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Ask HN: Will you stop Googling now, that it removed URLs and added favicons?

47 points by vizzah ↗ HN
I am seriously considering moving away from Google (or writing a browser addon) which will revert search results back to clean and readable form.

It seems "ad blending" made a final step towards morphing into organic results. It was distinct background first, ads count limited, then it went further and further and now it's just a favicon saying 'Ad' which distinguish sponsored content from the organic.

34 comments

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JohnFen
I would, yes, if I hadn't given up on Google already.
aosaigh
Ugh, I only noticed the favicons today. It's such a clear attempt to blur the lines between the regular results (now with favicons) and the ads (now with something that looks very like a favicon, particularly when scrolling).

I've also noticed recently that the first search result page is absolutely filled with nonsense: "People also ask" "Refined by Brand" Map results, Sponsered banner etc. I did a search recently where there were only 3 actual results on the first page, the rest were peripheral items.

It's such a mess. Unfortunately no matter how many times I try to switch to DDG, the results just don't hold up. Particularly for localised results.

x2f10
Don't forget the ugliness that is AMP. I understand the pursuit of answers rather than links, but for a variety of reasons, it's not working. DDG is nice, but the results are often lackluster (especially local results, as you say).

The sad reality is, I am having trouble discovering new content online even if I have a fairly specific search query. I am fed a list of the same websites ad nauseam.

I can't find much in regards to in-depth discussions, interesting blogs, or thought-provoking material. The worst part is, for communities that do provide this content, secrecy is a feature not a bug.

danShumway
Startpage recently got acquired, and is now (at least partially) owned by an advertising company. As a privacy advocate, I don't trust them. I use DuckDuckGo, I don't use Startpage.

However, you have to think of privacy and consumer hostile behavior as a continuum. Even though I don't trust Startpage as a private search engine, I also don't trust Google as a private search engine. The question is, "is Startpage still better than Google?"

I think it is. I think if you're in the position of saying, "I can't use DDG, I get the privacy issues, I get the monopoly issues, but I just don't like their results", then Startpage is still going to be a pretty big step up in privacy over Google search. Startpage is still going to be a good way to fragment your data so one company doesn't know everything about you. It's still going to be a good way of getting around the worst user-hostile UI changes to blend ads into search results.

If you disable Javascript and run a Google search, every single link you click on gets wrapped in a Google URL to record that click -- there is no way around that without some kind of browser extension. If you disable Javascript and run a Startpage search, you get direct links to the website.

So I heavily encourage people in your position to use Startpage if the alternative is continuing to use Google Search directly.

freediver
> Startpage recently got acquired, and is now (at least partially) owned by an advertising company. As a privacy advocate, I don't trust them. I use DuckDuckGo, I don't use Startpage.

Not following the logic there. How is DuckDuckGo not an (entirely) advertising company? Do they make money off anything else other than ads and injecting affiliate links?

danShumway
Yeah, I should have clarified more.

DuckDuckGo and Startpage always made money with advertising. The problem with Startpage's acquisition is the introduction of System1/Privacy One, which is not just focused on advertising, but on advertising based on consumer intent/interested, calculated by large-scale collection of consumer data.[0]

> “In our business,” Blend adds, “if we can gather as much data as possible, give it off to our engineers and data scientists, and then manage the two effectively, the business can quickly scale.”

Again, even though I don't trust System 1/Privacy One as much as I trust DuckDuckGo, I do still trust them more than Google.

[0]: https://csq.com/2018/01/system-1-silicon-beach-sleeping-gian...

freediver
That makes sense. I would still argue that Google back in the day when it only had 30M queries/day (like DDG has today) was no worse than DDG today, and that is the only fair comparison. Increased popularity together with influx of advertising money caused it to adopt product features and policies that allowed those advertisers to convert better, and make more money.

So basically what you are saying is "I trust that Weinberg & co are immune to that kind of pressure" or that their primary motives are altruistic in nature and will always stay such.

For me personally that is a hard sell. The elephant in the room is advertising based business models for search engines, and any company adopting it will be tempted to follow the path of Google if such opportunity is presented to it.

danShumway
> "I trust that Weinberg & co are immune to that kind of pressure" or that their primary motives are altruistic in nature and will always stay such.

No, not at all. I trust that right now Weinberg & co are less likely to be actively caving to that pressure or actively exploiting my information.

Trust is always a moving target, but right now I know that Google logs literally everything I click on associated to an IP address, and uses that for targeted ads. As far as I know, Startpage doesn't currently do that, though I expect them to get more aggressive about data in the future. DuckDuckGo (most likely) also doesn't do that, and I expect it to take them some time and have additional warning signs before they start doing it.

The link wrapping is a good example of something measurable that matters at this moment. You can use Startpage without Javascript and with a few browser-level features toggled and be pretty certain that the actual link you click on will be impossible for them to log. With Google search, today, there's no way to do that.

freediver
Fair enough. Btw I find link wrapping is annoying, you could do it also with javascript, but it is necessary to improve the quality of search results. I would also want to know what results work for which queries.
PikachuEXE
I won't I stopped using Chrome / Google long time ago (> 1 year) I started to dislike Google since AMP introduced
Kihashi
I looked at it, was confused, then downloaded the duckduckgo search for Firefox.
is_true
What is worse is that most of the advanced queries aren't working anymore
blueadept111
I noticed that the query "foo" AND "bar" does not give the same result as "foo" + "bar".

So what's going on, is "AND" just treated as another keyword now? Lame.

unlinked_dll
Yup. Putting things in quotes is no longer "find this exact term" but a best match for most things.

And on top of that you can't find specific information on actual data if it anyway correlates to businesses that advertise. It's gotten painfully difficult to research markets that I'm casually interested in (e.g. tonight I wanted to compare a few cities by how many hotels they had - this is impossible on google and duck duck go with simple queries).

They really aren't doing a great job of cataloging data and making it useful to anyone but advertisers.

rasz
nah, I just whipped 10 line userscript to fix it back
SturgeonsLaw
I don't suppose you'd be so kind as to share it?
rasz
a part of a bigger script:

    let resultLinks = e ? e.querySelectorAll('.r>a:not([class])') : document.querySelectorAll('div#search .r>a:not([class])');
    for (let link of resultLinks)
    {
      //LC20lb yWc32e iUh30 B6fmyf
      link.removeAttribute("ping");
      link.querySelector('a>div>cite.iUh30').innerText = link.querySelector('a>.LC20lb').innerText;
      let div = document.createElement('span');
      div.innerText = link.href;
      div.className = 'LC20lb';
      link.querySelector('a>.LC20lb').parentNode.insertBefore(div, link.querySelector('a>.LC20lb').nextSibling);
      link.querySelector('a>.LC20lb').parentNode.removeChild(link.querySelector('a>.LC20lb'));
    }
It was just a quick fix to get urls back, still needs fixing the cache/translation links etc, havent gotten around to making it look 100% like the old search page http://i.imgur.com/RoTJ5vG.png
Snetry
The more shady stuff Google pulls the less inclined I am to even consider using them.
PixelPaul
As a business owner that relies on organic traffic, this is a huge hit
rococode
If you don't mind my asking, why?
dfghfhgf
What do you mean? I don't see difference, can any1 take a screenshoot?
Gustomaximus
At the risk your joking;

http://prntscr.com/qp1cs6

Note: I scrolled past the top result and twitter to show you the listed results.

NullPrefix
Partial rollout. They started doing these fugly icons months ago for selected users.
manbearpiggy
Google search has become less user unfriendly, turned their back on their old business model. It seems they've deliberately blurred the lines between ads and relevance.

Bing is now easier to use.

EnderMB
It makes me wonder whether Google is now "too big to fall" in regards to search.

I switched to DDG a few months ago, and quite frankly I can probably count the number of times I've needed to switch to Google on one hand, and nearly every time it's been related to looking up directions via web search and expecting Google Maps to open up. DDG and Bing are largely good enough already for standard web search. The standard has probably been there for a while, so I would argue that web search is largely down to experience right now - and DDG/Bing have Google beat here.

With that being said, I doubt the average person has even heard of DDG, and probably never uses Bing unless it's set up by default. If there was ever a time to market Bing and DDG as viable Google alternatives to the public, it's now.

Jemm
You can pretend !g to your search and DDG will forward you to Google search. Just FYI
mortivore
No. The favicons are cool. The ads are no worse for content than the other links so it's not a big deal. Often it just makes something that is already in the top 3 have a duplicate.
MilnerRoute
Gah. That new design is horribly ugly. One other thing I've always hated about Google: if you just want the URL for a page, you can't right-click on it in the search results and copy the URL -- because Google will instead give you some Google-riffic hybrid URL that first refers you through a Google address so they can capture your clickthrough.

I've tried to steer most of my searching away from Google. (Of course, that's easy if you're already using a search keyword to skip the part where you go to the search engine's home page first.)

rasz
>copy the URL -- because Google will instead give you some Google-riffic hybrid URL

Google no longer does that! because they switched to dedicated feature for just this very purpose :D https://www.w3schools.com/tags/att_a_ping.asp

"When the user clicks on the hyperlink, the ping attribute will send a short HTTP POST request to the specified URL.

This attribute is useful for monitoring/tracking."

Was introduced into HTML5 drafts as early as 2005, removed by 2010 due to obvious user spying connotations. Chrome and Safari fully support it, uBlock Origin strips it automatically (but wont be able to after manifest v3 goes thru).

smarri
Me too. The recent change is really disappointing.
Mockapapella
not at all. Every search engine I've tried has paled in comparison to Google's results.
Narretz
The biggest issue for me is that github issues in the results don't have the issue title as title anymore but the name of the project. Makes it much harder to find an issue in all that noise.