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Comment by danso | Hacker News Reader

The OP lost me at the Google example. The search URL is one URL that is completely unnecessary to be clean. Google wants you to get used to using the omnisearch box because it can provide such niceties as auto-suggest, instant results, etc...plus, the google query interface is no longer just a text bar, but voice activated...it works against Google's UI/UX intent for you to get used to hacking things in the URL address.

And yes, for hacker types this intention of Google's seems overbearing...but for the other 99.9% of the population, google is likely more interested in making search uniformly accessible than making clean URLs

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I agree that Google is aiming at most people, and not the HN crowd, and that they're doing a good job.

But I remember the days when you could craft a Google search url by hand and tweak the results. It was part of an advanced user's toolkit. All of that has been taken away. Searching is now opaque.

At the risk of inadvertently dragging us into a discussion about the "bubble" that Google and other social services lock us into...Here are two points that I think are worthwhile:

1. Search has always been opaque. We've never known the complete details of PageRank, and we know even less about the hundreds of other flags and signals used by Google search to parse a query as vague as the famous "mike siwek lawyer mi" into something useful.

2. It is largely a good thing that we don't need to hack the search parameters anymore...because, in one sense, it means that search has gotten amazingly accurate. It's so good that I hardly ever go to the second page of results...instead, if I don't find what I want in the first 10, I just slightly alter my text query and Google will eventually get what I need (or at least what I think I need, but that's a philosophical question). I think that is a better UX experience for even hackers, as you can refine using natural language rather than tinkering with vague params.

The urls Google search presents don't invite hand editing, but it still works just fine.

For example:

https://www.google.com/search?q=pillow&start=100

But you may have tweaks in mind that no longer work, and so forth.

This is the point right here. Google intends these URLs for machine consumption, that you can simulate the work of the computer by hand doesn't change the facts. It also doesn't prevent them from creating another alternative URL scheme which is meant to be entered by humans explicitly.

Well why would they do that? How many people do you think it'd benefit?

Google can't control where the user wants to pass on or display the URL.

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