Comment by srean | Hacker News Reader

Comment by srean | Hacker News Reader

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Now, however, I feel that Google is pissing off some of its die hard admirers (me included, and I am almost a fanboy).

A non-exhaustive list of things that annoy me:

Random closure of services that had many happy users, for example code search

Rigging the search page like a mine-field with distracting and inconsistent pop-ups. (Hello! the absence of such distractions were the reason I switched to Google)

Removing two column format for news (Indian Edition).

No immediate way to paginate image search.

[EDIT: Paginations help in visually scanning a full page of new images and also anchors it to a particular link that I can go back to.The visual scan seems parallel and hence faster. The non-paginated version is closer to a more serial access, with no precise control over going back to where I want to. My other pet peeve is that I have to hover over every image for the meta data to pop up.]

Dropping links to cache: text_only: and similar: pages.

Dropping scholar from the drop-down menu.

[EDIT: It used to be a flick of a mouse to try the same search on search/scholar.]

Instant, though thankfully I can turn it off.

Closing down labs. (Much of the fun in the brand is gone with it).

Almost blindly copying Bing regardless of whether the changes are perceived as useful or not.

An oft repeated excuse I hear is that they are now apparently focusing on search. Speaking strictly from my own experience, that focus is actually hurting the quality I perceive.

I agree on a number of these points, but:

> No immediate way to paginate image search.

Out of curiosity, why do you want it paginated? This isn't a criticism, I'm merely curious.

> Dropping links to cache: text_only: and similar: pages.

Cache and Similar still exist, granted they're more difficult to find now.

> Dropping scholar from the drop-down menu

While I don't really mind they dropped scholar (scholar<Tab> in chrome works well enough when I need it to), I do wish they'd let us customize the top bar.

> Closing down labs. (Much of the fun in the brand is gone with it).

Eh, I'll agree with Larry on this one. When it died, I wasn't affected at all. I honestly can't think of a single thing that I used on it and, from what I hear. it was largely a collection of projects that were hardly even being maintained any more.

> Almost blindly copying Bing regardless of whether the changes are perceived as useful or not.

Besides a similar looking image search, what else do you think they've copied?

>Cache and Similar still exist, granted they're more difficult to find now.

Cache is now tightly integrated into Chrome and I think more heavily used then before (ie by a larger audience) because now if you pull up a website that's offline Chrome will point you to the cached copy

So they made the feature easier to use on their browser but harder to use on other browsers? Seems slightly evil to me.

You can just click or hover the preview "arrows" (which look like >> to the right of a search result on hover) and the "Cached" link appears. Not evil in any way.

I tried searching around to see if Instagram had any patents that were discussed on the web after their sale. I could find absolutely nothing useful. The search algorithm decided that news about Facebook's acquisition and their AOL patents was so 'hot' that it would show me only day old links.

It's a useful feature at first glance, but more and more often I find myself wishing that Google would just work like I expect it to (like it used to).

The alternative answer is that Instagram has no patents, and nobody is talking about it, so there's no search results to return for that.

And as far as I can tell, Instagram didn't have any patents. A quick Google Patent Search doesn't turn anything up with their name in it either [1].

[1]: https://www.google.com/search?q=instagram&tbm=pts

One UI thing we've struggled with is how to tell the user that we don't think there are any good results for the query. It's a very difficult thing to evaluate effectively, because most of our notions of a good search result page (obviously) involve there being results on it. But it seems intuitively that there's a big value to quickly and reliably concluding "nope nothing" and moving on.

It's a problem exacerbated by the increasing size of our index. It's hard to quickly tell whether you've reached the noise floor of the internet yet.

That's the conclusion I came to, but it wasn't very definitive. At the very least I expected to come across links to people talking about their lack of patents. Maybe I should have searched for 'instagram no patents'.

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