Does this mean they'll also "backtrack" on their destruction of the URL? I was extremely disturbed and horrified when I realised that not only did they replace / with >, but also seemed to arbitrarily remove and rewrite pieces of URLs shown in the results (e.g. all articles from HM would show nothing more than "news.ycombinator.com > item", which was intensely confusing.)
The URL seems way more important to me than the favicon / ad issue. Its an issue, but the users who can't see the difference didn't know they've been clicking on ads for the past 10 years.
#1 What does Google want the web to look like? Look at Google News.
#2 Google gets to hijack 20%~ of the screen space to get users to install their own apps, and go back to Google, not onward to the publisher's own website.
#3 Removing the URL is the final disambiguation, where no one but the most technical users can go where they want.
A lot of people just do not understand how to use URLs and EVERYTHING they visit online is done through Google search. I work in a large school and the majority of the students only use their phones to access the internet and everything is abstracted through apps or Google search bars and they just don't understand URLs.
For example, some students use their personal laptops in the sixth form. To access the student intranet, they need to enter the URL (and you ain't finding it on Google) and that's a huge struggle for many of them.
Not understanding URLs also affects their ability to see through any bad emails that make it through the spam filters. If you understand URLs, you can hover over a link, see that it's pointing to bankcom.fzzaa.net and see that it's obviously not something you should click on.
Quite a few students have asked me how to access the online resources that come with the revision guides they have purchased. Somewhere in the book will be a URL to whatever they need and they just don't recognise what a URL is. They see something beginngin with https:// and it's meaningless to them. Visit this link? How? What is it?
This isn't an exhaustive list of reasons, it's not even close. I don't think it makes sense to argue that being completely oblivious to the very basics of something so fundamental to all our lives is something to be dismissed as irrelevant. I also thinking it's bad that Google is the only way so many people know how to access a website. Remember when some blog was ranked #1 for 'facebook login' for a day or so? People were filling the comments section with stuff like "ugh this new facebook is so bad". I think that highlights a serious problem that we're lucky enough to have mostly avoided... so far.
> To access the student intranet, they need to enter the URL (and you ain't finding it on Google) and that's a huge struggle for many of them.
Sorry, copy and paste or clicking on a link they were emailed is a huge struggle? How are they receiving these URLs that they aren't immediately usable?
>Not understanding URLs also affects their ability to see through any bad emails that make it through the spam filters.
I've seen too many people who ostensibly understand URLs get phished to think it much matters.
You're being downvoted, which I think is because you've clearly decided nothing I can say will make any difference to you and your replies seem a bit cranky, but I'm not downvoting you.
Here's another example for you, that just happened today:
On a shared iPad, the iPad was returned with a note saying 'no safari'. I worked out that one student had changed the default Safari search engine to DuckDuckGo. For reasons, the school's ISP blocks DuckDuckGo and visiting it on an iPad just results in a 'connection was lost' message.
The next student needed to visit a website called Kahoot and the URL for this site is kahoot.com. Looking at the history I could see the student had just been typing 'kahoot' in to the URL/search bar over and over again. They also tried typing 'google'. At no point did they try entering the URL nor does it seem they even know how to do anything beyond type search keywords.
It doesn't seem to me the failure modes you're describing are ameliorated at all by making it easier to edit the URL, since the students in question have a fundamental lack of understanding of what URLs are. In that case, making understanding URLs a prerequesite to using the web simply bars access to users.
Better to have typing "Kahoot" into the topbar bring up a Google search that navigates to Kahoot.com than the user experience I had at that age, which was a DNS resolution failure because no TLD was specified. That was an era where none but the most technical users could go where they wanted.
I didn't make a case for easier editing of URLs. I agree, I don't see how that would help at all. All I've ever said is that I have observed many students lacking knowledge of what a URL is and that's a shame and gave some examples of when it would have helped them to know.
Regarding your second paragraph, sure it would be better for search results to be displayed if there's no TLD specified. However, when it's the ONLY way you know how to access a website and when that fails, as it did today, knowing how to manually enter a URL would be useful.
I agree that things are much more user friendly today, but because things are so easy people get really stuck when those ways fail and they have no way of troubleshooting anything.
I won't get in to how many students (and teachers) I see stumped because the ethernet cable has come out of their laptop or they can't open a file because they've copied the shortcut to a folder to a USB rather than the folder itself.
That's quite a shock if students don't know about urls. Can someone confirm if this is a secluded case or this is what most people end up with now a days.
I don't find this unbelievable but even here, I would expect 40% people to know about urls and 5% or so know about the technical details surrounding it.
This is all throughout the school, so ages 11 - 18.
If you haven't interacted with kids who don't have any tech-fluent influences in their life, you would be shocked at how much isn't understood. Just mobile phones and apps for the 'internet' has meant that it's so easy to access what you need (and also so limiting in what you can access) that most kids just haven't got a clue how the internet actually works.
I suppose most of the time they don't NEED to know, but I think it's a bit problematic that unless something has an app, they probably aren't going to know it exists. Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, TikTok, etc. is the entirety of what they access on the internet.
There are, of course, exceptions to this, but the majority are absolutely clueless. Ironic when everyone is expecting them to be so tech savvy because they've grown up around it. Problem is, it's too abstracted and too corporate.
I‘m not surprised at all. I remember countless discussions on Hacker News about the disappearance of the file system and how younger generations simply don‘t understand the concepts of files, folders and their hierarchy. I’d put URLs in the very same category of slowly fading and disappearing concepts, which is unfortunate and worrying in my opinion.
I opened Chrome on a friends phone (first time on Chrome mobile in years) and was shocked to see the url bar is no longer editable. It just gave me a weird context menu with a copy icon.
I guess they really want to funnel everyone through search...
> It just gave me a weird context menu with a copy icon.
Share, copy, and edit icons. While I'm not a big fan of it, it probably fits the frequency and relative friction of interactions on mobile better than the previous UI.
There is no other reason, than their desire to "herd" uesrs, why they could not have the additional options to share/copy and have it behave like any other edit control, i.e. you can tap the other icons to copy or share, and more importantly still start editing it without going an extra step.
That sounds annoying. This is like Slack forcing their WYSIWYG editor on me. Thankfully Apple hasn’t done this yet and the URL bar still acts very much as it should.
But just ask me how I feel about navigating other parts of Apple’s UI! Dunno who they’re user testing with but these changes make me a bit ornery sometimes.
It is editable, you just need to use the pencil button. It is an unerstandable choice because it puts forward the most common uses of the address bar and still allows you to edit.
I just hate it because it breaks well established UI conventions. The thing looks like a text field but doesn't act like a text field.
For me it is more of a "stop messing with UI" situation than trying to funnel everything through search. If they wanted to do that, they would have kept the dedicated search button. Early Android phones had that.
> yes, Virginia, I have and use a Bluetooth clipboard
I'm assuming from context that your mean keyboard, but the idea sounds kind of cool so I have to ask: any chance this is a term for a a bluetooth device solely designed to facilitate copy-pasting between other devices?
On the Android, there's Termux which offers a clipboard interface -- termux-clipboard-get and termux-clipboard-set which I've aliased as "xp" and "xc" respectively. (I have similar aliases for Linux and MacOS's respective clipboard manipulators.)
You can paste (including to remote SSH sessions) with the ctrl-alt-v keystroke.
It's possibly to select and copy screen regions, but tediously, so that piping to / from xc / xp is far more convenient. (I sometimes use this for composing / editing HN comments, more frequently on other sites.)
There's no such Bluetooth device that I know of, but KDE Connect used to allow cross-device copy and paste between Android and desktop over WiFi until Google killed that feature off by disabling the clipboard access it needed.
That sounds so useful. I've wanted that so many times!
In practice, I end up manually typing in long URLs on my laptop that people send me over SMS or whatever, and manually typing in long, high-entropy passwords on my phone when I would rather copy-paste them from my laptop's password database.
(Not that I'm running KDE. But the feature sounds great.)
Such a keyboard wouldn't need drivers if it's programmed in to send multiple keypresses--ctrl+[axcv] works on standard Android text inputs and selections, as do the shift, arrows, home, end, pgup/dn etc.
Okay I didnt see that. But why is this necessary? What was wrong with the text box that opened what you would expect - the box filled out with the url of the page you are on?
In my opinion this is still a gentle push to encourage users to just type in a search query instead.
> Okay I didnt see that. But why is this necessary?
Probably because URL copy or share (the two icons besides edit than the new UI provides) are more common interactions than URL editing, and are (without a keyboard and with a traditional text edit control for the URL bar) higher friction; this streamlines the common usecases at the cost of adding an extra tap for URL editing.
The old version opened with the text fully selected. You could either type a query and overwrite the text, edit the url, or tap and hold to get... Low and behold, copy and share.
The only thing they have added is confusion and behavorial conditioning. I see no benefits of the "new" way.
> Long press, especially on selected text, has always been a subpar user interaction.
Exactly, and other than web pages (before this UX change), virtually every other well-defined piece of content that is likely to be shared had a prominent, distinct, easy-access share button on mobile (the separate copy to clipboard button added for URLs is not a common affordance; in most cases that functionality is one of many options accessed through the sharing function. OTOH, for URLs and certain other shared content, copying-and-paste is a particularly common sharing method, so promoting it to a first-class option further streamlines a common use case. ) This change actually better aligns the browser with every other way of interacting with shareable content on mobile rather than violating mobile UX expectations.
Long press is fine, it's the autoselection of words that messes me up (on Android).
I click the url bar in Chrome, then the whole url shows up selected. Then I long-press to copy the url, but no! It auto-selects only a single word in the url and brings up the option to copy just that single word. Stupid.
Yes I know that I can click on the lock icon and then on the url, and that's what I usually end up doing, but that is also stupid.
Edit: sometimes it seems to bring the original url down in a dropdown with share/copy/edit buttons, but that doesn't seem to happen all the time. I haven't worked out why the dropdown often doesn't activate.
There are enough new active daily users on mobile devices for the UX that users have learned over the past decade to be less relevant than whether an average user is confused.
If they wanted to make copy/share/whatever else easier, they could've just made those buttons appear with the first tap, but also not change the immediate editability of the selected text like it was before. That's why all those other comments here about how they made copy and share easier are beside the point --- it's definitely possible to do that without making editing harder. Sadly it seems the skill of adding new functionality and making things easier without breaking existing functionality and making things harder is not common these days... but that's really what I think people making changes should focus on and deeply consider.
Editing is much easier. 2 clicks. Cursor starts at the end, swipe to scroll and tap to place cursor where you want it.It was very annoying before.
Most of the time I want to copy a URL. It's now 2 fast clicks. Previously you had to long click or something to try to select all the text, then some extra step I've forgotten. I often had to try several times.
Share is now much faster. Two fast clicks. Previously it was click top right ... long drop down menu, scroll down to Share. Click that.
If you can't go to expedia.com as easily as you can Google search Expedia, you'll probably do the later. And if you Google search Expedia, the first result is usually an ad for Expedia. Now Google makes money on you in a way they hadn't before. The more people expect Google to deal with all of the silly "web domain stuff" for them, the more money Google makes.
It's all about the incentives, and in the end there's only one incentive -- money.
I don't think anyone working at Google is being intentionally bad at all, but I do think their incentive structure ultimately results in prioritizing feeding people ads as much a possible. The A/B tests show that doing things a certain way results in more revenue, and that's what drives the decisions. There are likely no ethics meetings on the implications on society for each small change, but the collective result of many small harmless changes (aimed at increasing profit) is bad for society in the end. Not due to any conspiracy or "evil".
The change was a welcome QoL improvement in my opinion.
Typing a new address or copying the URL of the page I'm on covers ~95% of the use cases where I'm accessing the address bar on mobile and the change significantly reduces friction for both. It's exhausting to see every minute move Google/Amazon makes filtered through the HN cynicism lens.
Edit: Talking specifically about the chrome on Android omnibar change. The favicon desktop search change from TFA was awful.
> There are likely no ethics meetings on the implications on society
with respect, I don't think there would be an ethics meeting scenario about whether the default interaction for tapping the URL bar is copy or edit that would find any ethical concerns, besides "nerds will be annoyed we moved their cheese."
At least an Android, any URL you can navigate to you can pin to the home screen. This seems a week way to force behavior people go to the same place commonly.
It is in a hacker's nature to assume the worst, and often rightly so.
Many of kind of people that come to HN have personally worked on various forms of gamification and rule bending. It's as natural to SV culture as water to fish - indeed some of the biggest companies wouldn't be around without skirting rules and arguably morals.
The stench of MBAs and quarterly profit optimizing execs is all over the valley.
And then the ignorance/apathy of the layman adds an extra layer of plausibility to such accusations.
> The stench of MBAs and quarterly profit optimizing execs is all over the valley.
A good explanation for the increasingly normalized dark patterns ruining user experience on the web.
"Conspiratorial"? You bet. Have we not seen huge (and small) companies committed to screwing the public in as many ways as they can? It's not by accident, there's a widespread, condescending disrepect of users and just plain old conspiratorial maliciousness, intent on manipulating users and squeezing more profit.
Google's search results design (backtracked for now) is a clear symptom.
At this point one should question why it is pain in the ass, not how often does one edit it because it is. Browsers could easily show Notes.app-like editing window for a long urls. There is no reason to force it to be a one-liner, except that it is historical.
...and they only made it more of one by making you press an extra button. It's like they took the "easy things should be easy, hard things should be possible" mantra and turned it into "easy things should be easy, hard things should be harder."
I'm actually a fan of this. I rarely edit URLs, mostly copy them to share. Before, that always needed several clicks. Now I have the option to directly copy/share/edit it. Editing is at most one click more, sharing and copying is much easier.
Calling it "backtracking" feels strange. They still want to put favicons in there, but as pointed out, the positioning is misleading since it's in the same spot as the "ad" icon. They will most likely just move it to another more unique position.
Favicon display seems rife for abuse. I wonder what happens if you put a favicon that looks like googles’ or that says “ad”. All sorts of fun to encourage clicks onto a malicious site because it looks safe.
Correct. There could be quite a bit of fun. This more than likely could work for sites not in the top spot. If you borrow the credibility of another brand you could get a boost. This click thru boost could then translate into higher rankings over time as you outperform your spot.
I have already seen seen some ascii stars in the URLs of Googles ads. There is always abuse.
I would hope they've put thought into that and might even blacklist sites that try to steal other more popular sites favicons. I guess it would catch a lot of false positives with companies making new sites on new tlds that might share favicons.
This and the other stuff described in these discussions relies on Javascript, CSS or certain HTTP headers.
If the results are requested with a simpler HTTP client that does not automatically execute Javascript or CSS, where we can control te HTTP headers, then these manipulations can easily be sidestepped.
This is not "blocking". It is using a client that does not process JS or CSS, where we can easily control the headers sent. This can be done, e.g., with openssl s_client, obsd nc, socat, etc.
They are probably sending different html+css+js based on user-agent.
They have been doing that for many years. The difference this time is people are objecting to the look of what they are sending.
I use localhost proxies to decrypt TLS before it reaches destination programs as well as encrypt outgoing plaintext HTTP traffic from non-TLS enabled programs.
Using proxies allows me to edit incoming and outgoing traffic where needed.
From the privoxy FAQ:
4.15. How can Privoxy filter Secure (HTTPS) URLs?
Since secure HTTP connections are encrypted SSL sessions between your browser and the secure site, and are meant to be reliably secure, there is little that Privoxy can do but hand the raw gibberish data though from one end to the other unprocessed.
The only exception to this is blocking by host patterns, as the client needs to tell Privoxy the name of the remote server, so that Privoxy can establish the connection. If that name matches a host-only pattern, the connection will be blocked.
As far as ad blocking is concerned, this is less of a restriction than it may seem, since ad sources are often identifiable by the host name, and often the banners to be placed in an encrypted page come unencrypted nonetheless for efficiency reasons, which exposes them to the full power of Privoxy's ad blocking.
"Content cookies" (those that are embedded in the actual HTML or JS page content, see filter{content-cookies}), in an SSL transaction will be impossible to block under these conditions. Fortunately, this does not seem to be a very common scenario since most cookies come by traditional means.
> As far as ad blocking is concerned, this is less of a restriction than it may seem, since ad sources are often identifiable by the host name
Except if you use YouTube, which is a pretty significant service but impossible to use domain-based adblock like pi-hole with since both ads and content are served through the same Google domain. If you use the YouTube for Android app that means you have to sit through ads.
The alternative is something like invidious[0], but last time I tried it was impossible to seek videos more than half an hour because the seek bar shares its space with the player controls so it ends up occupying only ~15% of the viewport. That or waiting for Firefox Nightly to support WebExtensions.
"... but impossible to use domain-based adblock like pi-hole since both ads and content are served through the same Google domain."
However, ads and video are not served through the same Google domain.
Further, the ads are not served unless Javascript is enabled.
As such, aside from user comments, it is easy to retrieve the non-video content without retrieving the ads. Just use an HTTP client that ignores Javascript.
Javascript is not needed to view video from the domains that serve the video.
Proxomitron can use OpenSSL to MITM the TLS connection and filter "encrypted" pages too. Of course you need to do some certificate setup beforehand, but once you do that it works very well.
If URLs are read by humans, they need to be human readable. If you use a prominently displayed name to contain crap like "?id=22107823" which is meaningless to most users, then get off a search engine. Nobody needs to see that. Give it a human readable name if you want humans to read it or hide it completely if you don't. It's amazing how long unreadable URLs have lingered. I'm all for them being as hidden as HTML code.
Absolute rubbish. That is obviously a number identifying the item. I wish a lot of URLs would be shorter, but that's different. I also offer this piece of evidence:
People are intelligent. They can learn and see things if you give them a chance, and you're basically advocating for keeping them stupid and unknowing by hiding things from them... why?
People figured out how to make phone calls with numbers too, even area codes and special 0's in front. But it was an ugly mess necessitated by the technology. This isn't necessary.
Even if you know what it means, it's still not suitable for reading. If you saw that in search results, how will you decide if you prefer ?id=7678729 or ?id=22107823 ? They're not even sequential. You can't remember it from something you've seen before.
Yes keep them stupid and hide things from them. That's an important part of how computers became popular. A lot of people were excluded in the days of command line everything.
There's another comment here which sums up my thoughts on this perfectly: "Don't make me think" has turned into "Don't let me think", and that is a disturbingly dangerous direction for freedom from corporate/government control.
Society would be very different today if, several hundred years ago, the "ruling elite" decided that literacy should be discouraged.
When will we realize that adwords and everything it inspired was a wrong turn for the internet?
I’d much rather pay a monthly fee to get the services I want.
I understand that Google and Facebook have gone too far down this path, and they will say such a service is not as profitable, but ultimately their business model seems unsustainable. People search for the truth, and while you can sell anybody anything, the truth will prevail.
I’m not willing to pay anything. The internet was built on good will, fun, and generally good intent.
Now that it’s a mechanism of commerce it’s attracted the worst of the worst who have no ethics. Ethics courses will be taught in response to bad actors, not in anticipation of.
I’m aware the cats out of the bag and all of the high paid engineers need to make a living somehow. I just don’t think it’s about the consumer anymore, if it ever was. It will get worse before it gets better and I’m checking out.
I’m an older engineer and going to school for HVAC/R. I plan to do it on the side and eventually start a business. I’m pulling the rip cord.
One thing I will say about the blue collar world: they’re better about ego management. Many young engineers I meet are highly paid and treated well, sometimes rarely disagreed with. I can’t help but think that fosters some bad habits.
I’m so sorry to hear you have such a dark outlook. I totally agree, those companies are not about the consumer anymore, but that’s fine. That’s their problem.
I see computers and the internet as an extension of ourselves, and so they still allow us to communicate with whoever and whatever we want. I’m so glad this community exists and we can express that.
The worst part should already be over, you just joined hn. I’m also all about good will, fun, and generally good intent. And if you do something cool but it’s costing you something, let me know how I can chip in.
This brand of techno-optimism is so tired. Who today still believes the old facebook line about connecting more people? It didn't work and it enabled automated surveillance on unprecedented scale.
I agree, but a reminder to not allow evil companies like Facebook to take away our optimism. Just because they didn’t make the world a better place does not mean a better world cannot be made. What it does mean is their funding and business model probably isn’t the right way to go if you’re still an optimist.
There are still many wonderful niches on the web, and by going there - while avoiding the bad stuff - we strengthen them so they don't disappear as well. As techies we have an opportunity here to bring them more to the front, by the technology choices we make and the projects we contribute to, the awareness we raise.
You're missing the factory for the dandelions growing in the parking lot. Weird niche personal pages and projects are just distractions from the massive power struggle that is being fought by corporations and governments for the minds and personal data of every human on earth.
There’s a massive power struggle indeed, but if you look who’s really behind those organizations, you’ll see people just like you and me, imperfect minds in funky bodies that came from the same place we all once did.
World leaders and CEOs go to bed every night just like us, they speak, poop, and reproduce at the same rate as everyone else. Corporations and governments are nothing more than contracts to benefit those very same people, us. Even though there’s not an equal benefit to everyone involved.
If those contracts fail, and our freedom and liberty is at risk like you say, we ought to renegotiate. It seems, if you listen carefully, that’s what the world is currently choosing to do.
I love how you phrased that! I’m also tired of what’s going on. These corporations allow groups of people to compete for our attention just like individuals. Some giants we created are now getting in our way so much that people are starting to notice, and we are far from passive creatures.
It’s still possible to disconnect. It’s still possible to choose what you see or say, and it’s still possible to focus your energy on something you believe in. As long as you’re not tired of that, I‘m optimistic.
>The internet was built on good will, fun, and generally good intent.
The main catalyst for the internet was the fear of nuclear war, as exemplified in this influential RAND paper from 1960 [0], which led to the investment in ARPANET. I'm not disputing good will and good intent, but I don't think fun had much to do with it.
By the time you get to the opening up of the internet to mere non-defence mortals, there was plenty of fun.
There was a beautiful sweet spot between the earliest ISPs around 1990, and the end of fun once the effects of the mid 90s ending of NSF's ban on commercial activity fully kicked in. Probably late 90s/millennium as the first dot com boom turned into full on idiotic bubble.
I would definitely pay, but not through a middleman like google. We need to return to a decentralized, peer to peer internet where media companies are not beholden to advertisers (a very old problem). Technology presents the first real chance to implement this. A non-trivial part of the media’s (eg newspapers, news sites, cable news) is due to advertising, including “cancel culture” itself (the name dates back to pressuring advertisers to pressure media to cancel tv production, although the word has gained life of its own).
I listen to a podcast called the No Agenda Show that has sustained itself for about 10 years on a value for value model. Listeners donate what they want and there are never any ads. I think the model is applicable elsewhere. Granted it won’t make someone rich but someone can make a living.
I am not sure that a pay what you want model would work, but I want options dammit, and I would hazard a guess that content creators do too—just look at the wonderful, nearly complete lack of ads on patreon content.
I didn't go to HVAC school, but I have been moonlighting w/ a friend's HVAC business since 2002 for the exercise & appreciation of hard labor. That was well & good, and in time I was making decent, seasonal money working for someone else when not servicing IT needs of SB clients. Around 2008, as many of my clients were closing shop, I crossed paths with a "controls" guy and he showed me how to meld the technical & the labor to make as good money, if not better, as sitting behind a keyboard and playing whack-a-mole security full-time. Between pulling runs, provisioning controllers, solving failures and putting it all into comms I get all my mental, physical & financial needs met. I couldn't recommend it enough for anyone tired of the sedentary life at the keyboard. The only downside is I am still reliant on corporate managers & NOC engineers who have no clue how their products work in the field. YMMV.
Awesome advice, thanks. I’m happy to buy some stuff on eBay and play around.
Any suggestions? How about programming software? Readily available?
I recently picked up a Asco 300 w/comms module for my standby gen, DSE800 to control the engine, and a Siemens 9610 for consumption analysis.
I’m working on controls for load shedding now. I put shunt trip breakers on my water heater and it’ll kick off when on standby since I don’t have enough power, as per NEC.
I’m also working on a modulating valve controlled by the temp delta of my tankless water heater. Sometimes it can’t keep up and I’d rather slow down flow for a shower instead of letting it throw an error, resetting, and annoying people in the shower.
Most of the equipment & software I work with is owned/licensed by Honeywell and is proprietary, aka pricey. Older equipment can be found on reseller sites, but the developer software is expensive to license & hard to come by outside of the HON ecosystem.
If you go down the rabbit hole, check out Tridium, aka Niagara AX. Most(all?) of the big controls platforms are built on the Niagara framework.
Also, maybe contact contractors of Johnson Controls, Carrier Controls, Novar Controls, etc for more pertinent info.
As long as you realize the web without ads is a much smaller and less commercial one. That may be fine with you. But a lot of things hundreds of millions of people use every day would have to go away. Subscriptions can't replace ads, as individuals don't have nearly as much discretionary money to spend as companies have in their advertising budgets. We've already given them that money when we bought our groceries, and gas, and paid our bills for rent, internet, TV, phones, insurance, etc. It's not our bank accounts any more to reallocate to Google Maps or our favorite websites instead.
The web is far too large, and far too commercial -- adtech have forced commerce into fucking everything, and fucking ruined it. Without ads, a lot of things hundreds of millions of people use wouldn't go away, they'd reduce to a more sustainable number of companies and products. The remaining products and services would have to work harder to be better to compete and attract custom. Your new startup might have to offer a genuine improvement or innovation to get traction...
As an example every single Amazon or web product or service search results in dozens to thousands of irrelevant, shoddy and worthless products and services that are far closer to an outright scam than something to use. That's without considering the vast array of true scams and fakes.
A web without ads would have a chance of being useful once again, rather than every single click being an opportunity to part me from more money. Perhaps with suitable heavy regulation we could have the best of both worlds, more like newspaper advertising of old. Just "enough" non-invasive, non-tracking, non-JS ads to provide information on new services and products, but with enough demands of honesty, escrow good behaviour deposits, or whatever constraints you can conceive to keep all advertisers well behaved.
> As long as you realize the web without ads is a much smaller and less commercial one.
This is fine. People should make web pages because they have something to say, not because they want to make money. Since the advertisers can stop supporting a site, they effectively become the arbiters of right and wrong on the internet. Anything paid for by ads is inherently worse and less trustworthy than independent creations and platforms because they must necessarily be advertiser-friendly.
I fully agree, and furthermore, I think that if ad-supported sites were wiped out, the people who genuinely cared about the content would come out and make a replacement with just the useful content. People who have a need find a way.
Right now I can't think of any ad-supported site that I critically need. It could all go away and my web experience would probably be better for it.
I don't need HN critically, and there are alternatives.
Even if I did, let me clarify something. When I go to amazon.com and start looking for pens, I don't really consider the product listings to be ads at that point, even though each is obviously advertising a product. The listing is the content I am there for. If I go to a company's website to learn about their products, they are clearly advertising their own (first party) products. I'm fine with that.
Note that there is a difference between "an ad" and advertising. Characteristic of ads is that they are not the content you're there for. The real content is independent of "an ad", and you could block or remove ads and the real content would not suffer. Characteristic of ads is that they are not the topic of the site/content/video you're reading/watching (they might relate to the same subject matter, but they are not the topic). Also characteristic of ads is that they're advertising third party products/services, which again have little to do with the actual content.
If you removed a company's products from their own website, or the products from amazon's listing, then you'd be removing the content I'm specifically after. Does not fill my criteria for "an ad."
Now as to how this pertains to HN: HN was specifically created for startup-related links. So if they're advertising startup jobs here, they are very much posting the kind of content users would come here for. That would be actual content, not ads. Also, like a company advertising their own products on their own website, I think it is quite appropriate for YC to advertise companies they've funded here.
I don’t want Facebook and Google brokering my ads, I want licensed companies who have to tell me exactly what information about me they have and are selling, and let me edit that. Regulation can achieve this.
99% of all web pages are noise, solely created to extract as much as possible out of ads and trackers. The internet would be a smaller but far far better place without them.
That's not something we have any control over, is it? Whether it's allocated to internet or some other channel, these companies are going to advertise to acquire and retain customers, and that advertising cost is baked into their prices. If a new federal law was passed banning all advertising on the internet, I doubt Ford will drop the MSRP of the F-150, or that the price of a bar of Proctor & Gamble soap will change.
>Subscriptions can't replace ads, as individuals don't have nearly as much discretionary money to spend as companies have in their advertising budgets
Search ought to be a replacement. Imagine a site that makes a snapshot of other sites and then anyone can type a search request in it and follow the relevant link. That would replace ads since you get your clients for free. Just build the best electronic marketplace and everyone will visit it by themselves.
This worked to some extent and then stopped because people have what they think themselves they need, and the “commercial” part means someone pushing unnecessary crap down their throats. Losing that part is fine for everyone except these wandering commivoyagers.
Subscriptions do not work for most content makers because the content they make is consumed out of boredom instead of need.
I believe you are conflating two things. AdWords and keyword-based contextual advertising was not problematic by itself. (And I say this as a person who absolutely hates ads.)
The problem is all the associated crapware, bloat, intrusion, bandwidth hogging, end-user hostility to point of abuse, dark patterns, intentional misdirection, A/B-test-optimised serendipitous confusion, SEO game-theory shenanigans, and ABOVE ALL the industrial scale stalking.
Hell, I remember back in 2005 when I held a university course on basics of information security. The class laughed when I noted that observing everything a person does is called stalking when done by an individual, but as soon as its done by a large corporation indiscriminately and at scale, it's data-mining.
In the eyes of the law, only one of them is criminal.
Well, I don't think AdWords - in their original form - were a problem. But I definitely agree with you that it and its ilk are powering the perverse incentives, and what has resulted of them: the entire adtech ecosystem.[ß]
I can still recall the bad vibes when Google announced their acquisition of DoubleClick. In the early days their search advertising had been non-intrusive, text-only, rendered server side, and visually out of the way. Banner ads were introduced only some time later. (That was already a step in the wrong direction, IMO.) DC, on the other hand, was known as an invasive bad actor who shoveled unwanted crapware to browsers and had already earned the reputation of an online stalker. In fact, ad blockers had existed long before Google got into serving them. Privoxy, anyone?
All the hazards I listed are direct causes of adtech's surveillance business model, and the neverending quest to remember every possible piece of information available on the end-users. I'm not sure comparison with cholera is the most accurate one. (It's a bacteria, after all.) Malaria, a parasite, might be a better fit for this purpose. The symptoms are what makes either one dangerous, but instead of trying to eradicate just one type of a problem, we would do better to purge the environment from what makes the organisms' existence and breeding possible in the first place.
ß: Honest question. What do you call an ecosystem comprised entirely of parasites?
I'd very much like that mythical universal micropayment platform to show up. Probably won't happen, or it will be too expensive because every site will think "We're only charging as much as a Starbucks coffee!" [Note: I don't drink Starbucks coffee, just have a faint idea that it's overpriced.]
Although, shockingly enough, one of the sites I regularly visit (ars technica) saw the light and greatly reduced their subscription price like 2 years ago. And earned my subscription as a result.
I'd pay for a couple more sites if they dropped the coffee fallacy.
People search for whatever confirms their worldview.[1]
> while you can sell anybody anything, the truth will prevail.
Those ideas are at odds. If you “can sell anybody anything”, you can also sell them a lie. That keeps happening, so I see no basis for the argument that “the truth will prevail”.
I think ISPs are fine services, they can host and serve websites like they’ve always done. I pay for my service, you pay for yours, we can connect, it balances out.
If you decide to do something that adds value for the both of us, I can chip in to help you cover your costs.
One thing very valuable to me is a search engine. You promise to index all sites you can find on the internet, but you need funds to buy disks and servers. I think you’d do a great job, and I’ll pay you a monthly fee to keep giving me access to your wealth of information.
It so works out that the more people you can serve, the more income you’ll have to become a bigger player. Nothing wrong with that, just as there used to be nothing wrong with Google’s search.
It’s when they asked not the searchers but the advertisers to pay them that things went awry.
Another great service would be one to advertise my products on or disseminate ideas with. To like minded, or just interested people. I’d pay you a monthly service and will keep up my inventory. Customers would build up a profile of things they are interested in being subjected to.
You could help them get to know themselves better, or find what they like by asking for information that they’re comfortable divulging.
Just please don’t combine those two products in one, for the love of god!
Unsustainable businesses can be profitable for generations. Particularly if the law doesn't force them to deal with the externalities. Coal mining seems like an appropriate example. It's doubly unsustainable; coal is finite and burning fossil fuels is fucking up the climate, but coal mining remains profitable.
People don’t really compare that hard. If DDG’s experience is intuitively easier than Google’s in the first minutes (because there are no ads and results are good enough), people will switch.
The real problem is the “embedness” level of Google is much higher than any search engine achieved before: a switcher must make a pretty serious effort to change browser settings, change tools etc, and you can bet top dollars that Google will pull all monopolistic tricks in the book as soon as they feel their position is truly challenged. This is a scenario akin to Microsoft vs office open standards back in the ‘00s.
I've just checked the "there are no ads on DDG" and saw half of the content space taken by Wikipedia-sourced infobox, half by ad, searching for "insurance". Interestingly enough, Google shows me no ads for the same query (whole screen of local maps, then related queries, then organic results). "Car insurance" though ;)
Disclaimer: I do work in Google, but nowhere near anything user visible (I'm developing SRE infrastructure).
Did a DDG search and there are no ads. Just the Wikipedia infobox and a list of insurance companies in my country (and the Wikipedia article for Insurance at #3). It makes a very good starting point for someone wanting to get quotes from a range of companies etc.
Google's results is interesting though as it starts with one insurance company only (ad placement? It doesn't show it as a ad tho but it looks and feels like one given it's isolated from the rest of the results after the fold). It is then followed by a map which is an odd choice as generally most people in my country manage their insurance online or over the phone. Then below the fold more companies can be found but with media stories(?!) thrown in as well interrupting the flow.
It's been a long time since I've used Google as my daily driver and I'm gobsmacked at how badly it executes this query. It used to be very good but no longer. I have used DDG for some years now and it generally works just fine for me. This limited experiment in going back to Google has made me happier with DDG as my default search engine.
There's a difference in our indifference, you know.
"People don't really compare that hard" has been demonstrated to be false - if people didn't care that much, Bing & co would've seen much greater success in the past few years. It's not like this hasn't been tried before.
Google is so damn good at search that being "good enough" isn't good enough for the average user. You have to be as good as Google. This is why Apple and Mozilla work with Google to offer them as a default - they're not dumb, they know people expect it.
Bing was really, really bad when it started. Perception was shaped and a lot of people go out of their way to avoid it, even though it's now just fine for most uses. In this sense, DDG has an advantage, because it has had time to improve substantially before its brand hit the mainstream (which has not happened yet).
I'm still convinced the advantage Google has is not fundamentally technical. A lot of people expect it not because it's good, but because it has always meant "search" for them, ever since they got online. Google spent a generation at the top, and that sort of entrenchment is really hard to lose. Even Microsoft didn't really lose their primacy on the desktop - the internet just got big enough to escape their stranglehold.
Local (esp foreign language) results are so much worse on DDG. For many users it's just not an option. And people don't care about text ads, as long as they are relevant. I love DDG but if they can't get results with a quality close to what google offers, I don't think they'll ever become mainstream.
“ In fact, DuckDuckGo gets its results from over four hundred sources. These include hundreds of vertical sources delivering niche Instant Answers, DuckDuckBot (our crawler) and crowd-sourced sites (like Wikipedia, stored in our answer indexes). 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.”
It is not false. The standard 10 links you see come directly from Bing and they don’t even attempt to hide that fact.
I've seen logs of a few medium sized sites and I've never seen DuckDuckBot really crawling any of these sites. I'm sure they use their own results to supplement some parts but most of the web results still seem to come from Bing.
I've switched to Bing for images (more filters and less safe-search) and recipes (so many options!) , but for general search I find their index to be smaller and their results less relevant than Google's.
That's weird since DDG is noticeable worse in this particular aspect. DDG ads icon has much thinner fonts and is placed on the far right, instead of left. Combined, it is more difficult, not less, on DDG to tell ads from organic results quickly. There are many good reasons to switch to DDG but this latest episode is not it.
Can you also tell Google to fix the image search page? The new design is stupid. I prefer the previous design.
The new design splits the page vertically, when you click on a picture. And its purpose, which is quite confusing, is to follow a second track of searches related to that picture.
But that just makes the usage confusing. I want to click on the picture in order to see it in magnification mode, to have it fill the browser window. This was the prior design. It worked perfectly, and allowed me to quickly see the picture I want, in a magnified mode.
But instead, with the new design, it opens the picture on the 2nd split screen, but the picture is practically the same size.
And to make matters worse, some of the pictures, like if they are portrait mode, does not magnify, so it makes it very difficult to see the details of the picture. I’d have to open up the source picture in another tab.
Someone must’ve thought this was a good idea, but to be honest, it sucks.
And also, the split screens with dual scrolling behaviors, is incredibly frustrating to use. Half the time, I’m scrolling on the wrong half of the page.
The image search is now such a frustrating experience, that I try to use other search engines for a better experience.
The only thing they would have to change to make Getty happy is that when you click on the image, it takes you to the place where the image was used, instead of the direct url of the image.
All the rest of the design choices was Google's, and we rightly blame them for purposefully degrading the experience of using Google Image search.
As an image search user. The number of times I went to the site only to find it either doesn't have the picture or requires a login would just make me mad.
Getty should sue Pinterest! Their whole business is based on sharing 3rd-party pictures. And forcing you to register in order to browse. I don't understand how they still can continue doing business...
Yup, the amount of times I've clicked on the image up follow through to the site hasn't changed between either version either. This just makes things more of a hassle.
That’s something Google should improve then. I think the argument can be made that Google caches that image illegally, if the owner decided to remove it from its site.
And Google could also decide to block websites, like Pinterest, that are gaming their search algorithms. That would be beneficial for everyone.
I agree, feels more fair towards site owners than hotlinking the image, which been frowned upon on the internet since... At least I started using the internet.
What is not fine, is to use that as a reason to completely screw up the rest of the design, when a small change could have been enough.
I remember that, and I am a still a tiny bit salty about how it impacted me as a user. Ever since, it has been so unnecessarily tedious get the raw image link from Google. Half the time, I end up with a data url, sometimes I get taken to the backing website, who usually don't know anything about accessibility, sometimes I get the image. It's all just so much worse now.
That said, it is absolutely theft for Google to source data from your site, then use that to add value to their site, without giving you any click-through traffic.
Tangentially, it would be great if Google sent like $1 (edit: or < $1; the amount isn't my point) per 1000 clicks out to websites whose search results get clicked. They already have an ad-engine that does all of this. This would mean that you would get paid to have good SEO, or to be a central hub. The websites that comprise the entire web should negotiate better terms with central data brokers like Google.
> That said, it is absolutely theft for Google to source data from your site, then use that to add value to their site, without giving you any click-through traffic.
Would you be OK, if Google didn't show images from your site on their site? If so, I believe a simple robots.txt statement should be sufficient.
> This would mean that you would get paid to have good SEO, or to be a central hub. The websites that comprise the entire web should negotiate better terms with central data brokers like Google.
I don't really get the logic by which someone letting people find you, should pay for that privilege.
> I don't really get the logic by which someone letting people find you, should pay for that privilege.
Images ends up being more of a media platform than search engine. I'm rarely looking for a site. Doesn't seem too weird that they could pay for some of the content
I don't really understand. Are you saying Google is creating a media platform based on image search and they should somehow find a way to pay for the images in it?
If you want to use an image that is not free, you should go pay for it, no? You have a link for the site. You can even go visit the site as a courtesy for free images. Are you saying Google should be paying for the images?
If you want to be mad at someone, look at getty - they take² people's images and charge for them, even managing to file DMCA takedowns on the author[1]. As a consolation, at least they host the images themselves.
> Would you be OK, if Google didn't show images from your site on their site? If so, I believe a simple robots.txt statement should be sufficient.
Giving people a way to opt out doesn't absolve Google.
They need to get permission to use the property of others, not default to using it unless told not to.
They're acting as if everything that isn't locked up, and doesn't have a note on it saying otherwise, is free for anyone to borrow.
> I don't really get the logic by which someone letting people find you, should pay for that privilege.
Google can let people find sites without copying the content of those sites.
In fact, when Google copies your content, people are less likely to go to your site, the very opposite of "letting people find you".
That's not what that article says. According to that article, that decision was based on the idea that a hyperlink cannot infringe copyright, not on implied consent:
> The court in Karlsruhe does not regard the display of the preview images as an act of making available a copyright work in the sense of the copyright law. ... Since the decision handed down in the “Svensson” case in 2014, it is common ground that, in principle, the use of a hyperlink is not a copyright-relevant act.
My bad - I was looking at a published book that referenced the case and wanted to link an article that was more easily available, but it was for the wrong case. My original comment is also uneditable now. The case I meant to reference is "Vorschaubilder I", see the press release[0]
> [translated] The plaintiff has made the content of its website accessible for search engines without making use of technical means to exclude the images of her works from the search and display by image search engines in the form of preview images.
I am using entry page that brute forces password for accessing other pages. It takes a 30 seconds max on phone, but will raise cpu to 100%. Later it is stored to cookie. I havent seen any crawler get past that.
I have a website with over 1.000.000 pictures. I’m still a bit salty that my images get 1M monthly impressions in image search and just 15k visitors.
If I made a website like Image Search, hotlinked all the images and burried a visit website button somewhere as a ‘curtesy’, I’d be sued out of existence within a couple of weeks.
$1 per 1000 clicks is ridiculous. Google make a lot of money, but that's because of their scale, not because they have somehow made search a miracle source of income. Would you also argue that, say, indexes of literature or libraries should pay the authors money per item viewed, because the data isn't "theirs"?
Paying websites with good SEO would make filtering out abusers of search engines (no meaningful content, scraping other websites and republishing, clickbait...) even harder, as there would now be a direct ROI on SEO.
Yes, because the author didn't make its contents available for free. Websites can do the same, and many do. They could even disallow other sites from crawling them and processing their contents through the (mostly) respected robots.txt. But publishing something for free, not forbidding crawling through well-understood mechanisms, and then demanding payment is ridiculous.
Libraries do have to get special non-consumer licenses for electronic books. Typically they pay several times more than a the retail ebook cost for a library license that lasts the lesser of two years or ~50 views before expiry.
I'm not a fan of Google but the solution to the Getty problem for Google is to drop all links to Getty domains from the index. Getty is a relic of the past power that still has not adapted to the Internet.
Just remove Getty or maybe all stock images from the index. There are too many watermarked images in search results anyway. These images could still be made searchable through some other dedicated search with a conforming UI for users who really want a cross-vendor stock images search.
What's much worse is they removed the precise and custom image size search. It's now impossible to search for a 32x32 icon or a 3200x1800 wallpaper. This dumbing down and feature removal is sad and silly.
I was also really frustrated when they removed the exact size filter under search tools.
You can add "imagesize:32x32" to your search query to only show images of a desired size, but I'd still rather see Google bring back the search tool option.
I didn't notice that. I never used exact dimension searches because more often than not, they eliminate all of the interesting results which I would have been able to crop/resize to my desired dimensions manually. It's better to have some results you can transform than to have no results.
Ah, yes, now I do remember those more useful options. I definitely recall using them once or twice. I can't say I missed it though (seeing as I clearly forgot about it). I guess someone who needs to do it on a daily basis would miss it more.
Small self-promotions: We are working on image search engine - https://khumbu.im, demo (MVP stage)https://app.khumbu.im/search/5dff72e66483e25b40e0222e . We use DL to understand content of images and provide better search results. Soon we are going to add face recognition, improve object detection and semantic analysis.
I feel your pain, I mostly use duckduckgo these days so I'm not exposed to this behaviour too often but sometimes I don't find what I'm looking for and check Google instead. It's really frustrating.
for every such blunder that a major company does, i want to know what promotion/bonus someone "earned". For example this recent redesign of paypal: https://i.imgur.com/T7Rj3Tq.png
i have turned off blockers. every profile page is like that, and it says on the page that they ve "updated your settings and profile experience. let us know what you think". kind of agree with you about ux though
its probably a blunder that they ll fix soon, but one would expect much better from billion dollar companies
This may be a major event in Google's history - the point where they overdid ads and started to be perceived as a inferior service. This is sometimes called "pulling a Myspace".
Myspace was once the top social network. They looked unchallengeable. Then they got greedy. Myspace kept upping their ad content until usage dropped. Instead of backing off the ads, they upped the ad content even more to maintain revenue. Usage dropped further. That death spiral ended with Myspace irrelevant.
As an Adsense publisher, I noticed they enabled ‘Auto ads’ on every website, automatically. What this does is it plasters 15 ads in a long web page, it adds interstitials to mobile page and it just fucking ruins your websites UX. It’s enabled on millions of websites now. It’s like Google is desperate to make more money.
I can disable it, for now. I won’t be surprised if at some point in the future, they make it the standard and only behavior.
“It’s like Google is desperate to make more money.”
It’s getting exponentially harder to achieve their expected growth rates. They haven’t managed to find another significant revenue source beside ads so they have to squeeze everything out of that. Kind of sad that all the super smart people there still haven’t come up with any product they can sell with enough revenue besides ads.
Nothing like this is going to happen. Google Search is leaps and bounds ahead beyond anything else. And Google Assistant on top of this makes it even more effective. This was a mistake by Google and they heard the feedback and corrected it.
MySpace analogy doesn't make sense since there is no Facebook, which was a competent social network, here. Search is a massive investment and you don't just have random companies suddenly rising taking over the users. Duckduckgo itself uses Bing Search as its backend.
> Google Search is leaps and bounds ahead beyond anything else.
Nothing is too big to fail. If there's no direct competitor, an indirect one or a group could take over too.
> Duckduckgo itself uses Bing Search as its backend.
This reads to me as if Bing was the only backend they use, which isn't the case. According to Wikipedia they use multiple backends:
"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.", source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DuckDuckGo#Overview
Whenever I hear people complain about Google and that they'll switch to a competitor, I'm reminded of the "Delete Facebook" memes that happened, only to have FB reach a new user record every subsequent month.
Don't be deluded by the HN bubble. I like DDG and am glad it exists, but it's usage in a year is probably what Google gets in a few minutes, and I'm willing to bet that ratio hasn't really improved significantly for years.
Google traffic is about 4 million searches per minute, which comes to 6 billion searches per day. DDG traffic is about 50 million searches per day, so about 1%.
It looks like DDG traffic has been doubling every 1.5-2 years or so for the past decade. I presume that Google's traffic is relatively constant at this point.
Their own Sources page make it sound like the actual search results are from Bing and Verizon while all the other sources (including their own crawler) are used for widgets like Instant Answers: https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/so...
I keep seeing HN users working themselves into a lather praising DDG, but I just went there and see almost identical obfuscation of ads (a tiny "Ad" in the same color as the link) and in the using of favicons for each of their organic results.
I disagree about search result quality. I switched to DDG over a year ago and only need to use !g bangs when I search either for some specific local stuff or when I search for news that have happened in the last day or two. Actually, in some cases DDG gives more relevant search results than Google, especially for programming stuff.
I concur. I only occasionally use !g w/ DDG now, whereas two years ago it was more frequent (although I can't quantify). I stuck w/ it as I wanted some distance between myself and Google.
Whether I've achieved any distance is an open question and I suspect that it is less than it feels like when I use DDG.
The results are comparable in my current experience. Compage searches for 'bluetooth speakers' on Google [0] and DDG [1]. In my location (Canada) DDG returns national results which are preferred and relevant.
I like that on the DDG results page the ad is clearly separated from organic results and I get the results w/out a mapping insert. That's just my preference, though.
Even the results URLs speak volumes. I have no idea what data - if any - I'm exposing about myself w/ the Google result.
+1 for having zero issues at all with using DDG as my daily driver, I only use Google for some local searches and currency conversions. DDG results have improved every year even as Google's have gotten much worse.
Edit: just realized that DDG does currency conversion too, there's one less class of searches that goes to Google!
This is what I keep hearing about DuckDuckGo and I'd really like this to be true for myself and my search engine usage.
Unfortunately, however, having used DuckDuckGo for the last few weeks my experience has been quite the opposite (described here in some more detail: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22106837 ), especially when it comes to programming-related queries.
It would be nice to conduct these experiments while actually saving the searches (and results) for further study & ideas from the community on how to improve them.
I hear a lot of anecdotes about search working/not working but concrete examples remain elusive.
Intriguing idea. It'd be interesting to get DuckDuckGo involved in such a project because it's in their interest to improve search query matches.
Maybe, a browser plugin that allows you to easily report less than optimal or even irrelevant search results to DuckDuckGo (including a comparison with other search engine in case those yield more appropriate results) would be quite useful.
> Duckduckgo itself uses Bing Search as its backend.
Can you provide a source for this? I couldn’t find it myself, but I was searching with DDG.
“DuckDuckGo gets its results from over four hundred sources. These include hundreds of vertical sources delivering niche Instant Answers, DuckDuckBot (our crawler) and crowd-sourced sites (like Wikipedia, stored in our answer indexes). 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.“
I read the last sentence as if the actual search results all come from Bing and Verizon while they have their own crawler and 400 other sources for Instant Answers and other widgets.
Disagree. Lately whatever changes google made to promote mainstream media articles drowns out googling historical articles. I have been using other search engines. Google is getting worse and worse. They've already lost my search business.
I hear that a lot, but search results differ for me between Bing and DDG. Bing is definitely a major component of its results, but I doubt it’s the only part.
Yeah, if you compare Bing with DDG and Ecosia you will see that the results are identical to Bing on Ecosia but differ on DDG (although obviously a major component as you say). Ecosia is a true proxy while DDG has some internal ranking mechanism.
> "Duckduckgo itself uses Bing Search as its backend."
Why would that even matter? It's good enough no matter how it works. Frankly it's better than google since it doesn't have nearly as many anti-patterns.
google search is only as useful as the content that it points to. They used to incentivize people to make good content, now they re just stealing it, so people naturally will take their content off google or hide it behind walls.
It's also not "leaps and bounds ahead beyond anything else" , but they have the network effect and technical lock in to be safe enough. Two things they did: first, they promoted the usage of the omnibox as search box, so now almost every browser is auto subscribed to google,and subscriptions are sticky. Second, they stopped sending the search referrer to the target sites and worked to remove referrers completely from the web. This precludes target sites from providing a competitive search experience. Google now stands uniquely and exclusively in the pathway from the users' search bar to the destination website, and extracting the rents.
As the web contracts, becomes more silo'd and locked behind paywalls and app gardens, the volume of searchable data is also retracting. Add in that most of Google's users never go past the first page, or the 6th result, and I think Google's search is vulnerable.
Now, add in all the great features and functions they have built over the last 10+ years (maps, travel, etc) and they will probably always maintain an advantage. They are after all a verb...
But the actual search results, IMHO are most definitely within reach for a competitor or 3 to tackle.
That was actually the most interesting part of MySpace. Sure, you could get bad designs, but there was an ability to express one's self that you can't do beyond the header image--much like the amateur GeoCities aesthetic we admire. MySpace and GeoCities were why and where I started to learn CSS.
There are tens of thousands of people who first learned to code by customising their MySpace page. They might have made some seriously ugly stuff but that feature was amazing for getting people in to the tech industry. It was brilliant.
Definitely. MySpace was killed because Facebook was superior. And Facebook was superior because it didn't look like shit, people used real names and real photos of themselves, and they did that because it was only available to university students so it was quite a bit more private than MySpace. It didn't really have anything to do with ads.
The only thing in favor of Google is that so far nobody still hasn't got a better engine. Creating a Myspace clone or even a better service wasn't as hard as making a better search engine as google.
I've tried all the alternatives ddg, bing etc but the Google's results are still much better imo and as long as that is true they will keep trying such shenanigans.
"Pulling a MySpace" means messing up your product so badly that your users abandon ship.
"Jumping the Shark" means taking your story to such incredible heights that it becomes unbelievable.
Not the same thing.
It seems every time Google ruins the user experience for its products, the reason is money. I guess that sounds obvious by now.
For example, the the size of the skip button on YouTube ads on Android changed so it only has the width of the seconds counter instead of including the "Skip in N" text. Before you could keep pressing the button before the timer ran out without triggering the ad, if you were impatient, but now you have to be careful not to accidentally click on the ad since the button is so small.
Why? Because it results in more accidental clicks, if so many people have the habit of tapping it over and over. Which means more money. At the expense of user frustration or worry over clicking it unintentionally.
Look at Dropbox's redesign. They slapped a bunch of completely useless collaboration tools that have nothing to do with my singular use case for Dropbox: syncing files. And that's because, as they say, syncing is a feature, not a product, so they probably had no choice to find new ways to "keep growing" and making revenue or simply die out. Because they can't afford otherwise. But Dropbox was the one company with the capital to fine-tune their algorithm so it "just worked" across network instability and numerous system configurations (until they dropped support for everything until ext4 on Linux at least), so that's what so many people used.
I believe that if the only goal was to develop a program to sync files across devices, then everyone at Dropbox would have declared all the extra features unnecessary. But people have to eat.
I keep wondering if the limitless pursuit of capital growth is worth the downsides. It can give us things like Dropbox, but ultimately Dropbox is not worth the hassle for me anymore due to the bloat. As a naive question, will there ever be point where we've had enough growing?
I work for an mobile ad company and we would not consider accidental clicks for billing. I wonder how Google handles it. Advertisers would complain if you got a high fraction of clicks where the user closed the window right away or did not engage with the website in a desired fashion.
This has been trending now a few days, but I still don’t get it. Seems nobody can really say what exactly about this design says ‘advertisement’?
I get the feeling Mr. Mod’s tweet caught fire because of the sentiment, of Google oppression and dominance, and not many stopped to think what in particular about the design they don’t like.
Personally there is nothing immediately offensive to the way the results look. In fact I might argue it’s actually a good esthetic. I like seeing the favicon @ the top, and it does mimic the way mobile search results have looked for a while now. Nobody freaked out about that change?
If the anger over this is because people think this is a dark pattern, trying to obfuscate the difference between advertisements, that might not necessarily be wrong. But progression has been happening for a long time now. The picture in the article shows that at least since 2013, they eliminated the different color background that used to highlight ads. So it’s been a good 7 years since ads were nearly indistinguishable from regular results.
Totally agree. I can understand that someone might think the favicon makes it look tacky but ads have the word AD next to them. It isn't hard to tell the difference.
For me it was the straw that broke the camel's back. When this change went live I decided to switch to DDG and it's been a great experience. Search results are, in my opinion, more relevant and generally of better quality. I wish I would have switched sooner!
To be honest, for a long time I'd role my eyes at the DDG users in every thread, talking about how it's hey, pretty good now.
Well, now I'm that guy, because I think it's actually better than Google now. It looks crisper, cleaner, has way fewer ads, and does less fuzzing of my actual search terms. I love it -- I'm hooked.
The entirety of DDG’s traffic right now is a rounding error on Google’s traffic. I promise you they did not measure any sort of impact. That may change in the future but we are not there yet.
I think that a constant pressure to optimize this specific aspect (layout) has caused this.
However, optimization is not innovation.
What are novel ways that search results can be presented to (and consumed by) the user? Where is search going in the future?
I am a bit surprised to not see them on top of this game, but at the same time it would be a ripe chance for someone else to give it a spin (assuming that they have a sizable number of users to begin with).
For a company that had the least distracting ads for a very long time, this is definitely a questionable move.
But, all the hullabaloo in the article about Ad links making money for Google v/s the others that don't seems misplaced. After all, the point of a search engine is to find stuff. And if an ad shows an alternative, that is possibly better, you can click on it.
These ad links are definitely not going to download malicious malware onto your devices.
I am more worried about ads on social media platforms with infinite scroll because those ads are more unpredictable in placement.
I use google a lot, but I can’t escape the thought that every time I really need to find something (a book which title I barely remember, a product based on the job it does) I just can’t do it using google and that most of my queries are mostly key value lookups.
And yes, ads are annoying. Double ads in YouTube are annoying. f you google.
At least in Youtube I can (and do) pay to make ads go away, which I'm happy to do, as I get a great service in return. I just wish that I could do the same for Google search.
I view Google Contributor as a bad product offering, as it doesn't give me any guarantee.
Matt Cutts wrote that it works like if I would be bidding with an empty ad, but Google ad system works by CPC, so actually the product should be free in theory :)
Google exactly knows my long term value, so it could ask for that amount of money. Also it's for AdSense / DoubleClick, not for Google.com, where ads matter the most.
So my bid just drives up the prices advertisers need to bid to show me ads? Sounds like a win for a company that sells ads.
Asking for your "long term value" is interesting, although for users who run ad blockers and therefore never click an ad, isn't their value super low anyway? Imagine Google asking for $50/yr to not show ads, installing an ad blocker, then a year later seeing Google ask $5/yr as your value plummets.
It could just use my interests to predict how much I'm willing to pay for getting rid of ads.
Or even the type and number of devices that I'm using Google on should be a good enough predictor, or just the country (which is the case for Youtube Premium).
> My eyes first move thorough the colourful favicons first, then the url of the page and then the real content.
I'm not sure this is a big deal one you get used to it. Other search engines also have favicons. My browser tab has favicons. Most internet content (like twitter) has some kind of colourful icon to the left of the text.
Duckduckgo shows favicons in search results as well but nobody complains about it. People should be focusing on how to make Google ads stand out more and not the use of favicons.
Not only that, DDG shows "ads" marker on the far right, making it more difficult to distinguish ads.
Also, they sometimes put ads in-between organic results - e.g. show maps first, then show ads, then organic results.
DDG and Bing have ads favicon that's in very thin fonts, making it much less legible than Google's black, bold font.
There are many valid reasons to switch from Google to DDG, but ads being less clearly marked on Google is not a valid reason, since Google is objectively far more clearer in marking ads than DDG or Bing.
The original version of Ad Words always seemed ethical to me. Its simply showing users ads for something they were looking at the present moment. Mixing results and ads is bad. We know for a fact the first couple hits are clicked at a much higher rate.
I just switched to Edge and Bing (Will do DDG in the near future) and I'm not looking back. Edge is very snappy and crisp compared to Chrome. Bing doesn't show tons of ads as the top links. I wonder if Google noticed many people like me switching and became concerned.
Edit: Edge operates just like Chrome. Microsoft has made a better Chrome with less memory usage.
I haven't used Edge enough to compare it to Firefox, which I don't use. I like Edge over Chrome. I like Firefox but I don't see how they can compete over the long run against Microsoft and Google.
I’ve been on the test for this design since October 4, 2019, so I’ve actually gotten used to it! But it’s probably a good thing for them to backtrack. I wonder what went wrong in their clearly lengthy experiment about how this would perform.
This design is very successful technically for them and I’m sure it increased Ad click through.
The issue was cultural. The articles saying “okay this is too far on making Ads hard to see” and the super hilariously ironic fact that they launched this on the exact day that Basecamp went in front of congress to explain how Google is abusing running ads on trademarks, where this design make it much much worse.
Someone was better at persuasion than engineering and got approval to put it into production, ignoring potentially negative A/B test results or flawed feedback methodology.
I go to bing.com and honestly it is more egregious. I couldn't tell which were the Ads and which were the search results.
As a Google employee, I am not a fan of the new design and can appreciate consumers' dissatisfaction with it and will be happy if it is reverted.
But, I can't help feel like there is a double standard, here.
For instance, Google didn't even opt to bid on the recent giant contract to be the cloud provider for the U.S. Government.
Microsoft beat out Amazon for this and there wasn't a peep about it.
It seems to me that Google is unfairly targeted in this space for some reason. It makes me question the motivation of some of those pushing this agenda.
Google's last big search update has been a complete disaster for me. Very naive and arrogant assumptions of the semantics of my search. I can't search anything more than a few words strung together. If you try to search a sentence that you don't precisely know (like a couple words are different) then you're shit out of luck now even though it used to work great.
Google is now totally useless for any error message from popular software. I was getting an esoteric error from nginx; pasting the long error in quotes to google gave a full page of irrelevant ads with no organic results. DDG and Bing both had a forum post from Igor himself explaining the error as the first hit.
This sort of highly targeted search used to work so well in GOOG and now it doesn’t work at all and hasn’t for a while. I moved to DDG a year ago and never even seem to use !g.
The new look is annoying, but in my case I'm running a PiHole server. Clicking on ads just presents me with a page not found error.
I guess if I really get tired of the new look, there's other options out there. DuckDuckGo is great and I use them occasionally. Bing actually isn't terrible either, so there's alternatives out there. Maybe I'll give some others a try for a while.
That website refused to open in my uMatrix-enabled Firefox, and didn't open properly on mobile Safari (1BlockerX adblocker). Only desktop Safari (with the same adblocker) opened it.
that website also contains borderline malicious js making the back button nonfunctional (at least on ios safari). funny considering they felt the need to specifically point out how evil googles strategies are.
What strikes me the most about this debacle is how blatant it seemed. If their intention is to remove the distinction between ads and organic links entirely there are more subtle (albeit slower) ways they could've moved in that direction.
Good. I recently got dropped into the new design, and for the life of me I can't figure out which ones are ads and which are not. Either I've never gotten an ad with the new design, or they blend in so much that I can't tell.
to all the duckduckgo comments: ddg also has ads that look like search results. ublock origin nukes ~5 elements for me on a google search and ~ 8 on DDG. as far as i can see the only real differentiator for ddg is that it returns "universal" search results instead of individualized results (based on location, history, etc). aka, results that are 'private' but also more likely to be less relevant. more than ever the internet is ready for a new search engine, but DDG aint it. we need one that isnt based on f'ing advertising: its antithetical to the point of search!!!
Don't care. Haven't used Google since they put social engineering and ad revenue ahead of search quality and usability When I peek in from time to time, it looks intolerable compared to DDG's clean results.
If you wish to retry anytime in the future, you can use the bang commands to search elsewhere whenever the results aren’t satisfactory. I usually start with DDG, then if needed, I move to !s (for startpage) and then to !g (google). This does take more time, but for me it’s worth not having to use Google as much as possible. I’ve also become a bit wary of Startpage after it was recently acquired. There are many other alternatives too, like Searx, for example.
Is that your main concern about Startpage? As a Startpage person, maybe I can shed some light on this. Last year, Startpage announced an investment in Startpage by System1 through Privacy One Group, a wholly-owned subsidiary of System1. With this investment, the plan is to further expand privacy features & reach new users. The Startpage founders have control over the privacy components of Startpage. More info - https://support.startpage.com/index.php?/Knowledgebase/Artic...
I wish that page was a little clearer as to how startpage still has control, since it turns out system1 now has a majority stake in startpage. However, in reading the letter from your CEO linked at the top, it appears this is by covenant. While in theory that could be renegotiated in the future, it is a relatively strong protection. It would be nice to see the exact language of said covenant and whether there are protections requiring public notification if it is ever changed or rescinded. I know that is probably not going to happen, but it's worth communicating what I think would be a common desire.
IMHO the ads on Duck Duck Go are much worse / harder to ignore. At least Google puts the [Ad] icons on the left so they line up. DDG puts them at the end of the title so they are all over the place. Try to use it without an adblocker.
Maybe we need to be bailed out? We're broke on data, privacy and autonomy. Perhaps a 50% nationalization where democratically elected representatives serve on the board? The money can be printed.
Okay, Verizon's consent process is a disaster. After following several options to try and opt out I gave up and left. Which unfortunately means I can't read this article.
I have not even seen this in real because I use startpage and duckduckgo on top of ublock that blocks google ads anyway. Its strage to me that not everyone just blocks all ads.
Thank goodness. Aside from everything looking like Ads I just really hated the design. I had a harder time extracting data from it when looking for a relevant link.
Well since this is HN, the overwhelming majority will say DuckDuckGo. I switched to DDG as my default browser search around 3 months ago and it's mostly been fine. However, when I _don't_ find what I'm looking for, I do find myself popping open Google for that specific search (sometimes finding things I didn't find with DDG). So I guess I don't have full faith in DDG just yet.
I switched to DDG. It seems quite good to me. I am mostly interested in recent events and Twitter Search and news websites is good for that for my needs. DDG is perfect replacement.
While I’m glad they reverted, the doublespeak is absurd. As if they didn’t know users would hate it. User experience had nothing to do with this. It was all about revenue. The main question after this is what user hostile move will they attempt next?
Without major changes all over the company I don’t see how Google will get better.
Yes, it is about revenue, but I bet they honestly were surprised, at least at the magnitude of the pushback.
This is a very public embarrassment for a number of people - you don't intentionally risk this sort of thing. The most likely explanation is that they expected people like me to grumble but the vast majority to not mind. They were wrong.
> Without major changes all over the company I don’t see how Google will get better.
Agree with this. And major changes don't come without major systemic shock.
> The main question after this is what user hostile move will they attempt next?
We can look back in history and make a well educated guess. It took me a couple of days to figure it out, but we HAVE seen this same game play out. Back in the 90s there was a search engine that started out pretty decent but eventually did their best (or worst) to make ads and search results indistinguishable.
i'm going to admit: not only do i love favicons in search, i've sent countless emails and replied to various tweets with the need, even requirement, to add favicons in search.
it helps me find what i'm looking for much much faster.
Isn't Google just following the lead of all news sites who claim to be reputable, but are burying "sponsored news" or "sponsored BS" on their websites which are PAID FOR by companies and not really news ?
It’s a little meta but I think the way this has unfolded doesn’t shine well on Danny Sullivan and his role at Google. Danny been in the search industry from pretty much the get go, he knows anyone who was anything in search, he “studied the great machine, knows things even Draal doesn’t know” [1], and yet he has been reduced to some sort of an after-fact PR person for decisions it seems he had no say on. Pity.
well AMP was the death rattle and this is the flat-line. Google is officially dead. Another corporate zombie. if you want to be plugged in to new and exciting things, look elsewhere. What a crazy ride its been.
The perspective of this article feel naive for 2020. "You can't put out forest fires by pissing, but if we all piss together... uhm maybe... no wait"
Here's what I mean:
withering criticism from politicians, consumers and the press over the way in which search results displays were made to look like... .. It’s also a pretty evil by a company whose mantra was “Don’t be evil.” ..paid advertisements are ever more indistinguishable
This is like addressing the plastic straw problem on Shell oil rigs. Google and Facebook are both (among other things) more influential over media than Murdoch and the next five runners-up combined. Traditional media obviously also violate their own "journalistic ethics" for money reasons, but at least there is such a code. They teach college courses on it.
Google & FB have more influence on things like elections, war/peace & culture, but they don't even have an ethic to violate. Zuch won't even admit that Facebook is a political media outlet, despite being the most significant one to have ever existed.
Withering criticism of font choices is so 2007. "Vehement demands for antitrust action" is what we're about in the 1920s.
Does this mean they'll also "backtrack" on their destruction of the URL? I was extremely disturbed and horrified when I realised that not only did they replace / with >, but also seemed to arbitrarily remove and rewrite pieces of URLs shown in the results (e.g. all articles from HM would show nothing more than "news.ycombinator.com > item", which was intensely confusing.)
#1 What does Google want the web to look like? Look at Google News.
#2 Google gets to hijack 20%~ of the screen space to get users to install their own apps, and go back to Google, not onward to the publisher's own website.
#3 Removing the URL is the final disambiguation, where no one but the most technical users can go where they want.
In what sense?
Not understanding URLs also affects their ability to see through any bad emails that make it through the spam filters. If you understand URLs, you can hover over a link, see that it's pointing to bankcom.fzzaa.net and see that it's obviously not something you should click on.
Quite a few students have asked me how to access the online resources that come with the revision guides they have purchased. Somewhere in the book will be a URL to whatever they need and they just don't recognise what a URL is. They see something beginngin with https:// and it's meaningless to them. Visit this link? How? What is it?
This isn't an exhaustive list of reasons, it's not even close. I don't think it makes sense to argue that being completely oblivious to the very basics of something so fundamental to all our lives is something to be dismissed as irrelevant. I also thinking it's bad that Google is the only way so many people know how to access a website. Remember when some blog was ranked #1 for 'facebook login' for a day or so? People were filling the comments section with stuff like "ugh this new facebook is so bad". I think that highlights a serious problem that we're lucky enough to have mostly avoided... so far.
Sorry, copy and paste or clicking on a link they were emailed is a huge struggle? How are they receiving these URLs that they aren't immediately usable?
>Not understanding URLs also affects their ability to see through any bad emails that make it through the spam filters.
I've seen too many people who ostensibly understand URLs get phished to think it much matters.
Here's another example for you, that just happened today:
On a shared iPad, the iPad was returned with a note saying 'no safari'. I worked out that one student had changed the default Safari search engine to DuckDuckGo. For reasons, the school's ISP blocks DuckDuckGo and visiting it on an iPad just results in a 'connection was lost' message.
The next student needed to visit a website called Kahoot and the URL for this site is kahoot.com. Looking at the history I could see the student had just been typing 'kahoot' in to the URL/search bar over and over again. They also tried typing 'google'. At no point did they try entering the URL nor does it seem they even know how to do anything beyond type search keywords.
Better to have typing "Kahoot" into the topbar bring up a Google search that navigates to Kahoot.com than the user experience I had at that age, which was a DNS resolution failure because no TLD was specified. That was an era where none but the most technical users could go where they wanted.
Regarding your second paragraph, sure it would be better for search results to be displayed if there's no TLD specified. However, when it's the ONLY way you know how to access a website and when that fails, as it did today, knowing how to manually enter a URL would be useful.
I agree that things are much more user friendly today, but because things are so easy people get really stuck when those ways fail and they have no way of troubleshooting anything.
I won't get in to how many students (and teachers) I see stumped because the ethernet cable has come out of their laptop or they can't open a file because they've copied the shortcut to a folder to a USB rather than the folder itself.
That's quite a shock if students don't know about urls. Can someone confirm if this is a secluded case or this is what most people end up with now a days.
I don't find this unbelievable but even here, I would expect 40% people to know about urls and 5% or so know about the technical details surrounding it.
If you haven't interacted with kids who don't have any tech-fluent influences in their life, you would be shocked at how much isn't understood. Just mobile phones and apps for the 'internet' has meant that it's so easy to access what you need (and also so limiting in what you can access) that most kids just haven't got a clue how the internet actually works.
I suppose most of the time they don't NEED to know, but I think it's a bit problematic that unless something has an app, they probably aren't going to know it exists. Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, TikTok, etc. is the entirety of what they access on the internet.
There are, of course, exceptions to this, but the majority are absolutely clueless. Ironic when everyone is expecting them to be so tech savvy because they've grown up around it. Problem is, it's too abstracted and too corporate.
I guess they really want to funnel everyone through search...
Share, copy, and edit icons. While I'm not a big fan of it, it probably fits the frequency and relative friction of interactions on mobile better than the previous UI.
But just ask me how I feel about navigating other parts of Apple’s UI! Dunno who they’re user testing with but these changes make me a bit ornery sometimes.
If the latter, the default behavior gets in the way of the critical path.
I just hate it because it breaks well established UI conventions. The thing looks like a text field but doesn't act like a text field.
For me it is more of a "stop messing with UI" situation than trying to funnel everything through search. If they wanted to do that, they would have kept the dedicated search button. Early Android phones had that.
Nor, for that matter, can you click, ctrl-A (yes, Virginia, I have and use a Bluetooth keyboard). Instead it's click, then Copy Icon.
Utterly blinkered.
Oddly: Incognito mode is not (yet) crippled in this manner.
Don't get me started on pull-to-nuke-whatever-you'd-been-composing-or-losing-your-place-in-infernal-scroll
I'm assuming from context that your mean keyboard, but the idea sounds kind of cool so I have to ask: any chance this is a term for a a bluetooth device solely designed to facilitate copy-pasting between other devices?
For cross-device control, there's ... Synergy, I think:
https://symless.com/synergy
There's an Android client (I've no experience with it): https://sourceforge.net/projects/synergyandroid/
On the Android, there's Termux which offers a clipboard interface -- termux-clipboard-get and termux-clipboard-set which I've aliased as "xp" and "xc" respectively. (I have similar aliases for Linux and MacOS's respective clipboard manipulators.)
You can paste (including to remote SSH sessions) with the ctrl-alt-v keystroke.
It's possibly to select and copy screen regions, but tediously, so that piping to / from xc / xp is far more convenient. (I sometimes use this for composing / editing HN comments, more frequently on other sites.)
In practice, I end up manually typing in long URLs on my laptop that people send me over SMS or whatever, and manually typing in long, high-entropy passwords on my phone when I would rather copy-paste them from my laptop's password database.
(Not that I'm running KDE. But the feature sounds great.)
edit: I should mention that I think this requires drivers on the computer end, so probably won't on iOS/Android
In my opinion this is still a gentle push to encourage users to just type in a search query instead.
Probably because URL copy or share (the two icons besides edit than the new UI provides) are more common interactions than URL editing, and are (without a keyboard and with a traditional text edit control for the URL bar) higher friction; this streamlines the common usecases at the cost of adding an extra tap for URL editing.
The only thing they have added is confusion and behavorial conditioning. I see no benefits of the "new" way.
A whole lot of people in this thread have never watched a normal person use a smartphone in a UX study.
None of this UX design is perfect or totally settled, especially since it's only been 10 years since it's been mainstream.
Exactly, and other than web pages (before this UX change), virtually every other well-defined piece of content that is likely to be shared had a prominent, distinct, easy-access share button on mobile (the separate copy to clipboard button added for URLs is not a common affordance; in most cases that functionality is one of many options accessed through the sharing function. OTOH, for URLs and certain other shared content, copying-and-paste is a particularly common sharing method, so promoting it to a first-class option further streamlines a common use case. ) This change actually better aligns the browser with every other way of interacting with shareable content on mobile rather than violating mobile UX expectations.
I click the url bar in Chrome, then the whole url shows up selected. Then I long-press to copy the url, but no! It auto-selects only a single word in the url and brings up the option to copy just that single word. Stupid.
Yes I know that I can click on the lock icon and then on the url, and that's what I usually end up doing, but that is also stupid.
Edit: sometimes it seems to bring the original url down in a dropdown with share/copy/edit buttons, but that doesn't seem to happen all the time. I haven't worked out why the dropdown often doesn't activate.
Editing is much easier. 2 clicks. Cursor starts at the end, swipe to scroll and tap to place cursor where you want it.It was very annoying before.
Most of the time I want to copy a URL. It's now 2 fast clicks. Previously you had to long click or something to try to select all the text, then some extra step I've forgotten. I often had to try several times.
Share is now much faster. Two fast clicks. Previously it was click top right ... long drop down menu, scroll down to Share. Click that.
If you can't go to expedia.com as easily as you can Google search Expedia, you'll probably do the later. And if you Google search Expedia, the first result is usually an ad for Expedia. Now Google makes money on you in a way they hadn't before. The more people expect Google to deal with all of the silly "web domain stuff" for them, the more money Google makes.
It's all about the incentives, and in the end there's only one incentive -- money.
I don't think anyone working at Google is being intentionally bad at all, but I do think their incentive structure ultimately results in prioritizing feeding people ads as much a possible. The A/B tests show that doing things a certain way results in more revenue, and that's what drives the decisions. There are likely no ethics meetings on the implications on society for each small change, but the collective result of many small harmless changes (aimed at increasing profit) is bad for society in the end. Not due to any conspiracy or "evil".
Typing a new address or copying the URL of the page I'm on covers ~95% of the use cases where I'm accessing the address bar on mobile and the change significantly reduces friction for both. It's exhausting to see every minute move Google/Amazon makes filtered through the HN cynicism lens.
Edit: Talking specifically about the chrome on Android omnibar change. The favicon desktop search change from TFA was awful.
Here is a story from April 2019: https://www.wired.com/story/google-wants-to-kill-the-url/
with respect, I don't think there would be an ethics meeting scenario about whether the default interaction for tapping the URL bar is copy or edit that would find any ethical concerns, besides "nerds will be annoyed we moved their cheese."
Source: Google employee.
Many of kind of people that come to HN have personally worked on various forms of gamification and rule bending. It's as natural to SV culture as water to fish - indeed some of the biggest companies wouldn't be around without skirting rules and arguably morals.
The stench of MBAs and quarterly profit optimizing execs is all over the valley.
And then the ignorance/apathy of the layman adds an extra layer of plausibility to such accusations.
A good explanation for the increasingly normalized dark patterns ruining user experience on the web.
"Conspiratorial"? You bet. Have we not seen huge (and small) companies committed to screwing the public in as many ways as they can? It's not by accident, there's a widespread, condescending disrepect of users and just plain old conspiratorial maliciousness, intent on manipulating users and squeezing more profit.
Google's search results design (backtracked for now) is a clear symptom.
https://github.com/jparise/chrome-utm-stripper
...and they only made it more of one by making you press an extra button. It's like they took the "easy things should be easy, hard things should be possible" mantra and turned it into "easy things should be easy, hard things should be harder."
Latest Chrome mobile running on Android 9.
Judging by the current state, it'll arrive with no add-on support, which I honestly hope doesn't happen.
I have already seen seen some ascii stars in the URLs of Googles ads. There is always abuse.
As of today, search results are still favicons on mobile...
If the results are requested with a simpler HTTP client that does not automatically execute Javascript or CSS, where we can control te HTTP headers, then these manipulations can easily be sidestepped.
This is not "blocking". It is using a client that does not process JS or CSS, where we can easily control the headers sent. This can be done, e.g., with openssl s_client, obsd nc, socat, etc.
They are probably sending different html+css+js based on user-agent.
They have been doing that for many years. The difference this time is people are objecting to the look of what they are sending.
It not as easy as you say it is, theyre using server side scripts to mangle the URLs.
However, I wonder how privoxy users handle TLS.
I use localhost proxies to decrypt TLS before it reaches destination programs as well as encrypt outgoing plaintext HTTP traffic from non-TLS enabled programs.
Using proxies allows me to edit incoming and outgoing traffic where needed.
From the privoxy FAQ:
4.15. How can Privoxy filter Secure (HTTPS) URLs?
Since secure HTTP connections are encrypted SSL sessions between your browser and the secure site, and are meant to be reliably secure, there is little that Privoxy can do but hand the raw gibberish data though from one end to the other unprocessed.
The only exception to this is blocking by host patterns, as the client needs to tell Privoxy the name of the remote server, so that Privoxy can establish the connection. If that name matches a host-only pattern, the connection will be blocked.
As far as ad blocking is concerned, this is less of a restriction than it may seem, since ad sources are often identifiable by the host name, and often the banners to be placed in an encrypted page come unencrypted nonetheless for efficiency reasons, which exposes them to the full power of Privoxy's ad blocking.
"Content cookies" (those that are embedded in the actual HTML or JS page content, see filter{content-cookies}), in an SSL transaction will be impossible to block under these conditions. Fortunately, this does not seem to be a very common scenario since most cookies come by traditional means.
Except if you use YouTube, which is a pretty significant service but impossible to use domain-based adblock like pi-hole with since both ads and content are served through the same Google domain. If you use the YouTube for Android app that means you have to sit through ads.
The alternative is something like invidious[0], but last time I tried it was impossible to seek videos more than half an hour because the seek bar shares its space with the player controls so it ends up occupying only ~15% of the viewport. That or waiting for Firefox Nightly to support WebExtensions.
[0] https://invidio.us
However, ads and video are not served through the same Google domain.
Further, the ads are not served unless Javascript is enabled.
As such, aside from user comments, it is easy to retrieve the non-video content without retrieving the ads. Just use an HTTP client that ignores Javascript.
Javascript is not needed to view video from the domains that serve the video.
Even if you have a lot of pages, you can still make a readable URL, like The New York Times "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/22/style/modern-love-podcast.... None of that except perhaps "https://" and ".html" are mysterious computer codes.
Absolute rubbish. That is obviously a number identifying the item. I wish a lot of URLs would be shorter, but that's different. I also offer this piece of evidence:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7678729
People are intelligent. They can learn and see things if you give them a chance, and you're basically advocating for keeping them stupid and unknowing by hiding things from them... why?
Even if you know what it means, it's still not suitable for reading. If you saw that in search results, how will you decide if you prefer ?id=7678729 or ?id=22107823 ? They're not even sequential. You can't remember it from something you've seen before.
Yes keep them stupid and hide things from them. That's an important part of how computers became popular. A lot of people were excluded in the days of command line everything.
There's another comment here which sums up my thoughts on this perfectly: "Don't make me think" has turned into "Don't let me think", and that is a disturbingly dangerous direction for freedom from corporate/government control.
Society would be very different today if, several hundred years ago, the "ruling elite" decided that literacy should be discouraged.
I’d much rather pay a monthly fee to get the services I want.
I understand that Google and Facebook have gone too far down this path, and they will say such a service is not as profitable, but ultimately their business model seems unsustainable. People search for the truth, and while you can sell anybody anything, the truth will prevail.
Now that it’s a mechanism of commerce it’s attracted the worst of the worst who have no ethics. Ethics courses will be taught in response to bad actors, not in anticipation of.
I’m aware the cats out of the bag and all of the high paid engineers need to make a living somehow. I just don’t think it’s about the consumer anymore, if it ever was. It will get worse before it gets better and I’m checking out.
I’m an older engineer and going to school for HVAC/R. I plan to do it on the side and eventually start a business. I’m pulling the rip cord.
One thing I will say about the blue collar world: they’re better about ego management. Many young engineers I meet are highly paid and treated well, sometimes rarely disagreed with. I can’t help but think that fosters some bad habits.
I see computers and the internet as an extension of ourselves, and so they still allow us to communicate with whoever and whatever we want. I’m so glad this community exists and we can express that.
The worst part should already be over, you just joined hn. I’m also all about good will, fun, and generally good intent. And if you do something cool but it’s costing you something, let me know how I can chip in.
World leaders and CEOs go to bed every night just like us, they speak, poop, and reproduce at the same rate as everyone else. Corporations and governments are nothing more than contracts to benefit those very same people, us. Even though there’s not an equal benefit to everyone involved.
If those contracts fail, and our freedom and liberty is at risk like you say, we ought to renegotiate. It seems, if you listen carefully, that’s what the world is currently choosing to do.
It’s still possible to disconnect. It’s still possible to choose what you see or say, and it’s still possible to focus your energy on something you believe in. As long as you’re not tired of that, I‘m optimistic.
It's our job as techies to add that option, and make it easy.
The main catalyst for the internet was the fear of nuclear war, as exemplified in this influential RAND paper from 1960 [0], which led to the investment in ARPANET. I'm not disputing good will and good intent, but I don't think fun had much to do with it.
[0] http://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/papers/2008/P1995....
There was a beautiful sweet spot between the earliest ISPs around 1990, and the end of fun once the effects of the mid 90s ending of NSF's ban on commercial activity fully kicked in. Probably late 90s/millennium as the first dot com boom turned into full on idiotic bubble.
TLDR: Get the HVAC skills, then go into PLC work.
Edited: 3rd sentence for context.
Any suggestions? How about programming software? Readily available?
I recently picked up a Asco 300 w/comms module for my standby gen, DSE800 to control the engine, and a Siemens 9610 for consumption analysis.
I’m working on controls for load shedding now. I put shunt trip breakers on my water heater and it’ll kick off when on standby since I don’t have enough power, as per NEC.
I’m also working on a modulating valve controlled by the temp delta of my tankless water heater. Sometimes it can’t keep up and I’d rather slow down flow for a shower instead of letting it throw an error, resetting, and annoying people in the shower.
If you go down the rabbit hole, check out Tridium, aka Niagara AX. Most(all?) of the big controls platforms are built on the Niagara framework.
Also, maybe contact contractors of Johnson Controls, Carrier Controls, Novar Controls, etc for more pertinent info.
As an example every single Amazon or web product or service search results in dozens to thousands of irrelevant, shoddy and worthless products and services that are far closer to an outright scam than something to use. That's without considering the vast array of true scams and fakes.
A web without ads would have a chance of being useful once again, rather than every single click being an opportunity to part me from more money. Perhaps with suitable heavy regulation we could have the best of both worlds, more like newspaper advertising of old. Just "enough" non-invasive, non-tracking, non-JS ads to provide information on new services and products, but with enough demands of honesty, escrow good behaviour deposits, or whatever constraints you can conceive to keep all advertisers well behaved.
This is fine. People should make web pages because they have something to say, not because they want to make money. Since the advertisers can stop supporting a site, they effectively become the arbiters of right and wrong on the internet. Anything paid for by ads is inherently worse and less trustworthy than independent creations and platforms because they must necessarily be advertiser-friendly.
Right now I can't think of any ad-supported site that I critically need. It could all go away and my web experience would probably be better for it.
Even if I did, let me clarify something. When I go to amazon.com and start looking for pens, I don't really consider the product listings to be ads at that point, even though each is obviously advertising a product. The listing is the content I am there for. If I go to a company's website to learn about their products, they are clearly advertising their own (first party) products. I'm fine with that.
Note that there is a difference between "an ad" and advertising. Characteristic of ads is that they are not the content you're there for. The real content is independent of "an ad", and you could block or remove ads and the real content would not suffer. Characteristic of ads is that they are not the topic of the site/content/video you're reading/watching (they might relate to the same subject matter, but they are not the topic). Also characteristic of ads is that they're advertising third party products/services, which again have little to do with the actual content.
If you removed a company's products from their own website, or the products from amazon's listing, then you'd be removing the content I'm specifically after. Does not fill my criteria for "an ad."
Now as to how this pertains to HN: HN was specifically created for startup-related links. So if they're advertising startup jobs here, they are very much posting the kind of content users would come here for. That would be actual content, not ads. Also, like a company advertising their own products on their own website, I think it is quite appropriate for YC to advertise companies they've funded here.
People can afford to fund good online services at the level of google search (for example), but they can’t afford to make google wildly profitable.
That’s fine with me, it’s just VC culture and SV that has a problem with it.
I expect the goal of people advocating for less advertising is to stop giving them that money on a going-forward basis.
Search ought to be a replacement. Imagine a site that makes a snapshot of other sites and then anyone can type a search request in it and follow the relevant link. That would replace ads since you get your clients for free. Just build the best electronic marketplace and everyone will visit it by themselves.
This worked to some extent and then stopped because people have what they think themselves they need, and the “commercial” part means someone pushing unnecessary crap down their throats. Losing that part is fine for everyone except these wandering commivoyagers.
Subscriptions do not work for most content makers because the content they make is consumed out of boredom instead of need.
The problem is all the associated crapware, bloat, intrusion, bandwidth hogging, end-user hostility to point of abuse, dark patterns, intentional misdirection, A/B-test-optimised serendipitous confusion, SEO game-theory shenanigans, and ABOVE ALL the industrial scale stalking.
I've linked this piece a couple of times in the past three months: https://bostik.iki.fi/aivoituksia/random/no-stalking.html
Hell, I remember back in 2005 when I held a university course on basics of information security. The class laughed when I noted that observing everything a person does is called stalking when done by an individual, but as soon as its done by a large corporation indiscriminately and at scale, it's data-mining.
In the eyes of the law, only one of them is criminal.
In the same way we could say the cholera virus is not by itself a problem - it is the associated symptoms that are the problem.
I can still recall the bad vibes when Google announced their acquisition of DoubleClick. In the early days their search advertising had been non-intrusive, text-only, rendered server side, and visually out of the way. Banner ads were introduced only some time later. (That was already a step in the wrong direction, IMO.) DC, on the other hand, was known as an invasive bad actor who shoveled unwanted crapware to browsers and had already earned the reputation of an online stalker. In fact, ad blockers had existed long before Google got into serving them. Privoxy, anyone?
All the hazards I listed are direct causes of adtech's surveillance business model, and the neverending quest to remember every possible piece of information available on the end-users. I'm not sure comparison with cholera is the most accurate one. (It's a bacteria, after all.) Malaria, a parasite, might be a better fit for this purpose. The symptoms are what makes either one dangerous, but instead of trying to eradicate just one type of a problem, we would do better to purge the environment from what makes the organisms' existence and breeding possible in the first place.
ß: Honest question. What do you call an ecosystem comprised entirely of parasites?
Although, shockingly enough, one of the sites I regularly visit (ars technica) saw the light and greatly reduced their subscription price like 2 years ago. And earned my subscription as a result.
I'd pay for a couple more sites if they dropped the coffee fallacy.
People search for whatever confirms their worldview.[1]
> while you can sell anybody anything, the truth will prevail.
Those ideas are at odds. If you “can sell anybody anything”, you can also sell them a lie. That keeps happening, so I see no basis for the argument that “the truth will prevail”.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias
How is that possible if you never visit the same sites? That idea appears to favor the big players.
I think ISPs are fine services, they can host and serve websites like they’ve always done. I pay for my service, you pay for yours, we can connect, it balances out.
If you decide to do something that adds value for the both of us, I can chip in to help you cover your costs.
One thing very valuable to me is a search engine. You promise to index all sites you can find on the internet, but you need funds to buy disks and servers. I think you’d do a great job, and I’ll pay you a monthly fee to keep giving me access to your wealth of information.
It so works out that the more people you can serve, the more income you’ll have to become a bigger player. Nothing wrong with that, just as there used to be nothing wrong with Google’s search.
It’s when they asked not the searchers but the advertisers to pay them that things went awry.
You could help them get to know themselves better, or find what they like by asking for information that they’re comfortable divulging.
Just please don’t combine those two products in one, for the love of god!
I do agree, but if you're unscrupulous enough you can still get rich before such a business model eventually folds.
In the moment, yeah, this matters - but Google still beats DDG for certain classes of results and people go where the easiest experience is.
I say this as a user of DDG. ;P
The real problem is the “embedness” level of Google is much higher than any search engine achieved before: a switcher must make a pretty serious effort to change browser settings, change tools etc, and you can bet top dollars that Google will pull all monopolistic tricks in the book as soon as they feel their position is truly challenged. This is a scenario akin to Microsoft vs office open standards back in the ‘00s.
Disclaimer: I do work in Google, but nowhere near anything user visible (I'm developing SRE infrastructure).
Google's results is interesting though as it starts with one insurance company only (ad placement? It doesn't show it as a ad tho but it looks and feels like one given it's isolated from the rest of the results after the fold). It is then followed by a map which is an odd choice as generally most people in my country manage their insurance online or over the phone. Then below the fold more companies can be found but with media stories(?!) thrown in as well interrupting the flow.
It's been a long time since I've used Google as my daily driver and I'm gobsmacked at how badly it executes this query. It used to be very good but no longer. I have used DDG for some years now and it generally works just fine for me. This limited experiment in going back to Google has made me happier with DDG as my default search engine.
With adblockers off, I get 2 ads on DDG and 4 on Google.
I suspect your adblocker is just more targeted towards Google.
"People don't really compare that hard" has been demonstrated to be false - if people didn't care that much, Bing & co would've seen much greater success in the past few years. It's not like this hasn't been tried before.
Google is so damn good at search that being "good enough" isn't good enough for the average user. You have to be as good as Google. This is why Apple and Mozilla work with Google to offer them as a default - they're not dumb, they know people expect it.
I'm still convinced the advantage Google has is not fundamentally technical. A lot of people expect it not because it's good, but because it has always meant "search" for them, ever since they got online. Google spent a generation at the top, and that sort of entrenchment is really hard to lose. Even Microsoft didn't really lose their primacy on the desktop - the internet just got big enough to escape their stranglehold.
Any takers for trying out Bing?
https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/du...
“ In fact, DuckDuckGo gets its results from over four hundred sources. These include hundreds of vertical sources delivering niche Instant Answers, DuckDuckBot (our crawler) and crowd-sourced sites (like Wikipedia, stored in our answer indexes). 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.”
It is not false. The standard 10 links you see come directly from Bing and they don’t even attempt to hide that fact.
Genuine question. Bing is still owned by MS right?
Namely, I was planning a summer trip that included a mountain road that is closed 9 months per year due to snow. And I was doing that in spring.
Google didn't let me use that road because, right, it was closed. And people shouldn't be allowed to plan their trips 3 months in advance.
Bing gave me the same results without the nonsense.
The new design splits the page vertically, when you click on a picture. And its purpose, which is quite confusing, is to follow a second track of searches related to that picture.
But that just makes the usage confusing. I want to click on the picture in order to see it in magnification mode, to have it fill the browser window. This was the prior design. It worked perfectly, and allowed me to quickly see the picture I want, in a magnified mode.
But instead, with the new design, it opens the picture on the 2nd split screen, but the picture is practically the same size.
And to make matters worse, some of the pictures, like if they are portrait mode, does not magnify, so it makes it very difficult to see the details of the picture. I’d have to open up the source picture in another tab.
Someone must’ve thought this was a good idea, but to be honest, it sucks.
And also, the split screens with dual scrolling behaviors, is incredibly frustrating to use. Half the time, I’m scrolling on the wrong half of the page.
The image search is now such a frustrating experience, that I try to use other search engines for a better experience.
All the rest of the design choices was Google's, and we rightly blame them for purposefully degrading the experience of using Google Image search.
And Google could also decide to block websites, like Pinterest, that are gaming their search algorithms. That would be beneficial for everyone.
What is not fine, is to use that as a reason to completely screw up the rest of the design, when a small change could have been enough.
That said, it is absolutely theft for Google to source data from your site, then use that to add value to their site, without giving you any click-through traffic.
Tangentially, it would be great if Google sent like $1 (edit: or < $1; the amount isn't my point) per 1000 clicks out to websites whose search results get clicked. They already have an ad-engine that does all of this. This would mean that you would get paid to have good SEO, or to be a central hub. The websites that comprise the entire web should negotiate better terms with central data brokers like Google.
Would you be OK, if Google didn't show images from your site on their site? If so, I believe a simple robots.txt statement should be sufficient.
> This would mean that you would get paid to have good SEO, or to be a central hub. The websites that comprise the entire web should negotiate better terms with central data brokers like Google.
I don't really get the logic by which someone letting people find you, should pay for that privilege.
(have not used Google search in a long time)
If you want to use an image that is not free, you should go pay for it, no? You have a link for the site. You can even go visit the site as a courtesy for free images. Are you saying Google should be paying for the images?
If you want to be mad at someone, look at getty - they take² people's images and charge for them, even managing to file DMCA takedowns on the author[1]. As a consolation, at least they host the images themselves.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12180039
² Quick skim says they may merely let other people do the uploading of effectively stolen images.
Giving people a way to opt out doesn't absolve Google. They need to get permission to use the property of others, not default to using it unless told not to.
They're acting as if everything that isn't locked up, and doesn't have a note on it saying otherwise, is free for anyone to borrow.
> I don't really get the logic by which someone letting people find you, should pay for that privilege.
Google can let people find sites without copying the content of those sites.
In fact, when Google copies your content, people are less likely to go to your site, the very opposite of "letting people find you".
0: https://www.jdsupra.com/legalnews/german-federal-court-rules...
> The court in Karlsruhe does not regard the display of the preview images as an act of making available a copyright work in the sense of the copyright law. ... Since the decision handed down in the “Svensson” case in 2014, it is common ground that, in principle, the use of a hyperlink is not a copyright-relevant act.
> [translated] The plaintiff has made the content of its website accessible for search engines without making use of technical means to exclude the images of her works from the search and display by image search engines in the form of preview images.
0: http://juris.bundesgerichtshof.de/cgi-bin/rechtsprechung/doc...
I am using entry page that brute forces password for accessing other pages. It takes a 30 seconds max on phone, but will raise cpu to 100%. Later it is stored to cookie. I havent seen any crawler get past that.
If I made a website like Image Search, hotlinked all the images and burried a visit website button somewhere as a ‘curtesy’, I’d be sued out of existence within a couple of weeks.
Paying websites with good SEO would make filtering out abusers of search engines (no meaningful content, scraping other websites and republishing, clickbait...) even harder, as there would now be a direct ROI on SEO.
At least someone has to pay for the book to be in a library.
You can add "imagesize:32x32" to your search query to only show images of a desired size, but I'd still rather see Google bring back the search tool option.
edit: Oh, it no longer has "custom" under the sizes. Hmm.
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/view-image/jpcmhce...
its probably a blunder that they ll fix soon, but one would expect much better from billion dollar companies
Myspace was once the top social network. They looked unchallengeable. Then they got greedy. Myspace kept upping their ad content until usage dropped. Instead of backing off the ads, they upped the ad content even more to maintain revenue. Usage dropped further. That death spiral ended with Myspace irrelevant.
I can disable it, for now. I won’t be surprised if at some point in the future, they make it the standard and only behavior.
It’s getting exponentially harder to achieve their expected growth rates. They haven’t managed to find another significant revenue source beside ads so they have to squeeze everything out of that. Kind of sad that all the super smart people there still haven’t come up with any product they can sell with enough revenue besides ads.
It's not at all strange they can't just pop out a few more of those.
Google deserves as much condemnation for introducing those as it does for the recent redesign.
I think most people don’t realize it’s Google’s fault and blame the sites.
Thank you the comment. It explains so much of how the Internet has gotten markedly worse in the last couple months.
These “auto” AdWords are totally overwhelming and awful.
Absolutely. That's how I noticed what 'Auto Ads' really did. People thought my site was infected by malware and contacted me with screenshots.
MySpace analogy doesn't make sense since there is no Facebook, which was a competent social network, here. Search is a massive investment and you don't just have random companies suddenly rising taking over the users. Duckduckgo itself uses Bing Search as its backend.
Nothing is too big to fail. If there's no direct competitor, an indirect one or a group could take over too.
> Duckduckgo itself uses Bing Search as its backend.
This reads to me as if Bing was the only backend they use, which isn't the case. According to Wikipedia they use multiple backends:
"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.", source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DuckDuckGo#Overview
Don't be deluded by the HN bubble. I like DDG and am glad it exists, but it's usage in a year is probably what Google gets in a few minutes, and I'm willing to bet that ratio hasn't really improved significantly for years.
Google traffic is about 4 million searches per minute, which comes to 6 billion searches per day. DDG traffic is about 50 million searches per day, so about 1%.
It looks like DDG traffic has been doubling every 1.5-2 years or so for the past decade. I presume that Google's traffic is relatively constant at this point.
https://duckduckgo.com/traffic
Probably a poor assumption. The total number of internet users is still growing significantly.
Whether I've achieved any distance is an open question and I suspect that it is less than it feels like when I use DDG.
The results are comparable in my current experience. Compage searches for 'bluetooth speakers' on Google [0] and DDG [1]. In my location (Canada) DDG returns national results which are preferred and relevant.
I like that on the DDG results page the ad is clearly separated from organic results and I get the results w/out a mapping insert. That's just my preference, though.
Even the results URLs speak volumes. I have no idea what data - if any - I'm exposing about myself w/ the Google result.
[0] https://www.google.ca/search?source=hp&ei=KyUsXtPGIIGL5wKRx7...
[1] https://duckduckgo.com/?q=bluetooth+speakers&ia=shopping
I do appreciate the heads up, thanks.
Edit: just realized that DDG does currency conversion too, there's one less class of searches that goes to Google!
Unfortunately, however, having used DuckDuckGo for the last few weeks my experience has been quite the opposite (described here in some more detail: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22106837 ), especially when it comes to programming-related queries.
I hear a lot of anecdotes about search working/not working but concrete examples remain elusive.
Maybe, a browser plugin that allows you to easily report less than optimal or even irrelevant search results to DuckDuckGo (including a comparison with other search engine in case those yield more appropriate results) would be quite useful.
This obviously has privacy implications, though.
Can you provide a source for this? I couldn’t find it myself, but I was searching with DDG.
“DuckDuckGo gets its results from over four hundred sources. These include hundreds of vertical sources delivering niche Instant Answers, DuckDuckBot (our crawler) and crowd-sourced sites (like Wikipedia, stored in our answer indexes). 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.“
Why would that even matter? It's good enough no matter how it works. Frankly it's better than google since it doesn't have nearly as many anti-patterns.
It's also not "leaps and bounds ahead beyond anything else" , but they have the network effect and technical lock in to be safe enough. Two things they did: first, they promoted the usage of the omnibox as search box, so now almost every browser is auto subscribed to google,and subscriptions are sticky. Second, they stopped sending the search referrer to the target sites and worked to remove referrers completely from the web. This precludes target sites from providing a competitive search experience. Google now stands uniquely and exclusively in the pathway from the users' search bar to the destination website, and extracting the rents.
I don’t really think so, not any more.
Now, add in all the great features and functions they have built over the last 10+ years (maps, travel, etc) and they will probably always maintain an advantage. They are after all a verb...
But the actual search results, IMHO are most definitely within reach for a competitor or 3 to tackle.
I've tried all the alternatives ddg, bing etc but the Google's results are still much better imo and as long as that is true they will keep trying such shenanigans.
Nothing to do with being believable. More to do with being gimmicky and irrelevant.
For example, the the size of the skip button on YouTube ads on Android changed so it only has the width of the seconds counter instead of including the "Skip in N" text. Before you could keep pressing the button before the timer ran out without triggering the ad, if you were impatient, but now you have to be careful not to accidentally click on the ad since the button is so small.
Why? Because it results in more accidental clicks, if so many people have the habit of tapping it over and over. Which means more money. At the expense of user frustration or worry over clicking it unintentionally.
Look at Dropbox's redesign. They slapped a bunch of completely useless collaboration tools that have nothing to do with my singular use case for Dropbox: syncing files. And that's because, as they say, syncing is a feature, not a product, so they probably had no choice to find new ways to "keep growing" and making revenue or simply die out. Because they can't afford otherwise. But Dropbox was the one company with the capital to fine-tune their algorithm so it "just worked" across network instability and numerous system configurations (until they dropped support for everything until ext4 on Linux at least), so that's what so many people used.
I believe that if the only goal was to develop a program to sync files across devices, then everyone at Dropbox would have declared all the extra features unnecessary. But people have to eat.
I keep wondering if the limitless pursuit of capital growth is worth the downsides. It can give us things like Dropbox, but ultimately Dropbox is not worth the hassle for me anymore due to the bloat. As a naive question, will there ever be point where we've had enough growing?
I get the feeling Mr. Mod’s tweet caught fire because of the sentiment, of Google oppression and dominance, and not many stopped to think what in particular about the design they don’t like.
Personally there is nothing immediately offensive to the way the results look. In fact I might argue it’s actually a good esthetic. I like seeing the favicon @ the top, and it does mimic the way mobile search results have looked for a while now. Nobody freaked out about that change?
If the anger over this is because people think this is a dark pattern, trying to obfuscate the difference between advertisements, that might not necessarily be wrong. But progression has been happening for a long time now. The picture in the article shows that at least since 2013, they eliminated the different color background that used to highlight ads. So it’s been a good 7 years since ads were nearly indistinguishable from regular results.
Expedia for example, if you searched for "flights" you would get an advert for Expedia and a search result for expedia.com
To be honest, for a long time I'd role my eyes at the DDG users in every thread, talking about how it's hey, pretty good now.
Well, now I'm that guy, because I think it's actually better than Google now. It looks crisper, cleaner, has way fewer ads, and does less fuzzing of my actual search terms. I love it -- I'm hooked.
What are novel ways that search results can be presented to (and consumed by) the user? Where is search going in the future?
I am a bit surprised to not see them on top of this game, but at the same time it would be a ripe chance for someone else to give it a spin (assuming that they have a sizable number of users to begin with).
Anyone want to guess what their next devious attempt to confuse users into clicking more ads?
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22108338
But, all the hullabaloo in the article about Ad links making money for Google v/s the others that don't seems misplaced. After all, the point of a search engine is to find stuff. And if an ad shows an alternative, that is possibly better, you can click on it.
These ad links are definitely not going to download malicious malware onto your devices.
I am more worried about ads on social media platforms with infinite scroll because those ads are more unpredictable in placement.
And yes, ads are annoying. Double ads in YouTube are annoying. f you google.
https://contributor.google.com
Matt Cutts wrote that it works like if I would be bidding with an empty ad, but Google ad system works by CPC, so actually the product should be free in theory :)
Google exactly knows my long term value, so it could ask for that amount of money. Also it's for AdSense / DoubleClick, not for Google.com, where ads matter the most.
Asking for your "long term value" is interesting, although for users who run ad blockers and therefore never click an ad, isn't their value super low anyway? Imagine Google asking for $50/yr to not show ads, installing an ad blocker, then a year later seeing Google ask $5/yr as your value plummets.
It could just use my interests to predict how much I'm willing to pay for getting rid of ads.
Or even the type and number of devices that I'm using Google on should be a good enough predictor, or just the country (which is the case for Youtube Premium).
My eyes first move thorough the colourful favicons first, then the url of the page and then the real content.
This flies in the face of good design.
I'm not sure this is a big deal one you get used to it. Other search engines also have favicons. My browser tab has favicons. Most internet content (like twitter) has some kind of colourful icon to the left of the text.
DDG and Bing have ads favicon that's in very thin fonts, making it much less legible than Google's black, bold font.
There are many valid reasons to switch from Google to DDG, but ads being less clearly marked on Google is not a valid reason, since Google is objectively far more clearer in marking ads than DDG or Bing.
Edit: Edge operates just like Chrome. Microsoft has made a better Chrome with less memory usage.
The issue was cultural. The articles saying “okay this is too far on making Ads hard to see” and the super hilariously ironic fact that they launched this on the exact day that Basecamp went in front of congress to explain how Google is abusing running ads on trademarks, where this design make it much much worse.
The Verge seems to cover it with less dirty tricks:
https://www.theverge.com/2020/1/24/21080424
As a Google employee, I am not a fan of the new design and can appreciate consumers' dissatisfaction with it and will be happy if it is reverted.
But, I can't help feel like there is a double standard, here.
For instance, Google didn't even opt to bid on the recent giant contract to be the cloud provider for the U.S. Government.
Microsoft beat out Amazon for this and there wasn't a peep about it.
It seems to me that Google is unfairly targeted in this space for some reason. It makes me question the motivation of some of those pushing this agenda.
Google's last big search update has been a complete disaster for me. Very naive and arrogant assumptions of the semantics of my search. I can't search anything more than a few words strung together. If you try to search a sentence that you don't precisely know (like a couple words are different) then you're shit out of luck now even though it used to work great.
Google is literally becoming worse at search.
This sort of highly targeted search used to work so well in GOOG and now it doesn’t work at all and hasn’t for a while. I moved to DDG a year ago and never even seem to use !g.
A leopard cannot change its spots.
Confidence comes on foot but goes on horseback
I moved to FF + Duckduckgo engine a while ago, it will be extremely hard for them to win me back.
I guess if I really get tired of the new look, there's other options out there. DuckDuckGo is great and I use them occasionally. Bing actually isn't terrible either, so there's alternatives out there. Maybe I'll give some others a try for a while.
So here's another link: http://archive.is/aRU3O
https://i.imgur.com/KAZWb9i.png
The Ad maker on Startpage is way less visible than it ever was on Google or even DDG.
I'm just saying that comparing with DDG is not a good idea in this case, since on DDG the ads look much more like organic search than on Google.
Oh and "by date" ranking doesn't work at all in the news tab
You know, GDPR, and otherwise respect of readers.
See also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22019822
Without major changes all over the company I don’t see how Google will get better.
This is a very public embarrassment for a number of people - you don't intentionally risk this sort of thing. The most likely explanation is that they expected people like me to grumble but the vast majority to not mind. They were wrong.
> Without major changes all over the company I don’t see how Google will get better.
Agree with this. And major changes don't come without major systemic shock.
We can look back in history and make a well educated guess. It took me a couple of days to figure it out, but we HAVE seen this same game play out. Back in the 90s there was a search engine that started out pretty decent but eventually did their best (or worst) to make ads and search results indistinguishable.
It was called Altavista.
They rolled the dice hoping it would blow over. Government attention was likely the killer.
i'm going to admit: not only do i love favicons in search, i've sent countless emails and replied to various tweets with the need, even requirement, to add favicons in search.
it helps me find what i'm looking for much much faster.
[1] https://youtu.be/dn6sWdxpk90
Here's what I mean:
withering criticism from politicians, consumers and the press over the way in which search results displays were made to look like... .. It’s also a pretty evil by a company whose mantra was “Don’t be evil.” ..paid advertisements are ever more indistinguishable
This is like addressing the plastic straw problem on Shell oil rigs. Google and Facebook are both (among other things) more influential over media than Murdoch and the next five runners-up combined. Traditional media obviously also violate their own "journalistic ethics" for money reasons, but at least there is such a code. They teach college courses on it.
Google & FB have more influence on things like elections, war/peace & culture, but they don't even have an ethic to violate. Zuch won't even admit that Facebook is a political media outlet, despite being the most significant one to have ever existed.
Withering criticism of font choices is so 2007. "Vehement demands for antitrust action" is what we're about in the 1920s.