracking systems used on the web. This entire AMP project is created to circumvent their own slow systems. It creates more work for publishers while increasing data collection by running a "free" CDN that never leaves a Google-owned domain and thereby always supports first-party cookies. It's a perfect solution to protect against anti-tracking browsers and why Chrome now will also block 3rd-party cookies, because it won't affect AMP hosted on Google domains.
Probabilistic techniques are used for anonymous users or environments like iOS Safari that are very strict.
https://amp.businessinsider.com/lambda-school-online-coding-...
If you visit the page from search results (which is the only place it would be linked) then it would never leave Google's domain.
Here's the actual URL used from search results: https://amp-businessinsider-com.cdn.ampproject.org/v/s/amp.b...
In other words: if it behaves exactly as a page hosted on your site (just faster), why do you care?
I'm getting the impression that HN users care a whole lot about seeing the request in the nginx log they are tailing.
Google is strong-arming the entire web to switch to AMP in order to increase their control over the distribution of content, and to be in a better position for tracking users.
The fact that Microsoft and Cloudflare have joined the party does not change the fact that you're about to lose control over your own content if this is not stopped.
Please disclose your affiliation to Google either in your bio or in comments, and don't post the same comment in multiple places.
This...doesn't make sense. You lose the value of a CDN (both to you and to the consumer of your content, in this case Google and the end user) if you're rolling your own.
We were talking about CDNs because your collegue mentioned AMP CDNs, but the main point doesn't change: we cannot serve our own content from our own servers and get the same placement in search results as AMP content, even if our content loads verifiably fast and is as performant as an AMP page on the client.
I have no clue who bdeurst is. They certainly aren't a colleague of mine.
> even if our content loads verifiably fast and is as performant as an AMP page on the client.
Can you explain to me how your page load time is 0ms? My understanding is that a correctly functioning AMP-cached page will load for the user in a whopping 0ms, because it can be preloaded.
The entire design of AMP starts from a fairly straightforward premise: "How do we reduce (user-visible) page load times to 0, safely, cross origin?" If your pages user-visible loading time is longer than 0, you're failing to keep up with AMP.
prefetching isn't private cross origin:
> Along with the referral and URL-following implications already mentioned above, prefetching will generally cause the cookies of the prefetched site to be accessed.[1]
IDK about you, but I'd generally prefer that my cookies and IP not be exposed to all of the links that happen to be in the first page of search results.
[1]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Link_prefe...
Yes, for example Signed Exchanges, which on a technical level solves all of the problems of rel=prefetch (and a number of the problems with AMP, like link pasting and copying).
> Should we allow a handful of companies to be pinged every time we load a page on the web
I'm hopelessly confused here: you're only going to "ping" one of the handful of companies if you were referred by that company. (In a world with signed exchanges) You're not going to come across an AMP-cache link organically. You'll navigate to example.com directly, without anyone except example.com (and your DNS provider) knowing. The cache provider will only know if you navigate to the cached site via the cache provider. Concretely, you don't go to the Google amp-cache unless you're navigating there directly from Google's search results. Same for Microsoft/Bing.
So if your metric is
> Should we allow a handful of companies to be pinged every time we load a page on the web
Then yes, absolutely, because nothing changes!
Edit: To address your other question,
> should we give Google and a handful of other companies disproportionate control over how we publish and consume content, for 50ms of load time?
Alright: how is AMP materially different from <whatever other algorithmic choices rated search results before>?
You seem to be claiming that AMP is harmful to someone but who? It's not harmful to competitors or to end users, and its only harmful to developers if you make the most strained argument.
My premises here are that users actually prefer AMP results. You may not, but my understanding is that most users do. So from the perspective of an end user browsing the internet, AMP leads to an improved experience.
So it's good for users.
No one has yet been able to explain to me how its actually harmful to a web developer who now has an incentive to make AMP-compatible sites. Like sure, you now have to work with a framework you may not like, but that's not a compelling argument when people are claiming that AMP is a threat to the sanctity of the internet.
So it's not like bad for web developers, it's just sort of a lateral move.
That leaves competitors to the giants. But AMP is an open standard, and DDG could, if they wished, implement an AMP cache themselves today and it would just work. And they'd, if anything, benefit from the bigger players pushing that ecosystem. There's the potential for abuse via the caches.json registry, but the AMP project is aware of this and notes that the registry could be decentralized using Subresource Integrity or similar, if such a standard was adopted[1].
So again: I'm confused by how exactly it's bad, beyond the "I am forced to develop in a way I don't want to if I want to appear near the top of the search page", which isn't new.
[1]: https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/pull/18495/commits/c5d...
> So if your metric is
Google being pinged obviously isn't my main metric, as you can see from all my posts in our discussion. My main concern is that publishers will be forced to use specific publishing mechanisms (AMP, Signed Exchanges) to appear at the top of Google Search results. That loss of control puts publishers in a vulnerable position, and hurts innovation across the web.
> Then yes, absolutely, because nothing changes!
Everything changes. Google's influence and control won't end at the moment the user navigates away to a top result on Google Search.
And iiuc, sites are still free to revoke their certs. So this is actually probably more secure compared to something like https in that regard.
[0]: https://github.com/WICG/webpackage/blob/6cc3237b36c2f9ce7534...
Also, everything I say on HN reflects my own opinion and not any organization, which is what my profile states. I do not hide behind an anonymous username precisely for this reason. Poisoning the well by doxxing me doesn't change how the AMP standard works for CDNs either, and only serves to derail the conversation.
Sorry, but I agree with dessant. Your profile doesn't disclose your affiliation and nor do your comments. It's absolutely relevant to the discussion, because whether you want to admit it or not (or try your best to act neutral), your day job will have some influence over your opinions on these sort of projects.
You're right that it doesn't change objective facts about the specification, but I think it's misleading to suggest that, in general, external third-party CDNs are first class citizens in the AMP ecosystem when they're not treated the same within search.
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 URLs is not a major driving use case.
Typing in un-obfuscated URLs has almost never been a key feature or use-case of the web. If anything URL obfuscation is a core building block of the web and is a huge reason _why_ the web skyrocketed in popularity & usage. Don't pretend that somehow AMP obfuscating URLs will be the death of the web. The web exploded in growth despite massive, wide-spread URL obfuscation over the last 20 years. Nothing is actually changing here.
Two words: corporate greed. It's so much easier to persuade and herd them to where they can be "monetised" when they don't know how things work, nor can't figure out how and where to learn.
There's nothing I can do it about it, but I tend to hate it.
If my name is Mike and someone powerful calls me Chucklehead, I will have to start answering to that name in order to continue doing business.
But what REALLY concerns me is if a year later, that powerful someone calls someone ELSE Chucklehead.
So, if I search for something on reddit, I already learned to use duck duck go. Cause then I don't have to edit url to get rid of amp part not scroll up and down for that link.
Isn't that just a protection racket?
Your link is being shared from Google's search results and their application, so you might not like it but they have every right to control how it's displayed. Is it difficult to accept traffic from an AMP link? Are there technical downsides besides being called a name you don't want?
so, about that
4.6 Locators are human transcribable.
Users can copy Internet locators from one medium to another (such as
voice to paper, or paper to keyboard) without loss or corruption of
information. This process is not required to be comfortable.
accessing the URL is listed as one of the fundamental use case for them, and for good reasons, detailed elsewhere in the same rfc
You (often) can copy a page title into a client (Google) and expect it to find the right resource. This is usually done with articles, etc.
Even your comment provides a perfect example - you didn't link to RFC 1736, but the text "Locators are human transcribable" is unique enough that the first Google result is correct.
So you didn't have to provide a URL to lead someone to this page, just 'enough' unique text for it to be findable.
Which is kind of amazing - and maybe not what the original RFC intended.
none of the result here are pointer to the source I've used
sure the content is the same, but the resource isn't, if anything this demonstrates how easy is to misled a user, directing him on a different resource thinking it's the same.
compare with stack overflow result:
https://i.imgur.com/maJi47G.png
luckily prominent sites get pushed on top of the result queue (had to cut it because it was submersed by advertisement) but the attack vector is evident.
So web was designed with using Google in mind? woot
You can type it into Google, though...
But on another note, it will be the day when your mother (or anyone else for that matter) types in 'www.walmart.com' and actually goes to 'www.target.com' (names taken from other examples that I've seen on Twitter).
I made a new webpage for my father, and my mother cannot open it, since google does not know about that and there are no links to it.
There is unfortunately a tax on stupidity, and in this day and age it is paid with one's personal data to multinationals.
The "point" of the web was to serve humans, not machines. If we wanted to serve machines, we'd just throw binary blobs around, which would be orders of magnitude more efficient.
That said, I still have a bunch of "ancient" tech magazines that had directories of URLs for (then) popular websites, grouped by category. That's how we found things then.
People forget that there was a world before Google.
Making people type in URLs is not a key feature of the web. Letting people interact with their various signifiers has always been.
Too many people involved in UX and product and commentary have forgotten that "don't make me think" doesn't mean "don't let me think."
The URL is a set of half a dozen affordances.
Same as I'm not going to type a long path to a file on my file browser or CLI, I'm not going to type the full, character-by-character URL. But being able to see the path also provides extremely useful information.
I posted the solution below, which I found a few days ago. The script will work with greasemonkey and tampermonkey, it will provide you with results similar to the ones before the change. If you also use uMatrix, there will be no ads.
That's a solution, but not a particularly great one since it requires too much from the user to see mass adoption.
...which brings me to another great point this illustrates: if you want to customise your experience, if you want to be able to control how you see the Web, then you need to make an effort, and the amount you exert is essentially proportional to how much you can change.
Yet the majority of users have shown that they are willing to take whatever Google throws at them with little opposition. I find that a little sad and ironic in this era of "everyone can code" propaganda (I've seen even Google advertises something like that on its homepage); or perhaps the latter is just an attempt to increase the population of intelligent yet docile and obedient corporate drones... I know developers --- web developers --- who really hated the changes yet made no effort to fix it themselves, despite almost certainly having the skills to.
Nope - its green, and hasn't been updated since June... of 2003. I have no idea how it is able to be effective against the modern web, considering in 2003 the biggest issue was annoying pop-up Flash ads which no longer exist. Maybe there are updated plugins or something.
Yes, the UI is still skinnable, and the default skin is rather... psychedelic.
There's something to be said about the adblocker being a filtering proxy, it can really get anything before it hits the browser.
Do you know how it compares to Privoxy nowadays? Way back then it was the open source but harder to configure alternative, that didn't quite work as well as Proxomitron. But maybe Privoxy continued development and got better, I don't know what direction that project took.
Oh and I personally always really liked the default skin :D
Sorry to be "that guy" but for me the solution is to use DuckDuckGo.
It's not perfect, but neither is trying to play arms race with Google's JavaScript.
!s your search termsBut psychologically it's rather different. If you find the Google search page to be visually aversive then your goal is to get in and get out quickly. That's a bit harder if Google is your default search.
Just as a contrived example a search like "R33 RB25DET Motorsport ECU" typically got me specific links relating to the exact car, engine and topic. But the past 5 years or so it seems like it is weighting the more common word and more general terms. Often excluding the target topic altogether and just giving general motorsport results. Perhaps it's a consequence of every SEO specialist and their dogbot hammering general search terms and gumming up the machine with cruft.
The results just seem really bad lately, especially for anything technical. Just now I'd been looking for "html5 canvas torture test". The top result is a video called "Torture Testing my Nut Sac!!" and then some videos about testing Glock guns. Umm, no, that's not even close to what I'd wanted. (Bing does way better here and DDG is somewhere in between.)
I'm not sure what Google engineers are using to find technical information on the web these days, but I can't imagine it's the public Google search.
At least both of us are pretending the same level of intelligence, which takes away a lot of the irritation.
I also tried talking to DDG like a duck, but it doesn't give as good results as talking to Google like an idiot.
Top result doesn't have the word responsive, very handy.
It is getting more and more annoying getting workarounds for everything though. It is more annoying, because I liked G layout, default colors snd so on. It was cleaner.
Now not only is their search quality getting worse ( I got what I asked for on bing of all places ), their presentation managed to degrade too.
If it is testing result, I would be curious to see the data that informed that decision.
Just being able to keep scrolling and seeing more results is very helpful. I guess it increases the value of the "first page" for Google.
I run an instance on my local network, but you can run it for free on Heroku, AWS or GCP or even on a Raspberry Pi. There are several Docker images you can choose from.
Edit: Looks like Dogpile still works, and flags the google ads properly. I'm switching back!
Making profit, obviously. You to be less efficient at distinguishing ads and results, increasing time you look at ads, increasing chances of you interacting with ads.
I suspect there's naturally a laundry list of biases that all the work we designed and implemented needs to succeed or boy do we look silly.
Me too. It just looks ugly.
Google is really not good at creating beautiful products...
No, it doesn't. It's actually served from Google's URL, but it (the AMP service) shows you the original site URL (well, it shows the domain by default but that's a button that expands to the URL if you click it.)
Your address bar shows you the Google URL, but that's not misleading, either, since what the address bar has always shown is what location content is being served from, not a content identifier distinct from the mechanics of content distribution.
> they can't fix that without losing out on tracking
Nah, they could track of they worked like a classic CDN
SEO really translates to "How to fool Google into boosting your ranking artifically".
So much so that I now specifically use their search tool rather than go through google just in case some interesting thing pops up.
Check it out, because it sounds like it might start to match your workflow: https://duckduckgo.com/bang?q=
Google used to put the Wiki article right at the top of the results list. It virtually never does that anymore. This is what's bullshit.
The point of a good search engine is that it is supposed to conglomerate good results, relevant results - let's say I'm looking up 'Phillip J. Fry' from 'Futurama', but I still want wiki information. Wikipedia won't even spellcheck for you if you don't know how to spell something correctly, like a city name.
If I use a search engine, I'll get this Wikipedia result: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_J._Fry
But I will also get the far more informative Futurama-wiki result: https://futurama.fandom.com/wiki/Philip_J._Fry
Wikipedia is not a search engine. Although, at this point, Google is barely one, so plastered with sponsored results it can be hard to find the result you're looking for, and with this change, I've finally made the long-needed jump to DuckDuckGo.
Yes, it's time to 'stop the fucking bullshit', and save all our mental states - searching Wiki isn't going to solve that - but not using Google can help. ;)
Comparing a search engine to wikipedia search is like comparing a search engine to a local file search.
If you're looking for a specific driver on your computer that you know the exact spelling and version number of, a local file search will help you find that. A search engine will return many results with download links as well as potentially other drivers, or other versions of drivers for your product - and will generally forgive you if you misspell something.
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.
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/personal-blocklist...
It's silly that it's necessary to create separate bookmark for this, though. Native search engines, surprisingly, don't support keywords there.
I feel silly adding bookmarks for the things I already have in search engine list.
Do you find their search tool more effective than appending "wikipedia" to your Google search?
I also use hoogle a lot for work so I'm used to switching search tool.
Strength of SEO is irrelevant to the ads. The only thing Google hate is when sites manipulate themself to rank higher and offer a worse user experience.
It wouldn't be very surprising if Google varies the number of ads in a search results page based on the search term. For sites that have strong SEO for all of their key search terms that would be indistinguishable from Google placing more ads in pages where that site ranks highly.
Occasionally you can find pockets of less competitive search's that 1) allow ads 2) relate to your product via the algorithm even if they don't to a human brain 3) Align to your desired audience and these can give great return.
When does the mass-migration to DuckDuckGo go mainstream?
Not useful results will change habits.
https://twitter.com/jack/status/1199783221162053633?lang=en
https://www.businessinsider.my/twitter-jack-dorsey-duckduckg...
I have been having several issues with google search recently, this just seems like a good time to make the jump.
Tracking what users click to as the result of a search is critical feedback information for training your models/algorithms, it's not just about "hey let's see where this user goes to fine tune ad targeting for them". And, AFAIK, every search engine out there does it(?)
Now sure, we can argue that maybe the company should provide options where you can say "you can use what I click on for search training but not for targeted advertising" (I think Google does provide a set of options that pretty much disable all web history/targeted ad collection), assuming you believe they follow through. But the company needs to pay for its services somehow so I can't blame them for tying the two types of tracking together, I still have tools as a user (private window) to avoid it if I care enough to.
I use StartPage which has the benefit of local results (but can be fully anonymous) but still uses Google search results. DDG is a great alternative, but isn't for me. And then there's Bing
https://restoreprivacy.com/startpage-system1-privacy-one-gro...
...and at the end of the day, who is actually better out there, and that can prove that no data is leaking? Maybe running your own searx is the only option? (http://asciimoo.github.io/searx/)
Also, a couple of things that set Startpage apart from DDG: 1) We're HQ'ed in the Netherlands, ensuring all our users are protected by stringent Dutch & EU privacy laws, 2) we give you Google results without tracking, 3) with Anonymous View you can visit results in full privacy.
I left a strongly worded feedback on their form
Wow...
So, they helped make the web a far easier place to look around on things for a few decades and one layout change and you call them that they ruined the web?
It's easy to be on the barking side.
Barking side, indeed
The problem I see is that Google does not care about us Geeks anymore. They are 100% focused on consumers now, and that sucks a lot.
Focused on exploiting consumers, that is. Consumers are the livestock in Google’s factory farm. They are actively hostile to end users now.
google amp on mobile overrides behavior on mobile, even on android, so instead of web links opening up in the respective and selected default app, it opens up the amp link within google search or the browser. there is no way to turn off this feature on any browser, chrome or not.
In Gmail for instance: settings: General settings:
Open links in gmail. Turn on for "faster" browsing.
Default is on. Tip: Use firefox focus instead as the default browser to open all links. If the link warrants further look copy the url to your main browser.
The above has nothing to do with amp.
But to not detract, amp truly is a plague.
I find their UX approach to SEO more concerning than, say, scoring. For example, AMP pages will receive the same score as equally performant non-AMP content. However, they won't benefit from the carousel view, with instant page loads (prefetch), etc...
Small changes like this, applied at a huge scale to a user base that just can't afford to constantly fight hostile UX are damaging, regardless if they come from Google, an airline site, your mailbox switching to "Promotions" at random intervals or Twitter not allowing you to permanently change the feed order.
Internet feels more hostile than it used to. I don't mind the trolls (I can always block them) but I do mind that we depend on services that deploy hostile UX practices.
It's not Internet, it's software.
You can really feel it when switching from Android to LineageOS, or from Windows to Linux.
It's the difference between software where "you are the product" and software that has been created to serve the user, to be the best tool it can be.
I'm not talking about UX in the sense that open source software can sometimes feel clunky and unfinished, but I'm talking about breath of freedom you feel when you switch, and suddenly ... you notice that this current you have been forced to swim against, just isn't there any more.
I helped a friend get LineageOS on his bootlooped phone, and he's so happy with it. All these features in the settings that are actually helpful (when in Android you always have to second guess, you know that feeling when a setting's description is really vague and uninformative, "this is probably going to spy on me", is it vaguely positive or negative, because the switch can go either way). All the very basic features that would otherwise require an ad-filled app to perform, of course already there. You get privacy controls that aren't mystifying or reset on updates.
Similarly, I've now been on Instagram for about half a year. Always avoided FB, but there's some art I wanted to put out there, so I gave it a try. And oh my god, Instagram is probably the shittiest software ever? Or at least the most user hostile. It's a social thing where you can share images, comments and messages. Except it isn't, it just appears like one. Literally every interaction feels forced, to show me more ads, make me spend more time in this app (??) and mainly constantly throwing up barriers against interacting with any kind of software or data outside its ecosystem. You can't upload from your laptop, many links are not clickable, many text fields are not copyable, most features in the browser are locked unless you make it pretend to be an iPhone (!!), you can't post or reply to comments. The chat is such basic functionality that it seems hard to fuck up but they did. I should stop, but I can go on ...
This is that feeling of constantly swimming against a current, and somehow we're tricked into believing that is how it's supposed to be, because ... I don't know, some people told me when I complained, that most people don't use instagram in the way I do. Well I guess, but that doesn't seem to be most people's choice.
You haven't tried snapchat btw. It keeps getting worse. I'm sure many of us in here are feeling like dinosaurs, unable to fit in.
Instagram is not some generic photo sharing software that tries to be open and modular and integrate with everything and proliferate arbitrary visual media with a rich tightly coupled messaging system. It was never that and won't ever be that.
Instagram from the start was just about taking low res pictures with your phone camera, putting a filter on them so they look less terrible and then sharing them with your friends. Every other feature was begrudgingly added to increase accessibility and hence DAUs. So you were never supposed to be able to interact with anything outside of the app. You can't cross-post your posts to facebook or twitter, you can't post from your computer, you can't spam links in your photo descriptions. All of this is literally the point of Instagram. It was like this before it and slightly after it got acquired and people loved it, not in spite of the restrictions, but because of them.
Then Zuck crammed it full of ads and a terrible glommed on messaging system and ruined it.
I understand that what you describe is what Instagram was, but given what they have both become, they actually have little functional difference.
[1] https://developer.chrome.com/multidevice/android/customtabs
> In Gmail for instance: settings: General settings:
> Open links in gmail. Turn on for "faster" browsing.
I changed this setting, but now I clicked a link in gmail and indeed it opens via Firefox, but it still gets redirected through a google-URL before getting to the real page. I want to disable that behaviour most of all.
Unfortunately iOS doesn't support this nearly as well as Android does. On Android you can enforce this pretty much everywhere whereas on iOS a bunch of apps still open links in Safari no matter what you do.
Notably, there is absolutely no way for the end user to disable it, short of spoofing your user agent.
[1] https://googleweblight.com/i?u=https://news.ycombinator.com/...
Here is a way for Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/amp2html/
And people wonder why phishing is a thing?
I have been trying to switch from google to duckduckgo for years but its only the past few months that I have been successful and I have google to thank for that.
Also, what's the deal with showing an advertisement for the same result that's number one? See the below screenshot.
https://i.imgur.com/f0Kolfv.png
Doesn't this seem wrong? For a lot of people, Google has become a site to not only search the internet, but to simply navigate it. It's normal for someone wanting to visit Expedia to search "expedia.com" or "expedia". They are trying to navigate to that website, Expedia is the first organic result, and yet Expedia is pressured into paying for an advertisement to prevent one of their competitors from appearing first. Even when a competitor hasn't advertised, they're still stuck paying like the above screenshot. To me, this feels inappropriate. Google is getting a hefty payday by simply redirecting someone searching for "expedia.com" to the Expedia website.
They paid for the ad. They probably leave it up as first organic results because some people think clicking ads is malignant.
1. When I search an exact domain Google will take money from a competitor and show their "advertisement" first. I say that in quotations, because it looks like they're showing a search result, not an advertisement. At this point it feels like companies are paying for their search placement. Pay enough money and you can be the first result for any search term.
2. Does Google give Expedia the option to not pay for an advertisement when there is no competition? I don't think so, and in the example I posted, Google has basically scared Expedia into outbidding no one.
The whole thing feels like extortion. Pay us money or we'll send people trying to navigate to your website to one of your competitors.
Google made their favored ones easy.
Now that fails to deliver expected results. Too many people not making the choices Google would have them make.
Essentially, the bid to be #1 is discounted by the click-through rate. If 90% of people who search "expedia.com" will click an ad for Expedia, and only 10% of people who search "expedia.com" will click an ad for travelsite.com, travelsite.com has to pay 10x what Expedia does to make up for the lost revenue.
This gives Expedia an advantage when purchasing ads on the search term "expedia.com".
Of course, Expedia would probably prefer not to purchase ads on "expedia.com" at all.
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?
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 a competitor, just because they bought out the ad space for your brand name's keywords, that is theft, imo. Or extortion if you'd prefer. It's at the very least, extremely disingenuous and sleazy. Customer loyalty is looking up the preferred brand to begin with.
You'll probably figure out at some point that they do, and that this whole law thing is a proxy for ethics we put in place so that we can punish people that don't.
Until then, live in your world.
Why do I owe you a fulfilled promise? Because I said I'd be honest? Why do I owe you honesty about my honesty?
Reductio ad absurdum
If I build a search engine and promise that it will give accurate and honest results to your search queries, and then it doesn't do that... why do I owe you? "I didn't force you to trust me" is the most childish way to try and weasel out of broken promises there is.
To answer your question though - they don't, but it makes them a shitty company to lie to/manipulate their users.
The only real solution is to regulate this to make competition fairer again.
Two stores, A and B are competitors. I visit company A and say that I'll stand at the entrance of their competitor, store B. I'll tell each customer trying to enter store B about store A and attempt to refer them, as long as store A pays me $0.50 for each person I try to send their way.
This works, some people that drove to visit store B now go to store A instead. Now, store B is getting annoyed at me "stealing" their customers, but I have a solution. I tell store B the more money they pay me, the less likely it is that I'll refer their next customer to store A. So, store B starts paying me $1.00 each time someone tries to enter their own store, and in return, I do nothing but stand there.
A year goes by and I'm standing at the entrance of every store in the country. I collect a dollar when someone tries to enter every store, and I do nothing but let them pass.
We've even seen this happen with repeat customers of ours. It's tough since Google allows the ads to be very confusing, but then we also have competitors who have blatantly copied our style, content, and have even named themselves in a similar manner.
We also spend just under five figures a month on branded keywords to combat this. We rank #1 organically for all of them, but there are always 3-4 competitors bidding on them so we only get a small portion of that traffic if we don't pay for those keywords and get the #1 paid spot as well.
Even with that in place people will still get duped and click ad #2, #3, or #4 that go to competitor sites.
but for #2 there's a pro-competition argument here. If you search for Expedia and all you ever get is Expedia and expedia pages underneath that, in theory that's good. But what if you don't know about other online travel sites? You'll never see them, so it kind of makes sense that you are shown other sites in there.
Google should recognise that a search for Expedia is either: a) For Expedia b) For a travel holiday
and let other competitors rank for b), showing Expedia as the biggest and main CTA on the page.
I don't think that makes sense. Or, at least, such results should be below all the actually relevant results.
If I'm searching for Expedia, then what I want is results about Expedia. Nothing else. If I want to know about other travel sites, I'd be searching for "travel sites" instead.
Jacuzzi, styrofoam, and Super Glue are all brand specific trademarked items[0], but I doubt most users care about that when they're searching for those terms.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_generic_and_genericize...
And the same applies to other terms like Kleenex, Ziploc, aspirin, etc.
Why? If I search for a specific thing (Expedia), why would Google assume I want to see other options that I did not ask for other than "it's more profitable for Google"? More specifically, in the event I want other options, why is the correct answer "you want to see the other options that are paying Google the most"? That's not "pro-competition", that's "pro-Google".
Google should recognise that a search for Expedia is either: a) For Expedia b) For a travel holiday
Why, short of mind reading (I assume they're working on it, but it's not in the 10Q), should Google ever assume B?
If nobody bids against Expedia, they'll end up paying a penny to win the auction. Source: https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/2996564?hl=en&r...
Would it be possible to fund a search engine startup by selling shares to all of those sites who now have to pay to stay at the top? In the long run, it should be cheaper to fund a competitor.
That's a pure antitrust play.
This is the sort of practice that will get Google in trouble with Congress.
www.expedia.com/Expedia/Official_Site
To me (which may well be a minority view) that actually makes it feel less official, because "/Expedia/Official_Site" is the sort of tactic a scammer would use.
I'd worry about it having the unintended consequence of building people's trust in something like "/Official_Site" vs focusing on the domain name. At the very least it's muddying the waters in this respect.
what?
Wait so you're saying everyone owes it to Google to click the ads? How much? Always? Sometimes?
Does this mean that if you go to the movies you are literally obligated to buy popcorn and soda? I agree with you that if no one clicked ads then Google wouldn't "be able to operate it" for free. But I think that like any business they operate in the aggregate. Some people make you money, some don't. In Google's case, everyone I have ever watched click ads 100% of the time so I don't think they're hurting.
And also, I think if everyone stopped clicking ads and Google was forced to just charge users say $12 a month for search as an informational service with zero ads, I would gladly pay it. And the Internet and the world would be a LOT better.
It's a little confusing to read now, so for context: at the time Google published this, it only put ads in the sidebar to the right of search results. This post was written to criticize the practice of putting ads atop search results, which competitors sometimes formatted almost indistinguishably from organic search results.
Amazing how clear the writing is, how simple the message. That’s, like, totally not the corpspeak Goog emits now on a daily basis.
So, let’s do some digging.
Earliest version of url dates back 4+ years. https://web.archive.org/web/20151213182805/https://www.googl...
Things were a little better than, but not by much. This has to be earlier.
Ah, here is:
https://books.google.ca/books?id=oNT3AwAAQBAJ&pg=PA289&lpg=P...
This page is from a book by Douglas Edwards, employee number 59 published in 2011.
The content of OP url, written by same, is dated March 2002.
That company no longer exists. Goog should remove it from their website.
(I'm fairly certain that I have not viewed anything from this book, nor any book for that matter, this year.)
The site was created by Russians though, just not sure it is hosted there anymore.
The load speed difference between these two archived pages is huge.
The other thing I've noticed is that more and more of the top results are from garbage content farms. Filtering this kind of crap out was the original reason Google existed and everyone switched to them, but they're failing at it now. IMO Google is overripe to be replaced with something better.
“For example, entering the query "buy domain" into the search box on Google’s home page produces search results and an AdWords text advertisement that appears to the RIGHT of Google’s search results” [1]
It is from October, 2000. It is so ancient, it is even before Schmidt happened. I don’t believe anything preceded that, but to be sure we’ll have to wait for Larry to chime in and clarify.
[1] http://googlepress.blogspot.com/2000/10/google-launches-self...
> Google’s quick-loading AdWords text ads appear to the right of the Google search results and are highlighted as sponsored links, clearly separate from the search results. Google’s premium sponsorship ads will continue to appear at the top of the search results page.
Verdict is this: they started at the top, then things went sideways ;)
"It is clear that a search engine which was taking money for showing cellular phone ads would have difficulty justifying the page that our system returned to its paying advertisers. For this type of reason and historical experience with other media [Bagdikian 83], we expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers."
A visual guide: "A (mostly comprehensive history of Google's ad shading and labeling" https://i.imgur.com/0RxdzBE.png
E.g. https://i.imgur.com/SfomkdQ.png; the second result is a competitor's ad, the third result is the organic result.
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2019/09/04/google-paid-search-ads-shake...
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/17/technology/antitrust-hear...
Edit: Disclosure - I work at Google but this is my own opinion on multi-sided markets
If for example changes to the marketplace makes it harder to determine who is a fraud and who is not or simply making it difficult to determine the quality of products, competition between the companies with the quality products and fraudsters may increase and that would be a bad thing.
https://www.popehat.com/2016/06/14/lawsplainer-its-not-rico-...
It's like saying that you want to regulate what can advertising companies display on billboards, ex. they cannot display competitor's ads nearby your company's offices. Since the billboard space is private and owned by the ad company (similarly to the ad space on Google servers served pages), they get too decide to put there whatever they want (barring free speech limiting regulations).
Many of these UIs don’t have the controversial changes that Google has recently been implementing, including adding favicons and hiding full URLs.
I also found that there were several different mobile UIs for Google with different navigation schemes and search box styles.
I implemented what I found in a simple Firefox extension that changes the user agent string for Google searches [1].
[1]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/google-search...
I used the UA workaround up until near the end of last year, when they broke it and instead replaced with an even more dumbed-down mobile UI. (If you know of a UA which can still "unlock" the old JS-less full-featured UI, please say so!)
I also found another, even simpler mobile UI available with this user agent string, though results seem to be sent through a mobile-formatting proxy operated by Google:
Mozilla/5.0 (PlayBook; U; RIM Tablet OS 2.1.0; en-US) AppleWebKit/536.2+ (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/7.2.1.0 Safari/536.2+
If you a building a webapp, use feature detection not user agent strings.
Check out feature detection vs browser detection, it explains some of the challenges to relying on user agent strings.
I think the rule is: detect features, don't rely on unreliable proxies for features.
https://mobile.htmlgoodies.com/html5/client/browser-and-feat...
But Google search has some weirdly specific requirements. It needs to know if it can show a result that required a polyfill mere ms after it gets your request, for example, or if it would be better to just send less bytes and a scaled down version of the same result that might need different data to assemble. It's not perfect but a UA string is one of the only practical ways to do this. Having qa and engineers to keep track of this mapping for the most commonly used browsers may make sense for search to shave off a bunch of time shipping js and doing feature detection to figure out what it needs next, but may not make sense for your website.
In general there are no blanket general guidelines that apply to every single site regardless of usage patterns or business needs.
Disclaimer: Former web search eng, current Googler.
Now I tend to agree with the general advice that anywhere you can use JS based feature detection, you should prefer that.
But hell, there are times js based feature detection REALLY doesn't cut it.
For example, here's the Chromium team recommending UA based feature detection for handling the SameSite kerfuffle: https://www.chromium.org/updates/same-site/incompatible-clie...
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 candidate for the surviving English language web index. My prediction (which isn't shared by many so don't be surprised if you disagree :-)) is that once Google's dying becomes mainstream and they start heading into ground that Apple will buy their assets, keep Maps, Search, and maybe Waymo and throw the rest away.
Do you have a source for this?
i always found this baffling business logic from Google. i think Google is a strong enough brand that a lot of people would switch to it if it wasn't the default. maybe not everyone would switch but not worth $12 billion a year
[1] I worked there and paid attention at their 'life of a dollar' class they used to give Nooglers. :-)
It will be interesting to see what a desperate Goog might do with access to everyone's email, calendars, and docs.
And I’m also a 40-year old guy, from what I can see at people younger than me they spend almost all their web-related time on Facebook properties: Instagram, WhatsApp groups, Facebook private groups (FB the main app is also dying), with TikTok coming strong from behind. All of these are places where Google Search doesn’t have any reach. So one could say that the 2011 mantra “all arrows behind the same big arrow” (or whatever it was) was quite correct, Google+ was Google the company’s major chance of still remaining relevant in 10 or 15 years’ time. They still have YT, too bad they don’t know how to manage it.
For example, just used HN's search bar, and there it showed up in the options ready to customise keywords to my liking (if I wanted to change it).
Before anybody claims it's an additional step, it's not. DDG requires you to know what the keyword is before you use it, which is the same as having to use the search on the site before. So I guess I agree it's a killer feature if you exclusively use Firefox for the time being.
For example if I want to want search wikipedia, I type "en.w" and hit tab.
Everything else I get from HN, Reddit, FB, etc.
The instant google results are the vast majority of the time taken from wikipedia. Sports scores and election results are taken from other sites that Google has started top present quite nicely, but that I could easily get elsewhere. Company name searching is basically just using Maps indirectly.
Google as a raw search query product is dying. A competitor could probably service 90%+ of queries just by being great at serving instant result previews at the top for a set of the most popular data (mass-media, wikipedia, local maps).
Usually I find success when it's extremely niche results (usually rare error messages) that have only a few hits on google on some random forum that the other crawlers just didn't index.
I use search keywords, such that when I put "wiki example" in the search bar, my browser pulls up https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?search=example
I also do this with several other sites that I commonly use. In doing this, I've dramatically reduced the number of times I use a general purpose search engine in a day.
I've only ever heard people complain about this on here, nowhere else.
Perhaps at startups. At big companies, the call is made by directors and VPs that are well fined by sales people - and that's where the real money is.
I saw it real time with Maps changing its pricing model, where an international company reworked all their maps display. It was a lot of money, and it's not something you brush under the rug explaining the contracts are otherwise marvellous.
Then there was the whole google chat -> hangouts -> meets transitions with every variations in-between, and messaging applications are one of the most sensible tool to change in an enterprise environment. In particular the bigger it is the worse these changes will be perceived.
When came time to choose between AWS and GCP, the choice was clearly political, more than the technical merits.
People need to stop coupling their applications to cloud services for this very reason! It really bothers me that people architect their systems tightly coupled to AWS - Amazon LOVES it, of course, because this is the kind of vendor lock-in that Oracle could only dream about. (Amazon's vendor lock in is strictly superior because it is at runtime. I don't think Oracle ever had that power.)
Its incredible that so many companies have embraced AWS so completely, never giving thought to the the fact that they are giving Bezos total power over their technology investments. The sunk costs are only going to snowball, and AWS can and will raise prices almost arbitrarily, because opting out of AWS will mean a rewrite, which is some multiple of those sunk costs. That is, a company has to recapitulate ALL the money they paid to build software ALL AT ONCE. This is an existential threat to all small businesses, and an easy "just pay extra" grumble for medium and big businesses. Again, great for Amazon, bad for everyone else.
Google can and should get in cloud by pushing cross-cloud technology that lets companies have their cake and eat it too: cloud-hosted auto-scaling applications, AND the ability to pick a new cloud vendor without a rewrite. I suspect K8s is a good push in the direction. So, yeah, it's counter-intuitive but I think G could win big by pushing vendor-independent cloud tech, starting with K8s. The dream is that Google can cancel whatever it wants, and customers will just make an account at another cloud provider and keep rolling.
I'm short on Google Cloud.
They could have owned the cloud.
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.
Yahoo did this, most easily seen back on Yahoo Messenger, where I believe they fit an ad in 6 point type between two elements.
I've seen it at plenty of places that does revenue based A/B testing. You do an A/B test, measuring $ vs User retention. Money goes up, and retention maybe is affected, but over a few weeks, it looks like its the same. So you go on to the next test. Eventually, you find you have to do drastic measures to stop bleeding money. I wish I could say how long you need to measure retention for, but its probably too long for the test to make sense.
For the record, I don’t think this is FTC compliant. It also reeks of the kind of this that regulators would adjust their laws for. Google is playing with a situation where regulators may write very explicit rules that say exactly how much labeling their ads need. A 50%-75% chop in outgoing paid clicks would be material to their earnings. They’ve been in a situation for a decade where a large chunk of their most valuable demographic had no idea they’ve been clicking on ads. That isn’t a metric they should be getting more greedy on.
Regulators could just set up a test where, if a large enough percent of users don’t know they’ve clicked on an ad, paid disclosure has to be more explicit.
The low hanging revenue fruit for Google at this point is very sparse. Financially incentivized executives are scrambling to do questionable things to hit bonuses that probably shouldn’t be attainable. Kind of like Boeing.
The dominance of Google and Facebook is turning the web into a toxic waste.
"[...] the companies forget what it means to make great products. The product sensibility and the product genius that brought them to that monopolistic position gets rotted out, by people running these companies who have no conception of a good product vs a bad product." ... "They really have no feeling in their hearts, usually, about wanting to really to help the customers."
So don't blame fate. Don't blame market. Don't blame wall street. Don't confuse a lack of visionary CEOs or their willingness to take a risk with fate or dysfunctional market.
And while I'm sure I'm preaching to the choir here, quick reminder that unless you're running Lynx or some crap, literally everyone on this blog should have an adblocker installed (preferably uBlock Origin).
I appreciate there are multiple perspectives people have on whether adblocking should be a scorched-earth policy, or whether it's better to just target the worst actors. But disguising ads as native content is abusive enough behavior that you should be blocking those ads no matter where you fall on that spectrum -- and the UI changes here are very clearly, very obviously meant to make ads blend in with normal page results. The 'ad' indicator is meant to look like just another favicon.
I'm seeing people here suggest greaseMonkey scripts, and maybe there's something I'm missing, but I just really don't understand that. Don't restyle the ads, block them! Block advertisers that are abusive.
It's something of a conscious choice: unfettered tracking and advertising practices but good search results, or less tracking and OK results with profits used for a cause.
[Y] https://www.startpage.com/blog/company-updates/startpage-and...
Startpage's parent company is (currently) less integrated with Startpage than Google's Advertising department is with Search. Their search results are also better formatted, and ads are more clearly marked. Startpage also doesn't do link wrapping if you turn off Javascript, which is such a huge privacy win over Google Search that I would still tell you to prefer Startpage even if I knew that they were slurping up other data.
On the marketing side, Startpage's parent company also doesn't own the vast majority of the online ecosystem, and distributing power among multiple advertisers is better than consolidating all of the power behind a single company who also owns a dominant web browser. System1, for all of its faults, isn't actively proposing web standards with the goal of deprecating URLs.
If you can't use DuckDuckGo, you should still prefer Startpage to Google. Google Search is also owned by an advertising company, one that openly mines literally every single data point of every single search they do. You can't get worse than that. I see people who are saying they want to break free of Google, but that they can't give up Google's results. I'm not going to tell them to stick with Google if an almost universally better alternative exists.
I actually like advertising as one avenue of finding stuff.
I just hate when tracking is bundled with advertising. And I hate when advertising is camouflaged.
In practical terms:
When I’m searching for guitars, I like seeing both: third party results and ads that are not camouflaged.
I also like seeing guitar ads on a guitar related website.
But I hate seeing guitar ads on an unrelated website, just because I looked at a guitar website a few days ago. And I hate when a guitar ad is camouflaged as an independent review.
An advertising company that doesn’t track or camouflage gets my support. And I just hope that StartPage is and remains that kind of company.
AFAIK pretty much all customers that pay for internet advertising WANT tracking (a cookie or URL session ID that tracks you from the advertising platform to the advertised site destination) as a way to verify that their money is actually producing results, otherwise they have little way of knowing that.
Bear in mind, there are a lot of other sites beyond just Google where you should probably be blocking ads. Do you really want to deal with the performance/maintenance costs of Greasemonkey on every one of them? Just install an adblocker already and be done with it.
So in this one case I'm the kind of guy who would like to block ads on Google and nowhere else currently. (Also if I install an ad-blocker I am at the mercy of the ad-blocker not reaching a deal with one of the richest companies in the world to let their content through because it's ok)
The problem with this kind of aggressive A/B testing is that it's a game of "how far can we push the user?" So instead of having enthusiastic fans, they have people who begrudgingly use them. Sure, Google picks up an extra nickel here or there, and I'm sure some PMs got a raise. But I don't know any strong Google boosters any more, and there are hordes of people ready to switch over once something tolerable comes along.
(And from the comments, it seems like many of you have already found tolerable replacement search engines. I think I'm going to join you.)
And now I exclusively use Firefox again.
Remember when google was cool?
Google also does this with Chrome. Users are subjected to "field trials". No explicit consent is requested. Most users are probably unaware. While it is possible to see which trials one is a part of, Google is not transparent about what exactly these trials entail.
https://www.ghacks.net/2013/04/05/field-trials-in-chrome-how...
https://textslashplain.com/2017/10/18/chrome-field-trials/
https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/master/test...
https://blog.chromium.org/2012/05/changes-to-field-trials-in...
If Bing's results aren't good, head back to the address bar and use another engine, if that's not good try another. So easy nowadays that it's kind of insane to me that there's still so many people who aggressively will ONLY use Google Search.
Google I can bang in cryptic queries like > centos 7 tuned no daemon
and get the 3rd link about how to run tuned in a no daemon mode. Bing/DuckDuckGo have the article at around 7th or 8th place, but prefaced by a lot of "while technically not wrong, not what I'm looking for" links. It's even worse for more niche errors or code snippets.
We cannot, as a healthy internet, let Google control so much of the web.
I know Google also factors in how long people spend on the resulting webpage.
Ideally you could use Bing as your default engine, then fall back to Google whenever there's a search that doesn't yield good results. If you have the time, you can also use the Feedback link on the bottom-right of the page to report bad search results; people do actually triage and read those.
This is what I do with DDG. Unless I have a pretty specific search, or want Google's really nice live sports scores widgets, DDG is usually pretty good.
Interesting. Can you explain more on what is tracked after a user clicks a result and how this data is used?
Obviously ranking search results is immensely complicated with lots of accumulated insider wisdom, but the short answer is that "static" page features (PageRank, how well the query matches text on the page, etc.) are good for pruning down zillions of pages to generate a candidate list of 10 or so results to show the user, but not great at ordering those results, and serving the results in the best order is really important for user satisfaction. For generating the final top-10 ordering, "dynamic" features like how many people clicked that link, how long did they spend on the page, etc. are the most useful.
Regarding what is tracked, obviously Bing can only track what you're doing on Bing itself, so clicks on blue links and backs are tracked, but they can't see what you do on the destination page. This data is used to train models/NNs/etc. but the raw click data isn't kept for very long: it's too large and it has to be removed for GDPR compliance.
Do Google do this as well?
Downvoters: why on earth are you downvoting Analemma's post? It's constructive, on point and overall the kind of post which makes HN comments valuable.
Because of the way that downvoting works on HN, the few times I use it, my thought is "nobody should see this comment". Because enough downvotes delegitemize and hide a comment, it's effectively telling other people that it's not worth being read.
I don't know if that's actually going through people's minds when they downvote, but that's what I think which is exactly why I rarely use it. But too many people now are simply using it on posts they don't like, even if a post deserves to be there. For some reason, it's an unpopular opinion to believe that an idea or opinion you think is wrong deserves to be seen and rebutted rather than silenced.
A million flies are attracted to shit. I don't believe this sort of training data will ever become useful if it's in the same pool with the rest of the world. See also: voting with your wallet against the tyranny of the majority of uninformed consumers who buy whatever is most marketed. Those pennies don't matter.
In fact, I believe this sort of training and optimization for the mainstream plays a role in allowing bad results to proliferate.
This is before we even consider the fact that clicking on many results can indicate that they're bad (I click another result because the previous wasn't good), or because they're good (I'm browsing choices). Dwelling long can be bad (crappy & slow site, it takes me long to find the information I want or turn away) or it can be good (I found good stuff and I'm spending a while on it). Whatever conclusion your training system draws might be completely wrong. And probably prone to being gamed.
Sorry, appeal to authority is no argument. Direct experience is valuable if there's an argument or some real scenario we can dissect, otherwise it's nothing more than a baseless claim. Without concrete examples, it's not even an anecdote. And there are plenty of anecdotes about search results for in-depth content becoming harder and harder to find.
The person I was responding to posted that they're using this training data to order the top 10 results or so. That's already an indication that it's not very helpful for me. I don't get frustrated if the top few results are in suboptimal order, I get frustrated when I get pages and pages of garbage and irrelevant results and can't seem to get anything useful out of it.
Specifically they also measure metrics like "regret" - if you went back to the search results and chose something else this indicates it wasn't a useful search result for the query and this counts against it.
In theory this is quite a nice defense against clickbaity, content free results.
I explicitly addressed this:
> clicking on many results can indicate that they're bad (I click another result because the previous wasn't good), or because they're good (I'm browsing choices).
You don't know the reason why I clicked back. Maybe I got what I needed at a glance, and I'm browsing to the next thing to see if there's more of what I need.
You don't know that the Average Joe (and a million other Average Joes) wasted 15 minutes on clickbaity content free crap despite not getting anything useful out of it. You know, those same SEO spam sites are trying to find ways to make the user stay as long as possible; they are in the game. And I'm sure there are plenty of gullible users who will stay. Who knows, maybe SEO spam is working and that's precisely why we see SEO spam sites in results?
Again, I think training like this is pretending the problem is much simpler than it is. And I think that there is a real danger that training like this just optimizes for 1) average users 2) sites that managed to game the system with their SEO. Neither is optimizing for quality results.
That theory has so many holes and pitfalls.
Maybe the best bet is for a search engine to try to include a simple, non-intrusive method of getting user input to determine the usefulness of a search result. Like, if it determines you came back as a "regret", maybe a ThumbsUp/ThumbsDown icon next to the last link you clicked to get you to say whether that link was useful in any way, or maybe a "block" option as well to say that you never want sites like that again.
I should, then, expect dramatically different results when I use someone else's PC or a public computer. I have not witnessed dramatic differences.
We may not know exactly why you clicked back, or why Joe wasted 15 minutes on a site, but from all clicks in aggregate and from the human-labelled data, we can tell how that correlates with the clicked site's relevancy and quality and utilize your clicks accordingly to improve the ranking.
Finding such correlations is still by far and large what all search engines do, rather than trying to truly understand the query. It's only now starting to change with recent advances in deep learning and NLP.
The gaming part is where there's a lot of importance, since it forces the machine to learn which users are acting nefariously.
Speaking as someone who worked for another big web search engine in the past (not G, not B)
And counting good/bad clicks for a given (query, url) pair is just the tip of the iceberg. There's a lot of other interesting stuff you can do with them _if_ you have the data. Deep learning/NLP with clicks as training signal is probably the most exciting area to me, to name one. Unfortunately almost all of the data currently gets nabbed by google, other search engines are just getting by with the scraps. And it's very hard to bootstrap a competitor from scratch - for example Cliqz had to resort to some shady deals with Mozilla just to get any data to start with.
It's getting worse too.
Back in the day, you could Google something for a manufacturer and include the name of the manufacturer like, "Pioneer 10" Subwoofer" and automatically the first result would be a like to Pioneer's subwoofer page or their main ecommerce site.
You type that into Google today? You will get 15 results for AMAZON pages with Pioneer speakers. No, I want to buy it from Pioneer, not Amazon. Oh yeah? The actual link to the actual company, who actually makes those speakers? They're on Page 2.
When you have the actual manufacturer being buried in the results, we have a major problem.
Think of modern google as a question answering machine not a serch engine. And do "Show me Pioneer 10 subwoofer manufacturer specs" instead of just jamming keywords and hoping for the best.
Maybe, but if so then they're singularly bad at it. Google consistently gives me worse results than DDG and Bing, anyway.
I really think it's because Google is trying to figure out what I "really mean" by my search queries, and it's really terrible at guessing.
Not buying stuff you already own again serves neither the economy nor Google's advertising profit. Go on, buy another set. Infinite growth depends on it.
That really is their attitude to every product and service.
> When you have the actual manufacturer being buried in the results, we have a major problem.
How do you know though? What if the majority users actually do what you describe in hopes of buying something and thus the shopping results are more relevant for them?
I imagine either there is a bug or this is the case, because I'm sure the links people actually click feed back into the algorithms and the results are modified accordingly.
This being said, it seems like the fact that your results aren't personalized enough to your liking is a shortcoming, assuming you were signed in.
Google's results are uglier and blatantly revenue based. They have now lapsed behind DuckDuckGo in usefulness for me. I fall back to Google a few times per week, with inconsistent results when I need a "second opinion."
I'd suggest giving DDG another try.
I plan to remove Google from my life this year, at least as a central dependency. Search is already behind me. Mail, calendars, docs, and drive will be taken care of throughout the year. And my Android phone will be replaced with an iPhone.
However, some folks are a little spooked by the privacy implications of it being ran out of Australia, so be sure to research that if you're interested in Fastmail.
Proton has appeared somewhat bumpy to me -- I can't say for sure why, but they give me some spidey tingles.
Migrating / transferring is indeed a problem. I would suggest using Google Takeout, their data export tool, and permanently archiving your data with a third party service and / or physical backups. See https://takeout.google.com/. You probably won't be able to import into your new provider.
I ended up trying fastmail and found the transition much easier.
You should take a closer look at DDG, it has the answer from serverfault.com in an instant answers box for your query and it highlights the required setting in a perfectly chosen excerpt from the correct answer:
As of CentOS 7.2 tuned now has a no-daemon mode which
can be turned on by setting daemon = 0 in
/etc/tuned/tuned-main.conf. This is mentioned in the
RedHat Performance Tuning Guide.Do you have the URL?
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=centos+7+tuned+no+daemon&t=iphone&...
Not only can you bang in whatever query you want to DDG, you can bang it in via Google, using bangs (https://duckduckgo.com/bang). I think that "!g <query>" is the second stop for many DDG'ers, when DDG itself disappoints. (My understanding is that it still offers some anonymisation over searching directly through Google, but I'm not sure.)
ex. Adobe updates come faster than I can update, so I run into issues, so finding the most recent answer is what I am looking for and not a similar issue from Adobe pre CC.
If companies want to track me and build profiles on me, I accept that I can't stop that without refusing to use their products and every site that's integrated with it (Google Analytics, Adwords, etc). But if they're going to do it, at least use that information to help me. What's the point otherwise?
That means you see a second helping of ads.
You still use Google.
From their perspective this is probably working perfectly.
I know you can manually filter results, but why show 10 year old answers to software that gets updated so frequent! I am sure there are other areas where this exists, dated results should be pushed back a few pages.
I am amazed that no search engine gives me easy way to blacklist domains from my results. That would make the usefulness of any of them to increase by orders of magnitude. (and if they are careful, they might be even able to use the blacklisted data to adjust their general results , not only my personal results as well)
And I can't help to add qwant.com to the list of alternative search engines. No affiliation whatsoever, but I am pretty happy to use that as my daily search engine here in Europe.
Yep. Ironically enough, that was killed soon after I found about that. And anyways, it was implemented far from easy to use. It should be just behind the green arrow that gives the options to see cached version etc. And obviously with cross-platform effect on all my devices as long as I am logged in.
b(tab) Whatever I want to search for
and it goes to Bing with that query. It's a great example of what you're looking for. On my personal devices, I try to use Bing for as much as I can to see whether its personalized results will ever marry up to Google (it's gotten extremely close, lately), but I often prefer searching Google Maps, so I have gMaps added as a search engine with keyword "m", so I can search for anything with "m (tab) place" and immediately see gMaps results.
I have about 50 keywords.
DDG still isn’t as good as google at this.
I can’t append or prepend, I had time for one search and need a result now before I miss a turn.
Seriously, which parts of adulthood and 'the real world' make this seem necessary and okay to you? It really is super dangerous. (Google the statistics if that might convince you, or news stories to make the risk emotionally real.)
What you are doing is posing a significant risk to other pedestrians and drivers.
You should reconsider your irresponsible “real world” behaviour.
Side note - most browsers offer 'search shortcut' customization options, so you can start an address-bar search with !g or !b or whatever to seamlessly swap to your fallback(s).
While you indeed can configure browsers to do this, I think you may be erroneously attributing a DDG feature to -- or duplicating a DDG feature in -- your browser, because those are built in DDG bang commands.
I like the way Chrome shows it has recognised the keyword after you press space though, neat feedback, good design IMO.
https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/rev/cfd1cc461f1efe0d66...
edit: For example, I just needed to look up the current version of Scala. DDG correctly has scala-lang.org as the top result. Google has a snippet from sourabhbajaj.com (incorrectly) stating 2.10 is the current version taking up the top 1/3 of the page.
I had assumed I had simply adjusted to DDG and just forgot what Google had always looked like, but this post confirms that the Google results have in fact changed.
This reeks of AOL keyword BS.
It's remarkable, BTW, that most people at the same time believe that Bing sucks, and DDG is "just as good as Google". For me that hasn't been my experience at all: Google is far, far ahead of Bing (and by extension DDG) in terms of relevance.
"DuckDuckGo's results are a compilation of "over 400" sources, including Yahoo! Search BOSS, Wolfram Alpha, Bing, Yandex, its own Web crawler (the DuckDuckBot) and others. It also uses data from crowdsourced sites, including Wikipedia, to populate knowledge panel boxes to the right of the results."
I use the Google !g fallback for about 5% of my searches. Sometimes the google results are simply better, but the appearance just seems chaotic nowadays.
Bing’s UI looks exactly like Google’s with a two-year delay.
Their current ads have a single distinguisher from an organic result: the circled word ‘Ad’ in the same color and font size as the description.
Same as Google before the change. A worse distinguisher as the one it had before, where ‘Ad’ used a distinct color.
Do we really trust that Bing won’t copy the new design in two years?
Do you need to? Worst case you have delayed the bad for two years.
Which is I assume because Google is allowing their search results to be of a poorer quality in the pursuit of higher ad revenue.
As an example.... I search on DDG, "buy cricket equipment near me". I am not behind a VPN and whatsmyip correctly identifies my hostname with the correct European country suffix. However, the top results on DDG for this query is "Dick's Sporting Goods". Click on that and I get a nasty "GDPR DSG Sorry. Can't help you message." Second result is "Cricket Best Buy," who help "to connect North American cricket fans with the best possible cricket equipment." Next, AA Sports. Fourth, First Choice Cricket, "#1 USA Cricket Retailer".
If instead I try to be more precise with the query, "buy cricket equipment "austria"". First result is US Sports Direct.
Nothing here is relevant to my query. At least try to give me some UK results in the first few.
It's a minor annoyance that I've got used to, and hasn't persuaded me to go back to Google (I've used DDG as first choice for probably a little over 5 years now).
If DDG can't deliver the goods, !b (bing) is second choice, !mill (Million Short) probably third, then as appropriate, a mix of !azuk (amazon UK), !w, !ox (oxford dictionary) and a mix of others including !g as last resort. !g is so rarely better or helpful that I wonder why I still sometimes bother.
Edit: I think the real problem is with ICANN. .com should have been kept for global or multinational sites, and the USA used .co.us and .us generally for sites of national interest, as France uses .fr, Germany .de and UK .uk etc.
It's frustrating, because for geographical based results, I'm forced to drop back to Google consistently, and Google's getting worse and more user hostile/advertiser friendly.
Going back to Google is actually frustrating for me.
Their results are so badly presented and the number of ads so onerous to scroll through...
I don't understand why they don't just track my click with JavaScript. I suspect this new hiding the url thing might have to do with circumventing scripts like I have used before that rewrite the url so that when you click, you go directly to what you clicked on.
https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/du...
There are some things I miss about Google (I feel like I got better results when searching for programming questions), but I don't miss it too much.
However, 10 years ago I honestly felt DDG is not really worse compared to Google. And here's the problem: DDG hardly changed over last I-don't-know-how-many years, while Google surely did. And while it seems primary Google users are constantly upset about the nature of the changes, I, on the contrary, quite often appreciate how it behaves, especially on the mobile. In fact, when I bought a new phone this autumn, I, for the first time didn't change Chrome+Google Search as my default search engine.
I'm still mostly content with DDG on PC, but Google is actually better at answering questions I mostly want to ask on the go: to look up badly misheard brand or person's name, find some local shop and show me the time it closes, or — the thing DDG is most useless for — brief me on the real-time news everybody is talking about for the last couple of hours.
I believe nearly all the search engines are still guilty of this one.
I also think firms should be able to buy "blank space." For example facebook or amazon could pay NOT to have an ad above their result. Maybe they already do, I dont see an ad when I search facebook, however I do see an ad for amazon above the top amazon result. Google should just be smart enough to see the top result and the ad are the same link, and handle the situation more appropriately, like tucking the ad text underneath the result, or signifying that the top result owner has paid to hide ads. I have to say, I dont find these results differentiated ENOUGH from the ad. https://i.imgur.com/8Dhr1mj.png
That sounds an awful lot like a shakedown practice. "Nice search result you got there. Would be a shame if it would be obscured by an ad..."
Deduplication is the lesser of two confusings.
Backblaze had a competitor who bought ads for the search term "backblaze". The CEO successfully contacted the competitor CEO and they agreed they'd be in a pissing match throwing money at Google if the practice and retaliation (backblaze buying on their search term) occurred. The competitor promptly stopped the ad campaign.
I don't know exactly where my opinion lies in this case. I think the cloud backup space currently has many players and that even if all players agreed to this - the net result would be Google earning less, each of those companies having less ad spend, and therefore greater profitability.
Heck, imagine if a 3rd party existed to "bypass" the Google ad auction through collusion on generic terms like 'computer backup'. (I'm not in this space, so some of the feasibility is speculative). Each company puts in their bid parameters for search terms. 3rd party evaluate the bids, submit 2 slightly different bids to minimize ad spend, and since the whole market coluded, Google made less money.
It's fragile, it's collusion. It's easily by passable by anyone going to Google directly. Was anyone harmed?
Why does Amazon need to appear twice in a row - https://i.imgur.com/8Dhr1mj.png
If at some point you slipped down the organic list, you would have the option to buy a normal ad again.
They are smart enough, but they don't get any money from people clicking on search results, only ads, so of course they're going to show the ad - some people will click it.
AMP is google worst attempt yet at taking over the web. It’s so user hostile. It breaks lots of sites with its fake scroll and fake back button at the top of google news. I hate it soo bad!
Because you would be totally right. As a 8.5 year employee of Google I had to resign and blow the whistle.
I gathered all of the disclosure documents and stored them here:
--> https://www.zachvorhies.com <--
It's worse than you can possibly imagine. Everyone else seems to be waking up to this just recently (last 6 months).
...
https://yippy.com - ugly, but probably the best independent search engine outside the "big ones" and DDG
https://private.sh/ - Run by PIA as a proxy for Gigablast, small index but rapidly getting better
https://mojeek.com - UK-based, worth trying but has a spam problem
https://beta.cliqz.com - German based, their technical blog has been posted frequently on HN. Will eventually require a browser extension or their own browser to search.
https://yandex.com - Ought to be mentioned, but certainly not privacy focused.
The blog referred to: https://0x65.dev/
"Don't be evil" :)
I'm pretty sure for the layout itself I'll eventually just get a tampermonkey script to make it look like the old, but this is the first thing that has truly made me look for a Google alternative. They have severely damaged their main product, in my opinion.
The changes seem to have added enough noise to make parsing the page annoying, but maybe it's one of those things you brain learns to ignore after a while.
My legit first reaction when I saw it last week on my daily driver was "I wonder what extension is trying to cash out".
From the article,
- To remove the favicon: google.com##.xA33Gc
- To remove the URL: google.com##.iUh30.bc.rpCHfe
- To remove the arrow next to the URL: google.com###am-b0 and google.com##.GHDvEf.ab_button
- To remove everything: google.com##.TbwUpd and google.com###am-b0 and google.com##.GHDvEf.ab_button
[1] https://www.lifehacker.com.au/2020/01/how-to-fix-googles-ugl...
Like many around here, I have (re)started using alternatives to Google products last year. We're early adopters, so it will take a while for Google to be affected by a mass exodus, but what will happen when it will start? What medium will they use to fill the gap. The only (currently) untapped options matching Search's reach to display ads are: Gmail, Android, Google Photos. Probably nothing else. What happens for advertisers targeting specifically users like me who end up stopping using Google Search (e.g., how do you reach a high earner from Bay Area if they have completely stopped using Search? Because this, will happen first, and these users are valuable).
The required scale of any alternative is critical. Compensating for Search revenue decline is no easy feat. So much that, until now, nothing else generates anything even close to Search's revenue. If you talk profit, it's even worse as YouTube is probably not as profitable as Google would like (YouTube Premium anyone?) it to be.
So, the future will probably come from outside of Google's own properties, and that is why they are slowly killing competition in the ad tech space (3rd party cookies & Chrome). That is why they have been trying to diversify and are wisely enough pushing very hard with GCP and other proven revenue streams like subscriptions (YouTube Music, YouTube Premium, gSuite).
Probably also why founders really left.
It will be an interesting decade, for sure!
There's no good replacement for Calendar or Docs/Sheets as of now, that I'm aware of. Microsoft's suite as mentioned by therealdrag0 is an obvious alternative, and perhaps less advertiser-oriented, but still not a great in-browser option IMO.
Especially when considering the interoperability of the "platform," it's clear Google is streets ahead of the competition.
It's a shame that the best featured tools in this space are also not open-source, and used (probably) to mine massive amounts of data.
I'd be ok if you mined my data while I'm on your servers, but only if you allow me to host my own version of your software for when I don't want to be on your servers.
As for alternatives have you tried Microsoft's Suite?
Not to mention the thoughtcrime and influence/propaganda potential.
- DoH eliminates DNS based ad blocking.
- eSNI eliminates the last network level option for host based ad blocking.
- CDNs eliminate IP based ad blocking.
- Chrome eliminates browser based ad blocking.
IMHO they're securing the web _against_ us, not _for_ us.
Of course if you scroll down too far, Google jams another 2-4 ads at the bottom of the search results before you can click the link to the next page.
Finding organic search results on a google page is becoming similar to playing a game of "Where's Waldo" (Or "Where's Wally" for non-US friends). There's stuff jammed on the top, on the sides, on the bottom. Looking at the real results is like looking through two slats on a fence. It gets very frustrating.
I hadn’t noticed that I had started doing this, but now that you mention it...
New Theory of Software Evolution:
Designers = random mutations
Product Managers = fitness function
If the whole page looks like an ad then maybe we should see it that way. Google search is now for finding which ad to click on. Its now an advertising index. Not a general search engine. They don't want you finding anything but ads. So they've made everything look like ads.
I think I'll stick with DDG. Unfortunately if the whole page is an ad then the whole page is likely irrelevant. No matter how much data they have on me, paid content in my search results are likely not what I want to see.
Them knowing I have fish hasn't helped them advertise to me. Google results don't include who I regularly buy from. Even reading my fish hobby email account hasn't helped them improve. I've already used google search with that google account etc. All the ads were completely useless. Trying to sell me irrelevant items from irrelevant retailers. Wrong fish. Or trying to steer me towards boats. If anything, I didn't find what I needed and dropped back to DDG. I needed information necessary to a sale and paid content is completely inappropriate.
All that infrastructure slowed down and frustrated a sale. So. Not so good.
www.google.com##+js(remove-attr.js, onmousedown, .rc > .r > a)
www.google.com##.rc > .r > a:after:style(content: attr(href); display: inline-block; font-size: 14px; color: darkgreen; white-space: nowrap; width: 100%)
www.google.com##.rc > .r > a > br
www.google.com##.TbwUpd
www.google.com##.B6fmyf:style(right: 0px)
(submitted 4 days ago as a Show HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22072706)
It’s an interesting study. I remember Google before Gmail. It was a different time with such promise for a better web and better world.
What a shame it’s becoming such an irrelevant piece of junk. Then again, where else could it have went ?
What a shame.
If this helps ads mix in with real search results, maybe the ads need to be changed to stand out more? I feel people are focusing on "favicons = bad" instead of "ads looking the same as search results = bad".
My impressions were the same as that tweet. I'm not happy with the new Google search results. At all. I can't tell what is what. Is it an Ad? Is it a page? Is it...? So I've now told people who contact me to avoid Google's home page and use DDG so they get the results they're after. Feedback so far is they prefer the DDG replacement instead of Google. "Fixed" is what one person said. Their POV was that Google's result page was now "broken". (These aren't tech savvy people, either)
I also read in one of the follow up tweets that we now apparently have a form of "banner blindness" where we skip ads because they are deemed not or less relevant. This theory might be right. But Google's solution is not wise: if we associate ads as less relevant and fade out attention when we see Ads versus results, what happens when the entire google results page looks like ads?
Go to your Firefox' settings and change the default search engine, there, done. See if you care in a week to change it back, I promise you that you won't.
E.g. "search something !g".
Stopping using Google by default is a big deal if enough people do it.
In retrospect, I'm sure blurring the lines between ads and search results was probably part of the motivation. But if they modified ads a bit more to further distinguish them and kept the favicons, I don't think I'd mind.
I'll try and submit to the Chrome Store, let's see if it gets in :)
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/hide-google-s...
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hide-google-search...
In uBlock Origin one could add the rules:
www.google.com##.TbwUpd > .xA33Gc www.google.com##.TbwUpd > .K7JcSb
Or more generally: www.google.com##.TbwUpd > img
to hide the icons...
If websites change their fav icons to “Ad”, effectively all results look like ads.
Doesn’t achieve a lot, but it does highlight an obvious flaw in their design. It could force a change, but most likely they would just filter the fav icon.
... Fiction aside, since so much evil is done by accident and indifference it's only fitting that some heroics be done by similar mechanisms.
This one explains very well how I've recently come to feel about Google Search. I still remember when they were new and everybody flocked to them because they had the cleanest search with the best results. These days I barely see any results anymore because I'm automatically parsing them all as ads.
Because that's what they did here: organic results look more like ads now. So my automatic ad blindness filters them out. Whenever I search on Google, I feel like I'm only getting useless results, so I switched completely to DuckDuckGo now (I've used it before, but only occasionally; from now on it's going to be my default everywhere).
> Your item did not comply with the following section of our Program Policies:
>
> "Spam and Placement in the Store"
Clearly not spam:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/search-engine...
They already ruined the web with Facebook by riddling their search results with ads, being part of the ICAAN and having their own TLD, and then introducing AMP. In this case for this ad search result problem, uBlock Origin wipes these ad-links anyway. No need for these other funky hacks suggested in the Twitter thread.
It's also funny to see some Twitter users in the thread who have a website only for me to see on uBlock Origin which reports usages of 'Google Analytics'. Looks like we will all go back to spreading Googleware once again.
Which comes at the cost of a good user experience, where the feature PM didn’t truly ask: “does this deliver any value to the people using the search?”
Always trying to remember the wonderful excerpt[0] from Ken Kocienda’s “Creative Selection” on A/B tests - just because the data shows the outcomes are more significant does not make that a better experience.
[0]: https://mobile.twitter.com/kocienda/status/11134509457051770...
The sidebar is blank. The main page has results from "Places", "People also ask" and "images", interspersed with the normal results (which now look more like the old ads), but I don't see any actual ads, even with adblock off. For those of you that have the new look and see ads, where are they?
What I like the most about it is that I get a unified search results page for all engines, which avoids some of the profile bubble, and that the UI is always consistent, avoiding these scummy redesigns A/B tested to infinity and implemented because it increases their revenue.
The anonymizing stuff searx does really seems to work. My search results seem uniformly neutral regardless of which computer/profile/browser is in use.
I host on my LAN and out on the WAN over https protected with simple auth. All my devices, including my work computers and cell phone browsers, are set to use it. I rarely end up on Google in my life.
I actually prefer its interface for everything but images (which are only OK, but still perfectly usable)
In the last weeks, results from DDG or Bing appear later or even never. That make Searx not very reliable at the moment.
I'm pretty sure ad providers liked the changes because they are getting more traffic to their websites. So, the actual clients are happy why so much dislike towards a new change.
The most disappointing thing for me in this thread is recommendations to install ad blockers. This thing is harming the web the most because instead of focusing on the issue (bad UI) we just supporting such behaviour by using websites with bad UI.
p.s. I'm in risk of being downvoted because of just expressing unpopular opinion about ad blockers.
Their last changes are total crap. Designers/product-managers who came up with this crap are so out of their depth I have no idea how they got their job in the first place.
Needles to say I've been completely relying on ddg for the past weeks that now I really find there's no need for google search. So I'm kinda happy they did this honestly. Hopefully it drives more people away from google.
Google took queues from Reddit and fucked their UI. That's why those top UI/UX grads get paid the big bucks I guess.
Also, Carthage must be destroyed: the vertical created by ownership of the database and user interface is a Bad Thing about the web and HTML. Yes, it can be made consistent for everyone which is great from an adoption or branding point of view, which in turn generates more economic activity, but it becomes worse and worse for consumers of the service over time as providers move toward extraction of economic rents.
On the other hand, perhaps this speeds evolution. I foresee distributed and (quasi-adversarial) search networks with much more client-side intelligence, somewhat like Archie and Veronica search engines in the pre-web days.
By malicious I mean websites that destroy the back history, create alerts, flash the favicon, etc. By duplicate websites I mean websites that take content from something like stack overflow and puts it on a website with ads.
For example here's how I found it as I was writing this:
I wrote "stack trace" in search to get some auto complete results for something to test.
I see "stack trace #0 main thrown in" as one of the suggestions and search for that with quotes.
I get 2 results, one website that looks legit, and one website that's malicious website, something that redirects me to a website that looks like facebook telling me I won something. It also destroys my back history.
Google has always preferred you just give them a dump truck of money and have them run the ads where they would prefer.
With Dynamic Search Ads (DSA) they generate the ads and the keywords you bid on. Which means you can basically agree to pay Google X amount per month and they will run ppc ads for you.
The part that you won’t find online, since most of these guides come from agencies that want you to pay them to manage the ads, is that these DSA search ads actually work really well, in some cases outperforming agency work.
It could be preferential treatment internally for its own generated content or maybe google just knows which specific copy to show, URL’s to link to and which keywords to surface the ads under, better than any human can.
Either way, it’s starting to paint a bleak future for the web and even as a marketer, it’s not one I’m excited about.
They've also had this new design on mobile since May of last year [1]. But nobody seemed to care then?
I think people are just bothered by any visual changes in any product they're used to. I found the change slightly jarring for a day... then realized it doesn't really feel much better or worse than the previous way.
I guess people were just emotionally attached to URL being in green and below the title, rather than in dark gray and above. We develop attachments to familiar things, it's just how we are.
[1] https://www.blog.google/products/search/new-design-google-se...
In the long run this kind of fix-up is a losing game. But maybe it'll bring you some visual peace for now.
Nobody bookmarks/memorizes domains or URLs anymore. Google == the web, as far as most people are concerned.
90% of the time I search for something, I end up on Wikipedia, StackExchange, or HTML versions of documentation/code repos like Github. So I started just searching Wikipedia etc. directly. Next step in taking back my sovereignty is to get in the habit of cloning git repos and ripgrepping the code/docs instead of relying on Github (another monopoly getting bigger every day).
(Advertising companies HATE him!)
I then installed Stylus, a firefox extension that allows you to add a few lines of CSS to any website. I dont do webdev, but the level of CSS it requires is minimal. I just made filters for all the websites with these toxic features.
I wish there was a repository where people could share their CSS corrections with each other to make the web saner.
It reminded me of the story that got posted about Boeing: https://qz.com/1776080/how-the-mcdonnell-douglas-boeing-merg...
I don't know if people will necessarily die, like it did with the 737 Max. But I wouldn't be surprised if the key underpinnings of a participatory democracy gets compromised.
As an independent app dev I find this unconscionable.
I expect to be fed web results that are not tainted by Google's own offerings especially not in the form of an web app that pushes other independent results halfway down the page.
It's actions like this that make it clear Google is a threat to the web at large and this threat needs to be neutralized or we will all pay down the line.
Journey of Google Ads from Being Ads to Being Normal Search Result: https://searchengineland.com/figz/wp-content/seloads/2019/06...
Source: https://searchengineland.com/search-ad-labeling-history-goog...
Is GreaseMonkey the best for that, or is there a nice lightweight alternative more fit to purpose?
https://gist.github.com/keb/8a51c42daeb4c230e7f76664e62f9f42
That's why 'ppl are surprised'. To many, Google's ethos is still 'do no evil', an absurd mantra for a for-profit enterprise whose business model relies on developing ever more effective ways to spy on people's behaviours for the benefit of their advertisers.
What's rapidly
For a long time I have dismissed the perrenial chant that starts every time Google does something someone doesn't like that they're now "evil".
But this really seems to be 100% pure user hostile and directly in conflict with Google's mission to "organise the world's information".
By malicious I mean websites that destroy the back history, create alerts, beeps the computer (not sure how that works) and other nonsense about virus infections.
One of the main selling point when they introduced ads was that they would be clearly marked as such. The ads were on the side so that they couldn't be confused with the search results.
This was sold in contrast to all the other "bad" search engines who would first show a page of ads that looked like search results.
Personally I wouldn't know I have been using ddg for the last few months and I highly recommend it.
I still do lots of image searches. I wonder if those are also heavily influenced by ads now.
https://gist.github.com/navidkhn1/a2eff24419ef8d4ff8b40b6498...
At this point DuckDuckGo is best for keyword searches, Google is good if your searching for concepts and links sorted by popularity and similar subjects.
I personally dislike such changes, which no one asks for. Either people are just pushing their BS through Google higher ranks or they have no clue how their users actually feel and use their core product.
...
coca-cola is still going strong. so is BNSF railway. so is McDonalds.
i mean, i could go on here with more counter examples if you want?
You're being condescending but appear to have missed the point. The "Ad" text in Google's results is in the exact same position and is effectively the same pixel dimensions as the favicon.
It's cleverly designed and placed to resemble a favicon, to give the over-all layout more uniformity between ads and organic results.
As a user, I want less uniformity between ads and organic results, not more.
The screenshot doesn't show any Ad links in the text list results (unless the ads are wholly unlabeled).
It's not really the same case as the OP.
One could argue the words surrounding the carousel on DGG ("Shopping" and "Ad") are slightly more transparent than Google's "Sponsored" heading, but that's splitting hairs I guess.
In either case, I find both carousels pretty obvious in their intent. Maybe it's because the prices are being shown? I think more sophisticated internet users are trained to know that when you see a $xx.xx price on the internet, along with a link to purchase the item, there's probably some kind of commercial relationship happening behind the scenes.
These days, whenever I see a product mentioned anywhere on the web with links to purchase it, I default to assuming it's an affiliate link.
For now.
Actually I’ve stopping using google for EVERYTHING, except one old legacy throwaway gmail account. I must say, it feels really good!
Google is about as evil as they come now. They’re taking the role MS did in the 90s.
It doesn't seem that hard to distinguish? Perhaps other people are seeing something else?
Edit: I googled as well, and got the same results as you did.
The picture of the search results doesn't even show any ads in it.
Anyone have an extension to CSS it back to the way it was?
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/search-engine...
Fixed by making search results look like ads.
I hate it. It makes me feel dirty.
They have gotten terrible at Google because the results are all ads. Any technical article explaining what an expert may want to know is not part of a corporate product page and therefore has no monetary value for anyone (Google included) to push it up in the results. Ask how to implement something and you'll get a bunch of results for products that implement that thing already.
To be honest the Internet has gotten significantly less useful as a repository of information as it has aged, to the point where I now have to order books if I want to learn anything new in my field.
Besides: It's cleaner, faster, has often useful instant answers (random, 10011001 in hex, 1 btc in xmr, 40 stones in kg), bangs (!g for Google, !gh for GitHub, !yt for YouTube, !w for Wikipedia) and actually respects your privacy.
I think this feature could be much improved an expanded, but the location context switch is a really cool thing as well.
Got a link I can take a look at?
> We also of course have more traditional links in the search results, which we also source from a variety of partners, including Verizon Media (formerly Yahoo) and Bing.[0]
Yahoo is also powered by Bing last I checked.
[0] https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/so...
According to who?
DDG is a privately-owned, for-profit corporation, whose code is closed source and doesn't undergo independent audits or validations of privacy.
Most other companies can get away with violating your privacy because they have something nobody else has (either because their product is so good or because of network effects) so you have no choice but to keep using them. DDG doesn’t have that luxury.
I'd love to give them credit but without transparent proof of security, all I read here is "they are very motivated to hide any selling of data that they are doing.
DDG is just a reskin of Bing (and Yandex search). They don't have anything to lose if they violate your privacy - they can just pop up again under a different name.
Hopefully one day DDG becomes good enough that I never have to do that, though with the recent developments it’s more likely that Google will become worse enough to make current DDG be good in comparison as opposed to DDG actually becoming better than Google. Sad times for sure.
I switched at work because Google thought our proxy was evil or something, then I switched at home just because, and I honestly haven't missed Google at all.
The only thing that strikes me as obviously worse (maybe?) is that Bing isn't very good at guessing what you mean when you misspell something badly.
Other suggestions welcome.
DDG is search of choice now, !g a last resort
Im done with google.
will use duckduckgo.
I'm going to voice maybe the unpopular opinion here... Disclaimer:I don't work for google, nor am I rich or part of a big corp.
Thinking of what google has given us... mostly for free (yes yes I know we have paid in data and privacy...)
1. Really good search results: I remember the day of the search wars. AltaVista was the best there was and it was kinda crap. But but but I hear you say.... the results are worse and the ads blah blah so use another search engine then. For the most part they deliver on what they promised.. Organising the worlds information and they do it mostly for free for you.
2. Maps: Holly hell I don't want to live in a world WITHOUT IT !! I'm the type of person that gets lost in a mall. I kid you not. Yea I had a very expensive(for me at least) TomTom but Google maps has been free and always in my pocket.
3. GMail: When last did you have to delete a mail ? I freaking love GMail. There are few companies so good at spam protecting a 10 year old email address ! Sure there are things that can be better... ironical for me I wish it was search-inside-gmail. But apart from that Gmail is amazing they almost never down and never crap. GMail got there first with the big mailboxes and not too crappy UI. Thunderbird is a mess and slow. I save so many digital stuff(forever) just by emailing it to myself. Its Free - You bloody ungratefull fools !
3.Chrome(Browser). As stated I come from a time of the browser wars and Netscape and though Netscape was nice for the time. Chrome again blow it out the water... It just took us to the next level. Fine right now most modern browsers are at this next level but again Google got their first and again its free.
4. ML and Data-Tools. Maybe I get a bit specilzied here but TensorFlow is a fantastic.. yes its awkward to program but keras is a nice layer on-top of it. But Google did the ground work and still pushing the boundaries. Guess what yea... TF is free. Every had to pay for a "Delphi-Component" or any fancy Borland Compilers ?? Blessed you lucky stars ! Thanks Google !
5. Targeted Ads: Yea I get ads can be anoying but all these amazing planatary free service as mentioned above needs to be paid somehow... Guess what I like personlized ads compared to shitty ads about hair shampoo for women ! I watched "normal free to air tv" the other day, and q generic ad break came on... Lol it almost felt cruel to watch this advertiser just blasting it's un-targeted ads at me that will never buy fancy hair shampoo to the masses. If I type in plumber by god I want to see plumber ads in my area.
5b GoogleAds: Still the cheapest way to promote your business. Can you imagine going back to the old day... Printing 5000 flyers paying some kid to delivery it for you Try working out your CPL on that ! I always try to look for new advertising opportunities for my small business from newsletters to billboards the money they want to charge is crazy !! And most of the time untraceable ! With GoogleAds if I spent 1k on ads I can pretty much make up a spreadsheet model and deduce how much I will get for it. Try doing that with a billboard, flyers, school newspaper, BingAds( awful ), newsletter.radio or SMS.
Balancing the products and balance sheet of a company as big as Google must be a nightmare I don't want that job. Most comments here about Google ruining this and that... well its easy don't use their products go be unhappy on another platform. My life is truly easier with Google in my life !
Thank You Google.... You Are Like A Long Marriage... Your Not Perfect And Neither Am I... But My Life is Better With You. Thanks For All The Freebies And Advances.
As a user, I want the ads more easily distinguishable, not less.
The internet is slowly being turned into a corporate power grab and it's only getting worse YOY =|
> "The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users. ...we expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers. "
(http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html)
At the time they thought this was a bad thing...
a moral is not something that IS "good", its something ABOUT "good". saying someone is moral is calling someone principled - it says nothing about whether their principles (morals) are good or bad.
we need to discuss morals because they are axiomatic and foundational. if you take a strict moral view that doing harm of any kind is always wrong, you will never be able to discuss anything with someone who believes in the needs of the many over the needs of the few.
saying "moral people always recognize evil" is dangerously blind, circular reasoning, and the mechanism of several atrocities in history.
Almost everyone agrees that killing children is immoral. People in favor of abortion stick to a definition in which abortion is not killing children.
Whether that definition is right or wrong is what is at the center of the debate.
Almost isn't everyone, meaning it is still subjective for some.
>People in favor of abortion stick to a definition in which abortion is not killing children.
That shows that even the notion of 'children' is subjective.
>Whether that definition is right or wrong is what is at the center of the debate.
For some, not for others. There are many arguments on both sides and some depend upon this while others do not care about the distinction.
But we can use other examples. Take murder. There is subjective disagreement on what counts as murder and when certain forms of murder are wrong. Laws concretely differ between what is acceptable self defense and what is considered murder, and these differences mirror the moral differences people have that gave rise to these laws.
Many times you'll find people who will agree some word is wrong, but then disagree on what is covered under that word. If we both agree X is wrong, but then have totally different views on what constitute X, do we really both agree that X is wrong or do we have fundamental disagreement?
Swapping to something more technical, if we both agree commenting code is good, but you think comments are those blobs of text with syntax telling the compiler to ignore it while I think comments are super long method and variable names and don't count those blobs of text with syntax telling the compiler to ignore them as comments, then do we really agree that commenting code is important?
The world is a complex place and humans are complex beings. Nobody considers themselves the bad guy in their own story, that is, unless they feel they've been labeled the bad guy and they act to fulfill that label.
Painting people and actions as inherently evil, to me, is to overly simplify the person or misunderstand their motive and it prevents us from learning from their misdoings.
The only thing left then is, what do we want? It becomes a question of what do I want, and who can I view as allies in achieving my goals.
I want a search tool that serves my needs, not the needs of advertisers. I want privacy and I don't want distractions. So Google is not on my side, they are my opponent in this game[1]. And I suspect if the average user understood the implications of Google serving advertisers and not them, they'd be on my side, and not on Google's side.
In this framework, good and evil are just shorthand for shared goals. When someone says "Google is evil" they are saying "Google doesn't share our goals," and when they say "Google is good" they are saying "Google shares our goals". Of course, within this framework, the speaker is assuming that the listener has the same goals as the speaker, which is likely not a rational assumption.
But that assumption makes sense, because the goal here isn't actually to communicate, it's to persuade, and there's a good chance that when the listener hears "Google is evil" they will come up with their own goals that Google doesn't align with, and create an alliance with the speaker based on those goals even if they don't actually align with the speakers goals. In short: good and evil are sophist rhetoric, designed to persuade through soft power[2] rather than communicate meaning.
Of course, saying good and evil are subjective is also sophist rhetoric, because you aren't actually communicating about shared goals, you're just trying to undercut the argument that "Google is good" or "Google is evil".
I'll be careful to add that calling something "sophist rhetoric" isn't equivalent to calling it "evil" at any level, because we're operating in the framework where good and evil don't exist, so sophist rhetoric can't be evil. So if you're trying to persuade, there's no reason to think that sophist rhetoric is somehow beneath you.
But since I think people actually share my goals, playing the good and evil game is a poor choice for me, so I reject the whole framework of good and evil here. Anyone who uses these words, even to say they're subjective, is trying to sell you snake oil, because if they were actually being honest they would talk about how the thing they are arguing about aligns with your goals, because that's always a stronger argument.
So I'd suggest that if you actually believe good and evil are subjective, you make your argument based on what you think isn't subjective. Otherwise we can just discard your opinion as non-informative sophist rhetoric.
On the other hand, since most people actually do have goals they would consider to be part of a moral code, and we can objectively describe what most people would call good or evil, good and evil work just fine as shorthand, sophist rhetoric aside. If, for example, we can agree that we want to be able to differentiate between ads and search results, then we can agree to call that feature "good" and we can agree to call not having that feature "evil". If you don't agree to that terminology, it's because you don't share our goals, so why should we care? Go away, advertiser, we don't want you here. ;)
This too is meaningless, a chasing after the wind.
[1] Using "game" in a game-theoretical sense here.
How did you make that giant leap? Subjective doesn’t mean irrelevant, it means everyone has their own opinion on it which makes it quite relevant.
Your tangent was difficult to follow on the sole basis that Google is no different than any other entity. The US government is evil because we don’t share the same goals. Vegans are evil because we don’t share the same goals. Football players are evil because we don’t share the same goals. I can go on but you should get the picture by now.
At the end of the day, you should understand that businesses exist solely to make money. If they didn’t make money, they wouldn’t have investors. Without investors, most businesses would not exist. Without those businesses, we would be objectively worse off.
Relevant to what? If objective and subjective ideas are both relevant, why even bother pointing out that it's subjective?
Subjective ideas aren't admissable as evidence in most debates. Whether or not you intended it, when people go through the effort to say an idea is subjective, it's usually because they're trying to cut down the validity of that idea. So if that wasn't your intent, maybe you should have been more clear.
> Your tangent was difficult to follow on the sole basis that Google is no different than any other entity. The US government is evil because we don’t share the same goals. Vegans are evil because we don’t share the same goals. Football players are evil because we don’t share the same goals. I can go on but you should get the picture by now.
No, actually I don't get the picture. Yes, anyone can label anyone evil.
> At the end of the day, you should understand that businesses exist solely to make money. If they didn’t make money, they wouldn’t have investors. Without investors, most businesses would not exist. Without those businesses, we would be objectively worse off.
Actually, that's not objective, that's subjective. I don't agree that the world is better by having a huge amount of private data centralized under Google's control.
(Incidentally, see how saying that's subjective sounds a whole lot like saying it's irrelevant?)
> > > They cared not to be evil back then. Now they say they do the right thing, and “right” is subjective.
Yes, it's 'evil' when you're a poor disruptive startup trying to change how ads work, it's 'not evil' when you're a behemoth incumbent trying to maximise revenues.
The never did, that was just marketing nonsense we all naively swallowed.
> In general, it could be argued from the consumer point of view that the better the search engine is, the fewer advertisements will be needed for the consumer to find what they want.
> we believe the issue of advertising causes enough mixed incentives that it is crucial to have a competitive search engine that is transparent
This change seems to go directly against their belief that it's crucial for search engines to be transparent. After the change, it's way less transparent, or "easy to perceive or detect", that an ad is an ad.
I used to place a high value on how long people had been on the team, but the two extremely stable places I subsequently worked at were a shitshow, because there just weren't enough outsiders to argue them out of their circular reasoning.
At the boardroom level, the situation we warn about is "surrounding yourself with yes-men". I don't think Page & Brin remember where they came from. And they probably forgot long before they started trying to convert a 767 to be their corporate jet, which was already more than 10 years ago.
( https://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/07/07/google_bed_plane/ )
Certainly the case for me.
Reams of previous explanation at https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme... if anyone wants it.
Friends don't let friends use the internet without an adblocker.
With Google putting ads inline coming from them it gets really hard to filter without causing even more issues (and most people use Chrome so they can figure out things out from both ends).
uBlock Origin is open source and doesn't accept donations or payments to whitelist ad networks:
- Github: https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/
- Manifesto: https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/blob/master/MANIFESTO.md
If your adblocker doesn't offer you an easy way to add your own blocking rules, you're using the wrong adblocker. Relying solely on third-party filter lists is never adequate, and at times using them at all is more trouble than they're worth. Conflating the adblocking software with the third-party filter lists you're subscribed to is always a mistake.
However they are an ad company - and they ultimately benefit from blurring the line between an advertisement and a "real" result. I do feel like it is harder to find certain types of results as a "power user" though, and it feels like the quality of results rapidly drops off after the first page. I am not sure if the fault lies with Google or with spammy websites hacking the SEO.
I wish Google had something like duckduckgo.com/lite (also ddg.gg/lite) for the atypical "power user." It's nothing but text results. I find it really useful for certain types of searches and when you don't want to be bothered by how "busy" the Google search results page has become.
Interesting -- I've been playing with Google search this morning, and it's behaving much like it did when I stopped using it: there is only a very low chance that I'll get a relevant search result before the third page.