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Comment by Viliam1234 | Hacker News Reader

I assume the goal is to make sure that people never remember the URL and always use Google to get anywhere. Most people probably already do, but maybe increasing their number from 80% to 90% is still worth it.

If this is indeed the real motivation, the next obvious target would be bookmarks. What can be done about them? Replace the bookmarked URLs by Google queries? It would be an interesting functionality if Google could look at a page and give you the smallest query that would have returned exactly this page as a first result. Then bookmark the query instead of the URL. And if the search results change in the future... I suppose, it would be possible to spin this as a feature. ("Self-improving bookmarks" perhaps? You don't have to worry about link rot; with latest Google self-improving bookmarks, your bookmark will always point to the best existing page on given topic!)

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The bookmarking functions in chrome are already extremely weak, I guess for the reason you point out. No tagging, only folders, results when searching don’t get top position in the omnibar.

Bookmarking is one of the areas where firefox is clearly superior.

Same for the history, I much prefer it in Safari than Chrome. It looks like Chrome make it worthless on purpose so that we use Google instead of looking through our history.

And what’s worse is that none of the other Chromium browsers change it, it really is the worst history/bookmarking UI out there. Firefox’s isn’t much better as it feels plucked straight out of 2003.

It made the Safari 13 Extension-pocalypse so much harder to bear. Every browser I can pick from has something important I have to compromise on.

Don't give them any ideas.

> Google could look at a page and give you the smallest query that would have returned exactly this page as a first result

Maybe like a decade ago this was a student project that Google sponsored (maybe as either Summer of Code or some precursor to that). A student group developed a system for “tagging” a page with a series of “random” but memorable words that could be used to identify a page. Kinda like how imgur and other other sites generate URLs now. Like “glittery hamster bananas” or something like that.

> give you the smallest query that would have returned exactly this page as a first result

Just out of curiosity, is there a publicly accessible Google service, or a third party service, that does this? That would be useful to find more content or point-of-view about a topic (by looking at the other results)

Maybe this is just one of those pet issues that I can't get behind. Hiding "www" does not strike me as some evil scheme to prevent savvy users from bookmarking websites. It just doesn't.

They already had the feature you are worried about and it's existed since like 1999. Do you remember the "I'm Feeling Lucky" button? You could bookmark a query and it would redirect you to the first result for that search. It was discontinued in 2010 [Wikipedia].

I feel like there are a lot more sane things to be paranoid about in the world right now, but mandatory "I'm feeling lucky" doesn't reach my top 20000.

"I'm Feeling Lucky" was never discontinued [https://www.google.com]. It just got moved to the bottom of the autocomplete list that appears when you start typing.

I assume that crack smoking ux designers made this decision

The ones who justified this:

https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=24349

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