Perhaps it's worth quoting Larry Page and Sergey Brin, in the original paper on the Google search engine:
> "The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users. ...we expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers. "
1) It’s still there.
2) They have zero obligation to follow what’s in the code because it is not a legal document. Calling out the removal of something means you should call out all the companies that never had it in there to begin with.
i see people say this and act in accordance with this principle all the time, and its entirely wrong.
a moral is not something that IS "good", its something ABOUT "good". saying someone is moral is calling someone principled - it says nothing about whether their principles (morals) are good or bad.
we need to discuss morals because they are axiomatic and foundational. if you take a strict moral view that doing harm of any kind is always wrong, you will never be able to discuss anything with someone who believes in the needs of the many over the needs of the few.
saying "moral people always recognize evil" is dangerously blind, circular reasoning, and the mechanism of several atrocities in history.
Morals are also subjective. Take something pretty far on the other end of the spectrum, killing kids. Now compare to abortion. Lots of different people with lots of different views. What one sees as evil another would see the ban of it as evil.
>Almost everyone agrees that killing children is immoral.
Almost isn't everyone, meaning it is still subjective for some.
>People in favor of abortion stick to a definition in which abortion is not killing children.
That shows that even the notion of 'children' is subjective.
>Whether that definition is right or wrong is what is at the center of the debate.
For some, not for others. There are many arguments on both sides and some depend upon this while others do not care about the distinction.
But we can use other examples. Take murder. There is subjective disagreement on what counts as murder and when certain forms of murder are wrong. Laws concretely differ between what is acceptable self defense and what is considered murder, and these differences mirror the moral differences people have that gave rise to these laws.
Many times you'll find people who will agree some word is wrong, but then disagree on what is covered under that word. If we both agree X is wrong, but then have totally different views on what constitute X, do we really both agree that X is wrong or do we have fundamental disagreement?
Swapping to something more technical, if we both agree commenting code is good, but you think comments are those blobs of text with syntax telling the compiler to ignore it while I think comments are super long method and variable names and don't count those blobs of text with syntax telling the compiler to ignore them as comments, then do we really agree that commenting code is important?
If it's an arbitrary point how could it be anything but subjective? You're saying _some_ actions are universally evil. Personally I disagree that such actions exist.
The world is a complex place and humans are complex beings. Nobody considers themselves the bad guy in their own story, that is, unless they feel they've been labeled the bad guy and they act to fulfill that label.
Painting people and actions as inherently evil, to me, is to overly simplify the person or misunderstand their motive and it prevents us from learning from their misdoings.
Okay, for the sake of argument, let's accept your worldview where good and evil are subjective and therefore irrelevant.
The only thing left then is, what do we want? It becomes a question of what do I want, and who can I view as allies in achieving my goals.
I want a search tool that serves my needs, not the needs of advertisers. I want privacy and I don't want distractions. So Google is not on my side, they are my opponent in this game[1]. And I suspect if the average user understood the implications of Google serving advertisers and not them, they'd be on my side, and not on Google's side.
In this framework, good and evil are just shorthand for shared goals. When someone says "Google is evil" they are saying "Google doesn't share our goals," and when they say "Google is good" they are saying "Google shares our goals". Of course, within this framework, the speaker is assuming that the listener has the same goals as the speaker, which is likely not a rational assumption.
But that assumption makes sense, because the goal here isn't actually to communicate, it's to persuade, and there's a good chance that when the listener hears "Google is evil" they will come up with their own goals that Google doesn't align with, and create an alliance with the speaker based on those goals even if they don't actually align with the speakers goals. In short: good and evil are sophist rhetoric, designed to persuade through soft power[2] rather than communicate meaning.
Of course, saying good and evil are subjective is also sophist rhetoric, because you aren't actually communicating about shared goals, you're just trying to undercut the argument that "Google is good" or "Google is evil".
I'll be careful to add that calling something "sophist rhetoric" isn't equivalent to calling it "evil" at any level, because we're operating in the framework where good and evil don't exist, so sophist rhetoric can't be evil. So if you're trying to persuade, there's no reason to think that sophist rhetoric is somehow beneath you.
But since I think people actually share my goals, playing the good and evil game is a poor choice for me, so I reject the whole framework of good and evil here. Anyone who uses these words, even to say they're subjective, is trying to sell you snake oil, because if they were actually being honest they would talk about how the thing they are arguing about aligns with your goals, because that's always a stronger argument.
So I'd suggest that if you actually believe good and evil are subjective, you make your argument based on what you think isn't subjective. Otherwise we can just discard your opinion as non-informative sophist rhetoric.
On the other hand, since most people actually do have goals they would consider to be part of a moral code, and we can objectively describe what most people would call good or evil, good and evil work just fine as shorthand, sophist rhetoric aside. If, for example, we can agree that we want to be able to differentiate between ads and search results, then we can agree to call that feature "good" and we can agree to call not having that feature "evil". If you don't agree to that terminology, it's because you don't share our goals, so why should we care? Go away, advertiser, we don't want you here. ;)
This too is meaningless, a chasing after the wind.
[1] Using "game" in a game-theoretical sense here.
> Okay, for the sake of argument, let's accept your worldview where good and evil are subjective and therefore irrelevant.
How did you make that giant leap? Subjective doesn’t mean irrelevant, it means everyone has their own opinion on it which makes it quite relevant.
Your tangent was difficult to follow on the sole basis that Google is no different than any other entity. The US government is evil because we don’t share the same goals. Vegans are evil because we don’t share the same goals. Football players are evil because we don’t share the same goals. I can go on but you should get the picture by now.
At the end of the day, you should understand that businesses exist solely to make money. If they didn’t make money, they wouldn’t have investors. Without investors, most businesses would not exist. Without those businesses, we would be objectively worse off.
> How did you make that giant leap? Subjective doesn’t mean irrelevant, it means everyone has their own opinion on it which makes it quite relevant.
Relevant to what? If objective and subjective ideas are both relevant, why even bother pointing out that it's subjective?
Subjective ideas aren't admissable as evidence in most debates. Whether or not you intended it, when people go through the effort to say an idea is subjective, it's usually because they're trying to cut down the validity of that idea. So if that wasn't your intent, maybe you should have been more clear.
> Your tangent was difficult to follow on the sole basis that Google is no different than any other entity. The US government is evil because we don’t share the same goals. Vegans are evil because we don’t share the same goals. Football players are evil because we don’t share the same goals. I can go on but you should get the picture by now.
No, actually I don't get the picture. Yes, anyone can label anyone evil.
> At the end of the day, you should understand that businesses exist solely to make money. If they didn’t make money, they wouldn’t have investors. Without investors, most businesses would not exist. Without those businesses, we would be objectively worse off.
Actually, that's not objective, that's subjective. I don't agree that the world is better by having a huge amount of private data centralized under Google's control.
(Incidentally, see how saying that's subjective sounds a whole lot like saying it's irrelevant?)
Let's divide that space in two: objects in A are objectively good or bad, and objects in B are subjectively good or bad. Can these category exist? Is one of them the empty space?
I agree with you that good/evil feels like an objective dichotomy (A), especially in binary matters: e.g. alive or dead, working or not, arrived or not.
I agree with parent that evil is subjective (B) for other objects: e.g. capitalism, masturbation, violence, assistance, immigration.
I also move that good/evil is but one spectrum of evaluation, of assessing the world; there are many (hundreds, thousands) of such dimensions in our inner world.
Finally, I submit that good/evil is but the "feeling" of old/deep brain structures wherein emotions are generated and maybe felt too (nucleus acumbens, amygdala...), and that the dichotomy we feel and then think, theorize is but an interpretation of the manifestation of these primary emotions (they likely date back before we were apes, even before we were mammals; this is like the earliest system that lets a shrimp or fish move "towards" the cold and "away from" the light; there may not even be the "feeling" of it yet at that evolutionary stage).
Now is it all meaningful or pointless?... You tell me ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Edit: bonus question: is there a reunion space AB? (!) bonus 2: are some objects neither in A nor B?
Yes, it's 'evil' when you're a poor disruptive startup trying to change how ads work, it's 'not evil' when you're a behemoth incumbent trying to maximise revenues.
What I should have said is that one is discouragement while the other is encouragement, and that encouraged events tends to lead to more controversial/conflicting situations...
No there was a time that Google was genuinely not evil and repeatedly limited their potential profit to act in what they felt was an appropriate manner. Granted that was many years ago now, but I can remember distinctly that change over because that's when I started to move away from them.
> In general, it could be argued from the consumer point of view that the better the search engine is, the fewer advertisements will be needed for the consumer to find what they want.
> we believe the issue of advertising causes enough mixed incentives that it is crucial to have a competitive search engine that is transparent
This change seems to go directly against their belief that it's crucial for search engines to be transparent. After the change, it's way less transparent, or "easy to perceive or detect", that an ad is an ad.
I value input from new coworkers precisely because I often lose focus on things that I care about, often to be replaced by a nebulous feeling of discomfort. There's something to be said for maintaining a certain low rate of turnover in an organization to keep ideas and ethics on the menu.
I used to place a high value on how long people had been on the team, but the two extremely stable places I subsequently worked at were a shitshow, because there just weren't enough outsiders to argue them out of their circular reasoning.
At the boardroom level, the situation we warn about is "surrounding yourself with yes-men". I don't think Page & Brin remember where they came from. And they probably forgot long before they started trying to convert a 767 to be their corporate jet, which was already more than 10 years ago.
I wish there was a way to directly help Bing/DuckDuckGo/Yandex improve their search results. I've tried both, and it's just not the same.
Google I can bang in cryptic queries like
> centos 7 tuned no daemon
and get the 3rd link about how to run tuned in a no daemon mode. Bing/DuckDuckGo have the article at around 7th or 8th place, but prefaced by a lot of "while technically not wrong, not what I'm looking for" links. It's even worse for more niche errors or code snippets.
We cannot, as a healthy internet, let Google control so much of the web.
I used to work at Bing. If you really want Bing to improve, the best thing you can do is just use it: clicks on search results, plus backs and dwell times, are vital training data.
Ideally you could use Bing as your default engine, then fall back to Google whenever there's a search that doesn't yield good results. If you have the time, you can also use the Feedback link on the bottom-right of the page to report bad search results; people do actually triage and read those.
>Ideally you could use Bing as your default engine, then fall back to Google whenever there's a search that doesn't yield good results.
This is what I do with DDG. Unless I have a pretty specific search, or want Google's really nice live sports scores widgets, DDG is usually pretty good.
DDG doesn't track what you click on, so unfortunately you are not contributing much to improving its and Bing's search quality by using it instead of Bing.
(Disclaimer: as I said, I don't work at Bing anymore. Things may have changed in the intervening period and I could be mistaken or plain wrong about things)
Obviously ranking search results is immensely complicated with lots of accumulated insider wisdom, but the short answer is that "static" page features (PageRank, how well the query matches text on the page, etc.) are good for pruning down zillions of pages to generate a candidate list of 10 or so results to show the user, but not great at ordering those results, and serving the results in the best order is really important for user satisfaction. For generating the final top-10 ordering, "dynamic" features like how many people clicked that link, how long did they spend on the page, etc. are the most useful.
Regarding what is tracked, obviously Bing can only track what you're doing on Bing itself, so clicks on blue links and backs are tracked, but they can't see what you do on the destination page. This data is used to train models/NNs/etc. but the raw click data isn't kept for very long: it's too large and it has to be removed for GDPR compliance.
> For generating the final top-10 ordering, "dynamic" features like how many people clicked that link, how long did they spend on the page, etc. are the most useful.
I've never worked there and can't say for sure, but I have to assume that the broad strokes of their search engine are the same as Bing's. Bear in mind my response above was a very very high-level description of a really complex system with tens of thousands of person-years of accumulated knowledge and experience inside it.
Thanks for posting, it's nice to hear from someone on the inside!
Downvoters: why on earth are you downvoting Analemma's post? It's constructive, on point and overall the kind of post which makes HN comments valuable.
What I'm about to say will probably get downvoted as well, but I've noticed HN getting more polarized in terms of votes in the last maybe 2 years.
Because of the way that downvoting works on HN, the few times I use it, my thought is "nobody should see this comment". Because enough downvotes delegitemize and hide a comment, it's effectively telling other people that it's not worth being read.
I don't know if that's actually going through people's minds when they downvote, but that's what I think which is exactly why I rarely use it. But too many people now are simply using it on posts they don't like, even if a post deserves to be there. For some reason, it's an unpopular opinion to believe that an idea or opinion you think is wrong deserves to be seen and rebutted rather than silenced.
Downvotes for dislike is supported by HN/pg. Their choice of fading out comments, when combined with downvotes-for-opposition is really terrible for a high quality discussion site. Just goes to show the community around a site makes all the difference.
> I used to work at Bing. If you really want Bing to improve, the best thing you can do is just use it: clicks on search results, plus backs and dwell times, are vital training data.
A million flies are attracted to shit. I don't believe this sort of training data will ever become useful if it's in the same pool with the rest of the world. See also: voting with your wallet against the tyranny of the majority of uninformed consumers who buy whatever is most marketed. Those pennies don't matter.
In fact, I believe this sort of training and optimization for the mainstream plays a role in allowing bad results to proliferate.
This is before we even consider the fact that clicking on many results can indicate that they're bad (I click another result because the previous wasn't good), or because they're good (I'm browsing choices). Dwelling long can be bad (crappy & slow site, it takes me long to find the information I want or turn away) or it can be good (I found good stuff and I'm spending a while on it). Whatever conclusion your training system draws might be completely wrong. And probably prone to being gamed.
The above heuristic arguments seem inherently weaker than the direct experience of someone who used to be on the team that improves the results. They are well-funded and should be able to back out the effects you mention.
How are they ever going to know whether they improved results for me or not? You might as well train AI to play a game without ever checking their score. Oh, it's spending 20% more time in each room now and firing fewer bullets than before. Surely it is a better AI now.
Sorry, appeal to authority is no argument. Direct experience is valuable if there's an argument or some real scenario we can dissect, otherwise it's nothing more than a baseless claim. Without concrete examples, it's not even an anecdote. And there are plenty of anecdotes about search results for in-depth content becoming harder and harder to find.
The person I was responding to posted that they're using this training data to order the top 10 results or so. That's already an indication that it's not very helpful for me. I don't get frustrated if the top few results are in suboptimal order, I get frustrated when I get pages and pages of garbage and irrelevant results and can't seem to get anything useful out of it.
See the replies elsewhere. The metrics go beyond simple, naive "click counting."
Specifically they also measure metrics like "regret" - if you went back to the search results and chose something else this indicates it wasn't a useful search result for the query and this counts against it.
In theory this is quite a nice defense against clickbaity, content free results.
> Specifically they also measure metrics like "regret"
I explicitly addressed this:
> clicking on many results can indicate that they're bad (I click another result because the previous wasn't good), or because they're good (I'm browsing choices).
You don't know the reason why I clicked back. Maybe I got what I needed at a glance, and I'm browsing to the next thing to see if there's more of what I need.
You don't know that the Average Joe (and a million other Average Joes) wasted 15 minutes on clickbaity content free crap despite not getting anything useful out of it. You know, those same SEO spam sites are trying to find ways to make the user stay as long as possible; they are in the game. And I'm
sure there are plenty of gullible users who will stay. Who knows, maybe SEO spam is working and that's precisely why we see SEO spam sites in results?
Again, I think training like this is pretending the problem is much simpler than it is. And I think that there is a real danger that training like this just optimizes for 1) average users 2) sites that managed to game the system with their SEO. Neither is optimizing for quality results.
I just think you're assuming these search engines are using way fewer factors than they actually use. It's probably exceptionally easy to tie your search behavior to someone else who's much more like you than "the average", unless you're using a search engine like DDG, Qwant, etc.
Maybe the best bet is for a search engine to try to include a simple, non-intrusive method of getting user input to determine the usefulness of a search result. Like, if it determines you came back as a "regret", maybe a ThumbsUp/ThumbsDown icon next to the last link you clicked to get you to say whether that link was useful in any way, or maybe a "block" option as well to say that you never want sites like that again.
> I just think you're assuming these search engines are using way fewer factors than they actually use. It's probably exceptionally easy to tie your search behavior to someone else who's much more like you than "the average", unless you're using a search engine like DDG, Qwant, etc.
I should, then, expect dramatically different results when I use someone else's PC or a public computer. I have not witnessed dramatic differences.
It's just you pretending search engines are simpler then they are. Noone's just ranking most clicked sites first - that's too naive and encourages clickbait. Clicks are an ingredient in the overall ranking system, which is generally also trained on relevancy labels by human annotators/raters/assessors. These human labels are far more reliable and can penalize all the bad clickbaity stuff which clicks can't, but unfortunately also very expensive to obtain and thus low volume.
We may not know exactly why you clicked back, or why Joe wasted 15 minutes on a site, but from all clicks in aggregate and from the human-labelled data, we can tell how that correlates with the clicked site's relevancy and quality and utilize your clicks accordingly to improve the ranking.
Finding such correlations is still by far and large what all search engines do, rather than trying to truly understand the query. It's only now starting to change with recent advances in deep learning and NLP.
A lot of this does, in fact, get solved through machine learning. If one search query is conducted a hundred times by different people with otherwise similar profiles, the machine learning can constantly modify the results until the hundredth person sees the best results first. For example, if the first 25 people all click on the 2nd, 4th, 5th, and 8th result and then stop, it can modify the order of the results for the next 25 people, and randomize the order, so that some see 8-4-2-5 first, and others see 2-5-8-4, etc. The it re-assesses the results and gets smarter.
The gaming part is where there's a lot of importance, since it forces the machine to learn which users are acting nefariously.
Shuffling the top 10 results is not fixing the big problem in search for me. I don't care too much whether the company I search for is in first or fourth place. But I'm really irritated when I get pages upon pages of useless results and nothing remotely relevant.
Clicks are noisy and have their problems (especially clickbait), but as far as ranking goes they still blow out of water everything else you can use. Analemma_ is right on the money. We need more Lemon Pledge^W^W clicks!
Speaking as someone who worked for another big web search engine in the past (not G, not B)
And counting good/bad clicks for a given (query, url) pair is just the tip of the iceberg. There's a lot of other interesting stuff you can do with them _if_ you have the data. Deep learning/NLP with clicks as training signal is probably the most exciting area to me, to name one. Unfortunately almost all of the data currently gets nabbed by google, other search engines are just getting by with the scraps. And it's very hard to bootstrap a competitor from scratch - for example Cliqz had to resort to some shady deals with Mozilla just to get any data to start with.
Yandex does that. At the bottom of search results page there are links to other search engines. So if you aren't satisfied with results, you're one click away from Google. I believe they track these clicks and know which results are bad.
> We cannot, as a healthy internet, let Google control so much of the web.
It's getting worse too.
Back in the day, you could Google something for a manufacturer and include the name of the manufacturer like, "Pioneer 10" Subwoofer" and automatically the first result would be a like to Pioneer's subwoofer page or their main ecommerce site.
You type that into Google today? You will get 15 results for AMAZON pages with Pioneer speakers. No, I want to buy it from Pioneer, not Amazon. Oh yeah? The actual link to the actual company, who actually makes those speakers? They're on Page 2.
When you have the actual manufacturer being buried in the results, we have a major problem.
IMO Google is doing the best they can to serve you relevant results, just that everyone and their uncle is spamming internet to get up in the ranking game.
Think of modern google as a question answering machine not a serch engine. And do "Show me Pioneer 10 subwoofer manufacturer specs" instead of just jamming keywords and hoping for the best.
I'm genuinely asking: can you share an example where the Google results are worse in your opinion than DDG or Bing? Ideally with a screenshot in case there is some personalization going on. I just want to see a very clear example of it so I can try it out for myself.
What you really mean in a google search is you want to buy something. You only think you don't want to buy. It doesn't matter that you've lost the leaflet for your Pioneer 10 Subwoofer and want to remember which wire goes where in your new house. Or just want to remember some detail of something you had years ago. Google is there to assure you that you really want to buy a shiny new set.
Not buying stuff you already own again serves neither the economy nor Google's advertising profit. Go on, buy another set. Infinite growth depends on it.
That really is their attitude to every product and service.
I work at Google (not Search though sorry), opinions are my own.
> When you have the actual manufacturer being buried in the results, we have a major problem.
How do you know though? What if the majority users actually do what you describe in hopes of buying something and thus the shopping results are more relevant for them?
I imagine either there is a bug or this is the case, because I'm sure the links people actually click feed back into the algorithms and the results are modified accordingly.
This being said, it seems like the fact that your results aren't personalized enough to your liking is a shortcoming, assuming you were signed in.
It's a self-fulfilling prophecy. Third-party shopping results are shown on page one and the manufacturer's store is on page two, and people rarely go beyond page one so naturally they will click the Amazon results. This in turn feeds the algorithm and reinforces its original assumption.
I felt the same about Google alternatives up until about 3 months ago. Google's results have been declining in quality for a decade, with much more rapid decline over the past year or three.
Google's results are uglier and blatantly revenue based. They have now lapsed behind DuckDuckGo in usefulness for me. I fall back to Google a few times per week, with inconsistent results when I need a "second opinion."
I'd suggest giving DDG another try.
I plan to remove Google from my life this year, at least as a central dependency. Search is already behind me. Mail, calendars, docs, and drive will be taken care of throughout the year. And my Android phone will be replaced with an iPhone.
Do you (or anyone else) have any recommendations for an email service? I've cut pretty much everything Google out of my life, minus Gmail, mostly due to not wanting to go through all the trouble of transferring everything over to a service that I end up not liking. I've heard ProtonMail is good, but other than that, I'm not sure.
I've used Fastmail for many years now, and I have nothing but good things to say about the service. In particular, it's insane how well notifications work in Fastmail, especially compared to Gmail (which I use at work). (Honestly, you'd think Fastmail was the giant multi-billion-dollar super-advanced tech company, if you look at the quality of their email experience vs. Gmail.)
However, some folks are a little spooked by the privacy implications of it being ran out of Australia, so be sure to research that if you're interested in Fastmail.
I'm leaning toward Tutanota, but I can't claim to have experience with them yet.
Proton has appeared somewhat bumpy to me -- I can't say for sure why, but they give me some spidey tingles.
Migrating / transferring is indeed a problem. I would suggest using Google Takeout, their data export tool, and permanently archiving your data with a third party service and / or physical backups. See https://takeout.google.com/. You probably won't be able to import into your new provider.
If you own a domain through Gandi (possibly others) you get email included for free. This is what I use. I don’t know why I don’t see this recommended more often?
I would do this through bluehost but it just straight up doesn't work. No matter the tutorials followed or time spent with support, I can't receive emails at my domain.
In my opinion, the results on DDG et al are a matter of users being trained by Google knowing too much about them. If you search "Django" on Google and get relevant results, it's because Google knows you. On DDG you need to search "Django framework".
> Bing/DuckDuckGo have the article at around 7th or 8th place,
You should take a closer look at DDG, it has the answer from serverfault.com in an instant answers box for your query and it highlights the required setting in a perfectly chosen excerpt from the correct answer:
As of CentOS 7.2 tuned now has a no-daemon mode which
can be turned on by setting daemon = 0 in
/etc/tuned/tuned-main.conf. This is mentioned in the
RedHat Performance Tuning Guide.
> Google I can bang in cryptic queries like > centos 7 tuned no daemon
Not only can you bang in whatever query you want to DDG, you can bang it in via Google, using bangs (https://duckduckgo.com/bang). I think that "!g <query>" is the second stop for many DDG'ers, when DDG itself disappoints. (My understanding is that it still offers some anonymisation over searching directly through Google, but I'm not sure.)
My latest annoyance, nevermind them showing pages that don't have "quoted" keywords. They rewrite the search query in the textbox and remove the quotes. Just when you thought it couldn't get more annoying.
Oh yeah that kills me I often have one word that is the important one and instead they show me the low-value responses that do not contain that one differentiating word that is the reason I'm doing a search in the first place
I have noticed that when trying to find the most recent solution Google shows me an answer that is 10 years old.
ex. Adobe updates come faster than I can update, so I run into issues, so finding the most recent answer is what I am looking for and not a similar issue from Adobe pre CC.
I find that a lot too. Trying to search for anything Rails related always shows Rails 3/4 results before Rails 5/6. If Google really knew that much about me, they should notice I always end my searching by clicking on a Rails 5/6 result (because those are the versions I use) and every time I land on a Rails 3 or 4 result I almost always click back and try again. Same with Python when I get 2.x results, with all their data they should know I've used 3.x for years.
If companies want to track me and build profiles on me, I accept that I can't stop that without refusing to use their products and every site that's integrated with it (Google Analytics, Adwords, etc). But if they're going to do it, at least use that information to help me. What's the point otherwise?
or at least filter out results that are irrelevant. They are lacking the ability to remove dated results when you are looking for the most recent.
I know you can manually filter results, but why show 10 year old answers to software that gets updated so frequent! I am sure there are other areas where this exists, dated results should be pushed back a few pages.
> I wish there was a way to directly help Bing/DuckDuckGo/Yandex improve their search results.
I am amazed that no search engine gives me easy way to blacklist domains from my results. That would make the usefulness of any of them to increase by orders of magnitude. (and if they are careful, they might be even able to use the blacklisted data to adjust their general results , not only my personal results as well)
And I can't help to add qwant.com to the list of alternative search engines. No affiliation whatsoever, but I am pretty happy to use that as my daily search engine here in Europe.
> Google used to have that, but of course they stopped it. There are browser addons that have he same effect though.
Yep. Ironically enough, that was killed soon after I found about that. And anyways, it was implemented far from easy to use. It should be just behind the green arrow that gives the options to see cached version etc. And obviously with cross-platform effect on all my devices as long as I am logged in.
I would pay a subscription fee to my search engine to implement this feature. Currently use duckduckgo with a add-on to filter blacklisted sites but would love for this to be integrated.
To me it is not so much result quality as integration. Currently, with Google no matter what I am searching for, I just type it into my location bar and hit enter. Whether I am looking for a new bar to check out on a Friday night or what does a specific compile error mean in Haskell. So in the first case, I will get a map with bars around me and in the second case I will get a link to stackoverflow. With DDG these become functionally separate. To do the Haskell error search I do the same thing, but to do a local bar search I have to open a separate tab, go to Google and do a search there. Same goes for looking for things like theater plays (Google will give me reviews, showtimes and a link to buy tickets all right there at the top of my search page), address or place name searches (map, directions, open hours and website link all come up right away) etc. The only thing I can do with DDG is the old fashioned "find me links relevant to these keywords" searches.
Feels like a perfect opportunity for you to try out search engine keywords. On Chrome, it's under Search Engine > Manage Search Engines. This allows you to type (keyword) -tab- (query). For example, my work computer (on which I can only use Chrome or Edge) is force-defaulted to Google, but I have Bing set to keyword "b" and DDG keyworded to "d", so I just type:
b(tab) Whatever I want to search for
and it goes to Bing with that query. It's a great example of what you're looking for. On my personal devices, I try to use Bing for as much as I can to see whether its personalized results will ever marry up to Google (it's gotten extremely close, lately), but I often prefer searching Google Maps, so I have gMaps added as a search engine with keyword "m", so I can search for anything with "m (tab) place" and immediately see gMaps results.
Not sure about the facts underlying the analysis. In my search results (and it's important to remember that it's possible you get different results than another user, due to launch experiments and trials) the ads do not have icons. They say "Ad" in bold text. The "organics" results have icons.
I guess it depends on the user. I can't really put myself in the mindset of someone else, but I am pretty sure I would never accidentally click an ad and not realize it. Maybe others who don't pay attention to this kind of thing might be affected though.
This trick is what caused me to click and Ad for the first time in forever.
If the icons happen to be dark its easy to ignore the 'Ad' text. Maybe its time to supply a complaint. I doubt this is legal in Sweden.
But notice how the "Ad" text is specifically formatted (and placed) to resemble a favicon? They're blatantly trying to make the ads and organic results appear uniform to someone quickly scanning the page.
As a user, I want the ads more easily distinguishable, not less.
Huh... I thought it was just me. I have a rather atypical setup with my privacy extensions and browser settings, so I just assumed that one of them was changing the DOM to make it look like this. Just yesterday I was searching for some ISP offers and clicked on an ad result. Well.. I think I just need to get over my lazyness and finally host searx locally.
Same here. I think typically antivirus extensions like McAfee provide a few extra metadata on google search results that makes the page look exactly like it does now. My first instinct was "oh which extension fucked this up? anyway, I'll check it out later". Unfortunate to find out it's a change on big G's end.
I believe nearly all the search engines are still guilty of this one.
I also think firms should be able to buy "blank space." For example facebook or amazon could pay NOT to have an ad above their result. Maybe they already do, I dont see an ad when I search facebook, however I do see an ad for amazon above the top amazon result. Google should just be smart enough to see the top result and the ad are the same link, and handle the situation more appropriately, like tucking the ad text underneath the result, or signifying that the top result owner has paid to hide ads. I have to say, I dont find these results differentiated ENOUGH from the ad. https://i.imgur.com/8Dhr1mj.png
Their current behavior is no different in that regard AND is more confusing for internet users and business AND is based on the twisted "market price" of the search keywords
Basically yes. It does appear a bit like a "pay us this much to keep top result, or we will resell it to competitor" but realistically, thats already the case (the ad being the "top result".)
>I also think firms should be able to buy "blank space." For example facebook or amazon could pay NOT to have an ad above their result. Maybe they already do, I dont see an ad when I search facebook, however I do see an ad for amazon above the top amazon result.
Backblaze had a competitor who bought ads for the search term "backblaze". The CEO successfully contacted the competitor CEO and they agreed they'd be in a pissing match throwing money at Google if the practice and retaliation (backblaze buying on their search term) occurred. The competitor promptly stopped the ad campaign.
If the competitor was smaller with more money to spend or let's say had higher margins, it was stupid of them to agree to this type of (possible?) collusion.
I get what you're saying. It does have an anticompetitive/colluding feel to it.
I don't know exactly where my opinion lies in this case. I think the cloud backup space currently has many players and that even if all players agreed to this - the net result would be Google earning less, each of those companies having less ad spend, and therefore greater profitability.
Heck, imagine if a 3rd party existed to "bypass" the Google ad auction through collusion on generic terms like 'computer backup'. (I'm not in this space, so some of the feasibility is speculative). Each company puts in their bid parameters for search terms. 3rd party evaluate the bids, submit 2 slightly different bids to minimize ad spend, and since the whole market coluded, Google made less money.
It's fragile, it's collusion. It's easily by passable by anyone going to Google directly. Was anyone harmed?
I worry about the implications of the blank space idea. For example, if I owned coolstuff.com, when should I expect for my standard search result to be shown below the "blank space". Today, if someone searched "cool stuff", my site shows up as the top search result, but my arch-nemesis, the owner of neatstuff.com, has an ad tailored to that query. Would his ad go away since mine is the top search result for "cool stuff"? Similarly, if my site is preferable to Google enough that my site shows up every time someone searches for something like "cool shit" or "awesome things", would I also benefit from this "blank space" program, at the expense of the owners of coolshit.com and awesomethings.com?
if you BUY the entire whitespace above the first organic result (could cost north of 1-3 ads) then the first organic result would be the top of the list. It wouldnt matter if you are the top organic result or not, youve just paid not to have ads above that result.
If at some point you slipped down the organic list, you would have the option to buy a normal ad again.
> Google should just be smart enough to see the top result and the ad are the same link
They are smart enough, but they don't get any money from people clicking on search results, only ads, so of course they're going to show the ad - some people will click it.
With each AdWords display change, Google's been adding billions of dollars to their revenue by confusing and fooling their users and blurring the line between the content and ads.
For branded keywords, it's not just shady, it's racketeering. You wouldn't want your competitor to show up first when someone searches for your brand, would you? Then pay up.
Surely racketeering is legal in USA, the President described applying undue and immoral pressure through dominance as "perfect". Unclear how it could possibly be illegal, given USA's continued endorsement of such behaviour.
The difference being that you pay magnitudes less for your branded keywords than the competition, through the quality score. Allowing companies to advertise against their peers is actually creating more competition on the marketplace (which is a good thing).
Edit: Disclosure - I work at Google but this is my own opinion on multi-sided markets
more competition is not synonymous with good, it is a thing that can have good effects or bad.
If for example changes to the marketplace makes it harder to determine who is a fraud and who is not or simply making it difficult to determine the quality of products, competition between the companies with the quality products and fraudsters may increase and that would be a bad thing.
You're right, edited my comment to be more clear that this is my opinion only. I don't use an anonymous username on HN because, as you saw in my profile before searching me, everything I say reflects my opinion only.
This is a tricky proposition. Google has free speech rights to display whatever they want on their own server pages. These aren't statements of fact so it's not falling under libel & co.
It's like saying that you want to regulate what can advertising companies display on billboards, ex. they cannot display competitor's ads nearby your company's offices. Since the billboard space is private and owned by the ad company (similarly to the ad space on Google servers served pages), they get too decide to put there whatever they want (barring free speech limiting regulations).
I just want compact results again.. searching for coding related stuff I need to be able to quickly scan through a bunch of results to see if it's what I'm looking for.. but now they are so spaced out it's just weird and inefficient.
I remember when Google made a point of being ethical by putting ads on the right rail with a light blue background so it was clear which results were ads and which were organic.
I've been in this A/B test for a couple of months now, so I've had time to adjust, and I still hate it. I've just become so used to seeing the complete URL in green. The complete URL! If you hover over the results, you'll see that they like to take bits like numeric components or the query string out.
This is part of Google's attempt to de-prioritise the URL. Their destructive AMP service confusingly shows you Google's domain instead of the website's — and as they can't fix that without losing out on tracking, they're trying to change what the URL means.
Just saying IMO Google isn't ruining the internet. Of course every decision being scrutinized they can't have a perfect record. They have a search engine that due to it's popularity is the target of all kinds of stats gaming and optimizing, While at the same time trying to grow a profitable product. So it's not like there are simple solutions or easy quips like Google Ruined the Internet. It sounds like a lazy argument.
Is any site using this? It requires a special certificate and signing your content (which admittedly Cloudflare will take care of for you) but even then it’s only for Chrome and Firefox and Apple have said they won’t support it. Over a year after announcing it I’ve yet to find a single site that does this.
It's the intended side-effect. For the longest time ever AMP wouldn't even acknowledge it's a problem (oh, we just provide the standard, it's the browsers' fault).
Then Google relented and provided a non-solution in the form of an obscure bar on top of AMP pages (in which the link to the original page is deliberately designed to not look like a link).
The signed exchanges is a bone thrown towards standards committees after all the damage has already been done.
And the "solution" has been directly called by Mozilla harmful, they are not going to implement it. Safari shares Mozilla's concern.
Or even reader mode - I don't mind flashing the cruft for a few seconds while I turn it on, and it's the best of all worlds. The site gets their ads (briefly) loaded, and I get a clean page to read.
It seems faster for me across devices but there’s usability issues, at least on some sites/pages. In my experience “find on the page” is spotty or impossible on mobile sometimes.
You either choose AMP and appear in the search carousel at the top of search results in the biggest search engine in the world. Or you choose not to implement AMP and you don't appear there.
> It is not a requirement for AMP. CDNs now let you roll your own domains on the AMP standard
All these certificates do is make it so Google's browser (and only Google's browser) will mask the fact you're on Google's domains if you sign the file a certain way.
If anything, this shows more anti-competitive practices -- they're adding features into their browser that specifically benefit a features of their search engine.
You don't need lock-in to be anti-competitive. The requirement of extra work to implement AMP to get that higher search results page placement is the issue.
At which point pushing for new technologies as a private entity is anti-competitive vs moving technology forward?
If the criteria is just "needs extra work" then unfortunately almost nothing can change and we're all going to live with the existing technology. Change inherently has friction and requires "extra work" with the hope that's an investment which provides returns long term.
In other words, say you are a large Internet company that is trying to improve web page loading times. You profile why most web pages are slow and identify issues. You publicly report on those issues and develop guidelines and criteria. Nobody bothers because "extra work". You develop new technology that directly addresses those issues, this technology works within the existing environment but it requires both client and server support to be most effective. Do you think anyone cares? No, because of "extra work". That's why there needs to be incentives. Now you have a "penalty" for not doing that "extra work". You can file it under "it's anti-competitive" (maybe it is) but if you do the "extra work" then suddenly the anti-competitive part works for you, not against you. IMO that's why it's not anti-competitive.
Other examples: why do you think there are so many people that complained when iPhone released with Flash reader? "extra work". Similarly when it removed the audio jack. Change is friction and friction is extra work. But most of the time that's not anti-competitive...
Let me explain based on my 15 years of adtech experience:
HTML is already fast (see HN for an example). HTML is already universal across devices and browsers. HTML is already published and easily cached for billions of pieces of content.
AMP is a fork of HTML that only targets mobile browsers specifically linking from Google search results. It's useless on its own, but AMP is required to get higher placement on search results pages, so publishers are effectively forced to spend technical resources to output an entirely new format just to maintain that ranking.
If Google wanted faster pages then it can do what it always does and incentivize that behavior by ranking results based on loading speed. These signals are already collected and available in your Google webmaster console. There's nothing new to build, just tweak ranking calculation based on existing data. Sites would get faster overnight, and they would be faster for every single user because HTML is universal.
Do you know why they didn't do that? Because it's the ads and tracking that's slow, not the HTML. Google's Doubleclick and Google Analytics are the biggest adserver and tracking systems used on the web. This entire AMP project is created to circumvent their own slow systems. It creates more work for publishers while increasing data collection by running a "free" CDN that never leaves a Google-owned domain and thereby always supports first-party cookies. It's a perfect solution to protect against anti-tracking browsers and why Chrome now will also block 3rd-party cookies, because it won't affect AMP hosted on Google domains.
First party storage won't be affected without some major AI tech in browsers so cookies are still the best deterministic connection, especially since most people are logged into a Google service already (gmail, chrome, android, youtube, etc).
Probabilistic techniques are used for anonymous users or environments like iOS Safari that are very strict.
Then why are you searching on Google? That's where you would see an AMP page served from a Google AMP cache. If you searched on Bing, you would get AMP pages served from a Bing AMP cache instead.
AMP pages hosted by the publisher, Google's AMP cache, Bing's AMP cache, or some other company's AMP cache? GGP was complaining about sending any information to Google. Only one of those options does so.
It's not always faster. There are plenty of performance and usability issues with AMP pages, not to mention all the extra development effort needing to maintain a different version of the site just for a few mobile browsers.
The content is still served from their CDN regardless of the domain. There is no way to serve AMP sites from your own servers and appear in the search carousel among other AMP articles.
Google is strong-arming the entire web to switch to AMP in order to increase their control over the distribution of content, and to be in a better position for tracking users.
The fact that Microsoft and Cloudflare have joined the party does not change the fact that you're about to lose control over your own content if this is not stopped.
By "their CDN" I meant Google, Cloudflare and Microsoft. Can we set up our own CDN to serve our own content from our own servers and receive the AMP badge in search results?
Please disclose your affiliation to Google either in your bio or in comments, and don't post the same comment in multiple places.
> Can we set up our own CDN to serve our own content from our own servers and receive the AMP badge in search results
This...doesn't make sense. You lose the value of a CDN (both to you and to the consumer of your content, in this case Google and the end user) if you're rolling your own.
It no longer makes sense to be able serve our own content without it being pushed down in search results?
We were talking about CDNs because your collegue mentioned AMP CDNs, but the main point doesn't change: we cannot serve our own content from our own servers and get the same placement in search results as AMP content, even if our content loads verifiably fast and is as performant as an AMP page on the client.
> We were talking about CDNs because your collegue mentioned AMP CDNs
I have no clue who bdeurst is. They certainly aren't a colleague of mine.
> even if our content loads verifiably fast and is as performant as an AMP page on the client.
Can you explain to me how your page load time is 0ms? My understanding is that a correctly functioning AMP-cached page will load for the user in a whopping 0ms, because it can be preloaded.
The entire design of AMP starts from a fairly straightforward premise: "How do we reduce (user-visible) page load times to 0, safely, cross origin?" If your pages user-visible loading time is longer than 0, you're failing to keep up with AMP.
AMP pages are preloaded, that's how your get the 0ms load time. If Google would instruct the browser to preload other search results the same way, those would also be available in 0ms when the user accesses them.
I think the correct term I was looking for is prefetching. That's a secure way to tell the browser to start loading search result links in the background.
> That's a secure way to tell the browser to start loading search result links in the background
prefetching isn't private cross origin:
> Along with the referral and URL-following implications already mentioned above, prefetching will generally cause the cookies of the prefetched site to be accessed.[1]
IDK about you, but I'd generally prefer that my cookies and IP not be exposed to all of the links that happen to be in the first page of search results.
Browser specs can be improved, and new ones introduced. And even if safe prefetching is deemed technically impossible, the question remains: should we give Google and a handful of other companies disproportionate control over how we publish and consume content, for 50ms of load time?
> Browser specs can be improved, and new ones introduced.
Yes, for example Signed Exchanges, which on a technical level solves all of the problems of rel=prefetch (and a number of the problems with AMP, like link pasting and copying).
> Should we allow a handful of companies to be pinged every time we load a page on the web
I'm hopelessly confused here: you're only going to "ping" one of the handful of companies if you were referred by that company. (In a world with signed exchanges) You're not going to come across an AMP-cache link organically. You'll navigate to example.com directly, without anyone except example.com (and your DNS provider) knowing. The cache provider will only know if you navigate to the cached site via the cache provider. Concretely, you don't go to the Google amp-cache unless you're navigating there directly from Google's search results. Same for Microsoft/Bing.
So if your metric is
> Should we allow a handful of companies to be pinged every time we load a page on the web
Then yes, absolutely, because nothing changes!
Edit: To address your other question,
> should we give Google and a handful of other companies disproportionate control over how we publish and consume content, for 50ms of load time?
Alright: how is AMP materially different from <whatever other algorithmic choices rated search results before>?
You seem to be claiming that AMP is harmful to someone but who? It's not harmful to competitors or to end users, and its only harmful to developers if you make the most strained argument.
My premises here are that users actually prefer AMP results. You may not, but my understanding is that most users do. So from the perspective of an end user browsing the internet, AMP leads to an improved experience.
So it's good for users.
No one has yet been able to explain to me how its actually harmful to a web developer who now has an incentive to make AMP-compatible sites. Like sure, you now have to work with a framework you may not like, but that's not a compelling argument when people are claiming that AMP is a threat to the sanctity of the internet.
So it's not like bad for web developers, it's just sort of a lateral move.
That leaves competitors to the giants. But AMP is an open standard, and DDG could, if they wished, implement an AMP cache themselves today and it would just work. And they'd, if anything, benefit from the bigger players pushing that ecosystem. There's the potential for abuse via the caches.json registry, but the AMP project is aware of this and notes that the registry could be decentralized using Subresource Integrity or similar, if such a standard was adopted[1].
So again: I'm confused by how exactly it's bad, beyond the "I am forced to develop in a way I don't want to if I want to appear near the top of the search page", which isn't new.
I've actually removed that second question before I noticed your answer, because I knew you would then skip over the first one. Feel free to address the main point I was making in all my posts in this thread, whenever you feel ready.
> So if your metric is
Google being pinged obviously isn't my main metric, as you can see from all my posts in our discussion. My main concern is that publishers will be forced to use specific publishing mechanisms (AMP, Signed Exchanges) to appear at the top of Google Search results. That loss of control puts publishers in a vulnerable position, and hurts innovation across the web.
> Then yes, absolutely, because nothing changes!
Everything changes. Google's influence and control won't end at the moment the user navigates away to a top result on Google Search.
The signed exchanges protocol requires that the content be signed with a key with a short expiry date (< 1 week), sites are free to make it shorter. In extreme cases, the providing site could sign with an expiry of < 1 day or even something like 1 hour.
And iiuc, sites are still free to revoke their certs. So this is actually probably more secure compared to something like https in that regard.
I see what you're saying but im not sure that's a problem - how many people are building CDNs in their garages that need to be certified?
Also, everything I say on HN reflects my own opinion and not any organization, which is what my profile states. I do not hide behind an anonymous username precisely for this reason. Poisoning the well by doxxing me doesn't change how the AMP standard works for CDNs either, and only serves to derail the conversation.
>Everything I say on HN reflects my own opinion and not any organizations, which is what my profile states
Sorry, but I agree with dessant. Your profile doesn't disclose your affiliation and nor do your comments. It's absolutely relevant to the discussion, because whether you want to admit it or not (or try your best to act neutral), your day job will have some influence over your opinions on these sort of projects.
You're right that it doesn't change objective facts about the specification, but I think it's misleading to suggest that, in general, external third-party CDNs are first class citizens in the AMP ecosystem when they're not treated the same within search.
> This is part of Google's attempt to de-prioritise the URL.
URLs have always been an implementation detail and not a user feature. From the very beginning it was intended that users would follow links, not type in URLs. HTML was built on hiding URLs behind text. Then AOL keywords happened. Then search explosion happened. And short URLs. And QR codes for real-world linking. And bookmarks because yet again typing in URLs is not a major driving use case.
Typing in un-obfuscated URLs has almost never been a key feature or use-case of the web. If anything URL obfuscation is a core building block of the web and is a huge reason _why_ the web skyrocketed in popularity & usage. Don't pretend that somehow AMP obfuscating URLs will be the death of the web. The web exploded in growth despite massive, wide-spread URL obfuscation over the last 20 years. Nothing is actually changing here.
Let's distinguish between obfuscating the query parameters, the the path, and the domain. They are different things, and the domain name especially is a major security boundary.
Most of what I mentioned did obfuscate the domain name. Users do not care about domain name security boundaries - that's yet again an implementation detail. An important one, but still not something most users recognize or care about. Hence, you know, why phishing is so successful.
Users used to care about paths and other descriptors. A decade ago, we were fighting for human readable resource locators. However, users have been taught progressively to ignore them as too complex. (Just the same as it happened for any advanced, but user accessible browser controls.) Why is it that 25 years into web usage, any controlled access is deemed too complicated? (Mind that other technologies were already approaching the end of their lifespan at a similar age. The web is neither new nor disruptive anymore.)
Why is it that 25 years into web usage, any controlled access is deemed too complicated?
Two words: corporate greed. It's so much easier to persuade and herd them to where they can be "monetised" when they don't know how things work, nor can't figure out how and where to learn.
Somehow the knowledge industry has turned into dumbing down as a business. There's a TV ad for a smart speaker integrated car, showing a hip, but managerial type man downloading the route to his workplace to his car by a voice command from home and subsequently happily arriving at work. – How do you manage to make a living, if you can't memorize you daily drive from home to work? How is this a product? Has augmentation of human intellect turned into a zero-sum game?
Well then don't use AMP? It's your domain, it's under your control. You at least have a choice here, whereas you can't block most other forms of URL obfuscation when being linked elsewhere.
Google is deprioritizing sites without amp in search to force them to use it.
So, if I search for something on reddit, I already learned to use duck duck go. Cause then I don't have to edit url to get rid of amp part not scroll up and down for that link.
Isn't google already the front door to everyone's website? Are the amp URLS really crazy? If you have a .com address is that roughly the URL in search results?
Your link is being shared from Google's search results and their application, so you might not like it but they have every right to control how it's displayed. Is it difficult to accept traffic from an AMP link? Are there technical downsides besides being called a name you don't want?
> From the very beginning it was intended that users would follow links, not type in URLs.
so, about that
4.6 Locators are human transcribable.
Users can copy Internet locators from one medium to another (such as
voice to paper, or paper to keyboard) without loss or corruption of
information. This process is not required to be comfortable.
you can't copy a page title into a client and expect it to find the right resource, now, do you?
accessing the URL is listed as one of the fundamental use case for them, and for good reasons, detailed elsewhere in the same rfc
I agree with most this... but have somewhat of a counter point to "you can't copy a page title".
You (often) can copy a page title into a client (Google) and expect it to find the right resource. This is usually done with articles, etc.
Even your comment provides a perfect example - you didn't link to RFC 1736, but the text "Locators are human transcribable" is unique enough that the first Google result is correct.
So you didn't have to provide a URL to lead someone to this page, just 'enough' unique text for it to be findable.
Which is kind of amazing - and maybe not what the original RFC intended.
none of the result here are pointer to the source I've used
sure the content is the same, but the resource isn't, if anything this demonstrates how easy is to misled a user, directing him on a different resource thinking it's the same.
luckily prominent sites get pushed on top of the result queue (had to cut it because it was submersed by advertisement) but the attack vector is evident.
Because web browsers default "home screen" has a large text box by default. People think that's where the address goes, but not really, that's actually a web page which does search.
Shame on us for designing it that way.
But on another note, it will be the day when your mother (or anyone else for that matter) types in 'www.walmart.com' and actually goes to 'www.target.com' (names taken from other examples that I've seen on Twitter).
Maybe Firefox should change the default screen from containing search to containing the address bar instead. That way if you type in a proper URL there it should go directly to it rather than doing a search.
URLs have always meant something to users. It’s how you trust the content and indeed the link. And now with so many exploits and phishing it’s even more important. Typing in a URL might be rarer, an honour only reserved for google, facebook etc. but reading urls is very important
The "web" is built around "human readable" technologies. Even actual implementation details that the user doesn't care about - like the application layer protocol (HTTP) and the source code for pages (HTML, CSS) - is human readable.
The "point" of the web was to serve humans, not machines. If we wanted to serve machines, we'd just throw binary blobs around, which would be orders of magnitude more efficient.
That said, I still have a bunch of "ancient" tech magazines that had directories of URLs for (then) popular websites, grouped by category. That's how we found things then.
People forget that there was a world before Google.
You're talking about writing URLs as if that's the only purpose they serve. You also read URLs.
Same as I'm not going to type a long path to a file on my file browser or CLI, I'm not going to type the full, character-by-character URL. But being able to see the path also provides extremely useful information.
Sidenote: your comment gets downvoted,huh. Though I don't agree with you I'm happy to see someone with opposite arguments. Have an upvote as you contributing greatly to this conversation.
This is categorically wrong. URL is the fundamental part of the web and without it, the Internet couldn't be decentralized. Imagine if I must reach tweeter by typing "tweeter" somewhere then that somewhere now becomes the gatekeeper. The URL allows distributed gatekeepers. A mechanism with a distributed structure will need something like URL infrastructure.
I posted the solution below, which I found a few days ago. The script will work with greasemonkey and tampermonkey, it will provide you with results similar to the ones before the change. If you also use uMatrix, there will be no ads.
That still requires somewhat less from the user than my solution: a filtering proxy. On the other hand, the latter enables a far more customised browsing experience and one that isn't restricted to a single browser on a single computer.
...which brings me to another great point this illustrates: if you want to customise your experience, if you want to be able to control how you see the Web, then you need to make an effort, and the amount you exert is essentially proportional to how much you can change.
Yet the majority of users have shown that they are willing to take whatever Google throws at them with little opposition. I find that a little sad and ironic in this era of "everyone can code" propaganda (I've seen even Google advertises something like that on its homepage); or perhaps the latter is just an attempt to increase the population of intelligent yet docile and obedient corporate drones... I know developers --- web developers --- who really hated the changes yet made no effort to fix it themselves, despite almost certainly having the skills to.
Haha I just took a look, expecting a cool Github project page.
Nope - its green, and hasn't been updated since June... of 2003. I have no idea how it is able to be effective against the modern web, considering in 2003 the biggest issue was annoying pop-up Flash ads which no longer exist. Maybe there are updated plugins or something.
The creator died 16 years ago... but the (rather small) community has made a lot of patches and continues to work on filters. Given that it's basically the equivalent of running all the sites you visit through sed, with a syntax that's more suited for filtering HTML than plaintext, the strength lies in its flexibility and generality.
Yes, the UI is still skinnable, and the default skin is rather... psychedelic.
Ohhhh, right! I remember when that happened, forgot ... Amazing that the software is still in use. And that it's still useful given the temporary nature of these filters. Its syntax was pretty neat; writing your own cosmetic filters was pretty easy. And I suppose that the community wrote some code to auto convert public block lists maybe?
There's something to be said about the adblocker being a filtering proxy, it can really get anything before it hits the browser.
Do you know how it compares to Privoxy nowadays? Way back then it was the open source but harder to configure alternative, that didn't quite work as well as Proxomitron. But maybe Privoxy continued development and got better, I don't know what direction that project took.
Oh and I personally always really liked the default skin :D
Good call, I think you hit it right on the money. We have all seen these problems (basically Google attempting to MITM the entire Internet) getting worse for years along with all of the very real malvertising threats. We have partnered with the Privoxy project to do exactly what you are doing with Proxomitron but a system that will scale to enterprise environments. We have it running in corporate and educational environments already w/out SSL inspection. What we will be able to do with SSL inspection will be a game changer. Check out the virtual appliance! Any feedback or ideas are appreciated. https://www.nextvectorsecurity.com
This is available only on Android though. On iOS, Firefox Focus (or any Firefox or other browser) is tied to Apple's restrictions. So there's no scope for browser extensions as we generally think of it.
And Mozilla is about to roll out Firefox Preview soo with all add-ons but uBlock Origin disabled until they can fix up and test the add-on ecosystem on the new browser. Unfortunately there's more add-ons for privacy/security/ethics than uBlock (Decentraleyes, tracking token strippers, et. al) which will include add-ons that redirect to the original source from AMP.
I use DDG as much as I can but when I need to find something very specific, or find a solution to a bug Ive encountered, it takes 2x as long on DDG vs Google
Just to be clear, I still use !g pretty frequently.
But psychologically it's rather different. If you find the Google search page to be visually aversive then your goal is to get in and get out quickly. That's a bit harder if Google is your default search.
I find Google ignoring my attempts to be more specific more often.
Just as a contrived example a search like "R33 RB25DET Motorsport ECU" typically got me specific links relating to the exact car, engine and topic. But the past 5 years or so it seems like it is weighting the more common word and more general terms. Often excluding the target topic altogether and just giving general motorsport results. Perhaps it's a consequence of every SEO specialist and their dogbot hammering general search terms and gumming up the machine with cruft.
That's something that really drives me nuts about it lately. If I just wanted general results, I'd do the lazy thing and not put in the additional terms. Worse, I've been finding that it still ignores some of the terms even when I put them in quotes.
The results just seem really bad lately, especially for anything technical. Just now I'd been looking for "html5 canvas torture test". The top result is a video called "Torture Testing my Nut Sac!!" and then some videos about testing Glock guns. Umm, no, that's not even close to what I'd wanted. (Bing does way better here and DDG is somewhere in between.)
I'm not sure what Google engineers are using to find technical information on the web these days, but I can't imagine it's the public Google search.
I personally find it most helpful to just ask Google a question like I'm a complete idiot. I got the idea from the meme about "that guy wot painted them melty clocks", which works extremely well in my opinion. Looking in my history "how to multilingual in java please", worked fine. You get a laugh out of it, 90% of the time Google figures out what you need, and the rest of the time it's going to show whatever the hell it wants to, any way.
At least both of us are pretending the same level of intelligence, which takes away a lot of the irritation.
I also tried talking to DDG like a duck, but it doesn't give as good results as talking to Google like an idiot.
Firefox has been my main browser for about 15 years. Never saw the advantage in Chrome, aside from using it once in a while when a webpage didn't work correctly on Firefox. These latest years we are seeing very aggressive behaviour from Chrome (reducing effectiveness of ad blocking, for example) and that just reinforces my decision.
I think I agree. Google still seems like my first choice mentally, but I used ddg a lot more as first search lately ( past month or so ).
It is getting more and more annoying getting workarounds for everything though. It is more annoying, because I liked G layout, default colors snd so on. It was cleaner.
Now not only is their search quality getting worse ( I got what I asked for on bing of all places ), their presentation managed to degrade too.
If it is testing result, I would be curious to see the data that informed that decision.
I usually start with DDG (it's my default search engine on all the devices I use) and then quickly move on to !s (for Startpage) since DDG still is lacking in the quality of results for many searches. It's a bit rare that I go to !g (Google search).
DuckDuckGo is great, but Searx[1] is even better. It's a metasearch engine that aggregates several search providers that you can self-host, or access via one of several public instances.
I run an instance on my local network, but you can run it for free on Heroku, AWS or GCP or even on a Raspberry Pi. There are several Docker images you can choose from.
Extra irony: I went to try Dogpile, but got redirected to some anti-something site (seems to not like my VPN IP) that wants me to do a Google Recaptcha.
Depends on what Google’s mission is. If it’s to show you ads, it doesn’t matter how long you’re on their page as the destination will (almost certainly) have more. If it’s to help you, it’s not successful.
Making profit, obviously. You to be less efficient at distinguishing ads and results, increasing time you look at ads, increasing chances of you interacting with ads.
> Their destructive AMP service confusingly shows you Google's domain instead of the website's
No, it doesn't. It's actually served from Google's URL, but it (the AMP service) shows you the original site URL (well, it shows the domain by default but that's a button that expands to the URL if you click it.)
Your address bar shows you the Google URL, but that's not misleading, either, since what the address bar has always shown is what location content is being served from, not a content identifier distinct from the mechanics of content distribution.
> they can't fix that without losing out on tracking
Nah, they could track of they worked like a classic CDN
I mean, I generally get the gist of what you are saying, but you are saying "no, you're confused, it's not misleading..." It's kind of like saying "no, you don't have hypochondria, it's all in your head!"
Google hates strong SEO sites, because they won't make them any money. So that's a clever way of pushing them further down. I wondered when all results on the first page will be Ads only.
Wouldn’t having strong SEO incentive competition to buy ads? Of course it also incentives them to work on SEO, but the only way to ‘get above’ a top ranking site would be to buy an ad, no?
The way Google defends its income stream against that is simple: They allow your competitors to buy ads on your own names and trademarks, then you're forced to do so as well because otherwise your organic link is below the ads. It used to be that it mattered since only dumb users would click the ads. But now that they're unshaded and look 99% identical, only super nerds bypass ads. Meaning your #1 organic result is basically only good for bragging rights and nothing more if there's anyone willing to pay even a small amount to jump up above you.
I guess sites with real, useful content (e.g. Wikipedia) don't need strong SEO since they have a ton of back-links from other sites that validate their high ranking, so "strong SEO" is really about making a less useful site look more useful, which makes sense for them to hate.
SEO really translates to "How to fool Google into boosting your ranking artifically".
I use duckduckgo, and for the most part, you know what you are searching for so the !tags are really good. !w search term, just takes you right to wikipedea. When I really have no ideal what or where I'm looking for something, I still find myself looking on google a bit, but for the most part, !youtube, !arch, !git, !stack, get me exactly what I want about 99 percent of the time.
Which is complete fucking bullshit. It's driving me mental that when I search for something, Wikipedia usually isn't on the front page. It's almost always the best result for most things, it should be on top.
You are perhaps joking but that has been my tack for a while now. Having specific sites I use to search through. I used to web search the pick from the offerings presented, not caring what site it was so long as it had the information I needed. But now I really value a good website that respects UX and good, honest content with low commercial influence.
Wikipedia's search is totally inferior to google. It requires correct spelling within one or two edit distances and the SERP is far less informative. This is a common enough action that those seconds add up. If ddg wants to be competitive they need to fix this.
Google used to put the Wiki article right at the top of the results list. It virtually never does that anymore. This is what's bullshit.
The point of a good search engine is that it is supposed to conglomerate good results, relevant results - let's say I'm looking up 'Phillip J. Fry' from 'Futurama', but I still want wiki information. Wikipedia won't even spellcheck for you if you don't know how to spell something correctly, like a city name.
Wikipedia is not a search engine. Although, at this point, Google is barely one, so plastered with sponsored results it can be hard to find the result you're looking for, and with this change, I've finally made the long-needed jump to DuckDuckGo.
Yes, it's time to 'stop the fucking bullshit', and save all our mental states - searching Wiki isn't going to solve that - but not using Google can help. ;)
Comparing a search engine to wikipedia search is like comparing a search engine to a local file search.
If you're looking for a specific driver on your computer that you know the exact spelling and version number of, a local file search will help you find that. A search engine will return many results with download links as well as potentially other drivers, or other versions of drivers for your product - and will generally forgive you if you misspell something.
There used to be such feature in the results page. I just went looking for it and I got 'Cached' and 'Similar' when I click in the little drop-down arrow. Nice feature that appears to be removed. How does removing that feature benefited the users?
No, it used to be part of the official results before the personal blocklist extension ever existed. Then some features were removed from the search results and then partially reimplemented in that extension.
If you know which site you want to search, and its search feature is as decent as wikipedia’s, I suggest adding it as a search keyword. Saves me some time to type e.g. ”wk turtle” in the address bar instead of going through the front page or lazily searching via some third party search engine.
I think it's Google's work to deprioritize them on other search engines it is still showing up at first DDG gives it special treatment, by highlighting its summary, which is often what I'm looking for.
I noticed that as well over the years. Also, one thing that really drives me crazy is that Google is trying to steer me into using the german wikipedia, even though I am already explicitly searching for the english article name. I really prefer reading the english version for techie topics, no matter if there might be an article in my native language.
This is the sort of "smart" behaviour that really feels dumb.
Google decides the layout. You can have the 'strongest SEO' in the world and Google still decide if they put 1 ad or 9 in front of the result.
Strength of SEO is irrelevant to the ads. The only thing Google hate is when sites manipulate themself to rank higher and offer a worse user experience.
It wouldn't be very surprising if Google varies the number of ads in a search results page based on the search term. For sites that have strong SEO for all of their key search terms that would be indistinguishable from Google placing more ads in pages where that site ranks highly.
My understanding it is very linked to 1) Profitability. Search terms around things like lawyers and credit cards. You'll almost always see 4 ads. 2) Genuine relevance. Google know for certain searches your not likely looking to buy something and to keep credibility don't show ads.
Occasionally you can find pockets of less competitive search's that 1) allow ads
2) relate to your product via the algorithm even if they don't to a human brain 3) Align to your desired audience and these can give great return.
Yeah for a long while I felt like an idiosyncratic person for using it and it did feel like a minor sacrifice. Nowadays it really does seem like a competitive platform on quality. Slightly less good at parsing the semantics, but much better at actually showing me search results instead of ads.
> and as they can't fix that without losing out on tracking
Tracking what users click to as the result of a search is critical feedback information for training your models/algorithms, it's not just about "hey let's see where this user goes to fine tune ad targeting for them". And, AFAIK, every search engine out there does it(?)
Just search in a private window then, the part of the tracking that I assume you find objectionable (gathering info on what sites the current user visits) goes away when you close the window while the part that helps the search engine (and thus results in better search results for everyone) still works.
Now sure, we can argue that maybe the company should provide options where you can say "you can use what I click on for search training but not for targeted advertising" (I think Google does provide a set of options that pretty much disable all web history/targeted ad collection), assuming you believe they follow through. But the company needs to pay for its services somehow so I can't blame them for tying the two types of tracking together, I still have tools as a user (private window) to avoid it if I care enough to.
They can track it with a simple js onclick handler, or a simple redirect on their server, that's not the problem. (They do both btw.) The problem is that they want to track what I do on the links I already clicked - which is absolutely none of their business.
I use StartPage which has the benefit of local results (but can be fully anonymous) but still uses Google search results.
DDG is a great alternative, but isn't for me.
And then there's Bing
...and at the end of the day, who is actually better out there, and that can prove that no data is leaking? Maybe running your own searx is the only option? (http://asciimoo.github.io/searx/)
Startpage person here ️. 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, we hope to further expand our privacy features & reach new users. Rest assured, the Startpage founders have control over the privacy components of Startpage (https://support.startpage.com/index.php?/Knowledgebase/Artic...).
Also, a couple of things that set Startpage apart from DDG: 1) We're HQ'ed in the Netherlands, ensuring all our users are protected by stringent Dutch & EU privacy laws, 2) we give you Google results without tracking, 3) with Anonymous View you can visit results in full privacy.
It's funny to think that, of all the products Google kills on the regular, the one thing most everyone wants them to be done with (AMP) is probably gonna stick around forever.
So, they helped make the web a far easier place to look around on things for a few decades and one layout change and you call them that they ruined the web?
Google gave us a lot, but that does not mean they should not be criticized. Without emotion I can say that using Google is far worse today than it was in the early 2000s. Besides delivering the results in a much more readable format, at that time we were able to search specifically in forums and there were a lot of advanced features like "linkto:" that are not supported anymore.
The problem I see is that Google does not care about us Geeks anymore. They are 100% focused on consumers now, and that sucks a lot.
that's a rather simplistic and faulty argument. there are plenty of things wrong with "lure and then abuse" scenarios, and it isn't really an argument at all to say "but look at all the good the lure phase did".
Google has done away with most of its original competitive advantages. Its biggest advantages now are its name recognition and its size. If Google had started off with paid search results and what-you-search-for-is-not-what-you-get we'd probably all still be using Altavista.
google amp is a plague on the internet and should have been shutdown by regulators. it is definitely anti-competitive. i am sick and tired of our government completely slaving to the big tech companies when it comes to regulations and anti-competitive behavior.
google amp on mobile overrides behavior on mobile, even on android, so instead of web links opening up in the respective and selected default app, it opens up the amp link within google search or the browser. there is no way to turn off this feature on any browser, chrome or not.
Unless I misunderstood, that is something you disable in each (google)app that has that "feature".
In Gmail for instance: settings: General settings:
Open links in gmail.
Turn on for "faster" browsing.
Default is on. Tip: Use firefox focus instead as the default browser to open all links. If the link warrants further look copy the url to your main browser.
if you use google search as your default search, then there is no way i know of to disable amp, no matter which browser you use, even if you request the browser to handle opening the link. google search passes the amp link to the browser.
Thanks for the tip. Most of the people here would fix that somehow, e.g. by tweaking browser settings, finding and following comments like yours. But, why does someone who doesn't deal with tech have to think about that, and will they, should they?
I find their UX approach to SEO more concerning than, say, scoring. For example, AMP pages will receive the same score as equally performant non-AMP content. However, they won't benefit from the carousel view, with instant page loads (prefetch), etc...
Small changes like this, applied at a huge scale to a user base that just can't afford to constantly fight hostile UX are damaging, regardless if they come from Google, an airline site, your mailbox switching to "Promotions" at random intervals or Twitter not allowing you to permanently change the feed order.
Internet feels more hostile than it used to. I don't mind the trolls (I can always block them) but I do mind that we depend on services that deploy hostile UX practices.
You can really feel it when switching from Android to LineageOS, or from Windows to Linux.
It's the difference between software where "you are the product" and software that has been created to serve the user, to be the best tool it can be.
I'm not talking about UX in the sense that open source software can sometimes feel clunky and unfinished, but I'm talking about breath of freedom you feel when you switch, and suddenly ... you notice that this current you have been forced to swim against, just isn't there any more.
I helped a friend get LineageOS on his bootlooped phone, and he's so happy with it. All these features in the settings that are actually helpful (when in Android you always have to second guess, you know that feeling when a setting's description is really vague and uninformative, "this is probably going to spy on me", is it vaguely positive or negative, because the switch can go either way). All the very basic features that would otherwise require an ad-filled app to perform, of course already there. You get privacy controls that aren't mystifying or reset on updates.
Similarly, I've now been on Instagram for about half a year. Always avoided FB, but there's some art I wanted to put out there, so I gave it a try. And oh my god, Instagram is probably the shittiest software ever? Or at least the most user hostile. It's a social thing where you can share images, comments and messages. Except it isn't, it just appears like one. Literally every interaction feels forced, to show me more ads, make me spend more time in this app (??) and mainly constantly throwing up barriers against interacting with any kind of software or data outside its ecosystem. You can't upload from your laptop, many links are not clickable, many text fields are not copyable, most features in the browser are locked unless you make it pretend to be an iPhone (!!), you can't post or reply to comments. The chat is such basic functionality that it seems hard to fuck up but they did. I should stop, but I can go on ...
This is that feeling of constantly swimming against a current, and somehow we're tricked into believing that is how it's supposed to be, because ... I don't know, some people told me when I complained, that most people don't use instagram in the way I do. Well I guess, but that doesn't seem to be most people's choice.
I think you're definitely misunderstanding what Instagram is. I'm not saying it isn't user hostile and full of ads, because it definitely is, but you're complaining about all the wrong things. All of those things you're complaining about are conscious design choices and have been from the very beginning.
Instagram is not some generic photo sharing software that tries to be open and modular and integrate with everything and proliferate arbitrary visual media with a rich tightly coupled messaging system. It was never that and won't ever be that.
Instagram from the start was just about taking low res pictures with your phone camera, putting a filter on them so they look less terrible and then sharing them with your friends. Every other feature was begrudgingly added to increase accessibility and hence DAUs. So you were never supposed to be able to interact with anything outside of the app. You can't cross-post your posts to facebook or twitter, you can't post from your computer, you can't spam links in your photo descriptions. All of this is literally the point of Instagram. It was like this before it and slightly after it got acquired and people loved it, not in spite of the restrictions, but because of them.
Then Zuck crammed it full of ads and a terrible glommed on messaging system and ruined it.
This is not AMP. It’s a feature originally called Chrome Custom Tabs [1], and it’s a faster way to open a webpage than a regular “open URL” intent (that would have to launch the entire browser app) or a custom WebView (which sucks for other reasons). The thing is, this feature takes into account your default browser, so if you set Focus as your system default browser, the custom tabs will launch in Focus, with all the privacy protections it offers.
> Unless I misunderstood, that is something you disable in each (google)app that has that "feature".
> In Gmail for instance: settings: General settings:
> Open links in gmail. Turn on for "faster" browsing.
I changed this setting, but now I clicked a link in gmail and indeed it opens via Firefox, but it still gets redirected through a google-URL before getting to the real page. I want to disable that behaviour most of all.
> Tip: Use firefox focus instead as the default browser to open all links.
Unfortunately iOS doesn't support this nearly as well as Android does. On Android you can enforce this pretty much everywhere whereas on iOS a bunch of apps still open links in Safari no matter what you do.
Semi-off-topic, but I recently found out that there is an even worse version of AMP, called Google Web Light. Running Firefox on an ARM device (e.g. Raspberry Pi), the results speak for themselves [1].
Notably, there is absolutely no way for the end user to disable it, short of spoofing your user agent.
Its been enough to make me change my iPhone's search default to DDG. I've been using it for about a month and I'm surprisingly happy with the results so far.
I hate to be that guy, but have you considered moving to another search engine? For example, DuckDuckGo is very decent once you adapt to it. And for the few cases where you absolutely need Google to read your mind, just add "!g" to your query and you're automatically there.
The thing which I use Google most for is typing some random place’s name in and it gives me that little card which shows how busy it typically is, what time it’s open, directions, contact number, etc. DDG just gives me a search result and 90% of the time that’s not what I want. I’m looking for information, not a list of URLs.
> I've been in this A/B test for a couple of months now, so I've had time to adjust, and I still hate it.
I have been trying to switch from google to duckduckgo for years but its only the past few months that I have been successful and I have google to thank for that.
Google is satanic.
They a mirror of the Soviet Union. Google also works with 3rd party websites to blacklist IP addresses so you can never post on a forum . And people always say you get blacklisted because you spam. I think that's bull crap . I think people get blacklisted for their political beliefs.
I noticed this on a co-workers screen recently and my immediate thought was "what dodgy search extensions have they been installing?". Now that it's on my results as well I can't help but strongly dislike the change for some reason. The icons are both very small and very distracting at the same time and don't aid in adding authority or any important meta information about the site.
The changes seem to have added enough noise to make parsing the page annoying, but maybe it's one of those things you brain learns to ignore after a while.
It's a little confusing to read now, so for context: at the time Google published this, it only put ads in the sidebar to the right of search results. This post was written to criticize the practice of putting ads atop search results, which competitors sometimes formatted almost indistinguishably from organic search results.
The google books link appears to have died: "You have either reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing limit for this book"
(I'm fairly certain that I have not viewed anything from this book, nor any book for that matter, this year.)
The post was written to criticize "paid placement" search engines like Goto.com/Overture (see https://www.searchenginewatch.com/2002/03/04/how-overture-go... for details). I believe Google has put ads above search results for as long as AdWords has existed (since 2000).
Vendors pay for placement throughout google's interface and search results, even if the 'list' of links is still 'organic'. For example, the placement of buy links for movies, flights, hotels, etc. Now with instant articles, google places content higher if it allows google to track and advertise within the article.
No, at the very beginning, Google only had the ads in little yellow boxes over to the right. They were very distinct. Then they started putting ads above the search results, but they still had a yellow background. Then they got rid of the background, but the results were still fairly visually distinct from the ads, and there would only be one or two ads above the search results. Now they just put this tiny little box that says "Ad" next to the ad, and they're no longer easily visually separable from search results. Also, very often the first screenful of results is entirely ads. The overall experience has massively degraded.
The other thing I've noticed is that more and more of the top results are from garbage content farms. Filtering this kind of crap out was the original reason Google existed and everyone switched to them, but they're failing at it now. IMO Google is overripe to be replaced with something better.
“For example, entering the query "buy domain" into the search box on Google’s home page produces search results and an AdWords text advertisement that appears to the RIGHT of Google’s search results” [1]
It is from October, 2000. It is so ancient, it is even before Schmidt happened. I don’t believe anything preceded that, but to be sure we’ll have to wait for Larry to chime in and clarify.
> Google’s quick-loading AdWords text ads appear to the right of the Google search results and are highlighted as sponsored links, clearly separate from the search results. Google’s premium sponsorship ads will continue to appear at the top of the search results page.
I have also observed people totally ignoring the top link and clicking a lower one even on searches where the top link was not an ad and was the correct page.
They don't show full URL, and a few times when I clicked on "correct" link I got to a shitty landing which I could not escape. Of course most of the blame is on shitty website design, but still I want to see where the link actually goes to because most of the times for me it's confusing.
This bit from the 1998 paper by young researchers Brin and Page, in which they introduce a novel search engine called 'google,' is also fun and instructive:
"It is clear that a search engine which was taking money for showing cellular phone ads would have difficulty justifying the page that our system returned to its paying advertisers. For this type of reason and historical experience with other media [Bagdikian 83], we expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers."
I searched for "google search advertisement" in the period 2000 to 2005, looking for screenshots of how Google ads have changed in style and placement over the years. Turns out the first result was this page... oh, the irony.
don't see why ppl are surprised about this from an ad company. its not a search engine company and never as been, despite having a large search engine...
Google has been the search champion for close to 2 decades, and are seen as the pinnacle of SV innovation. That's the starting point of any conversation about Google, because the victors get to write history.
That's why 'ppl are surprised'. To many, Google's ethos is still 'do no evil', an absurd mantra for a for-profit enterprise whose business model relies on developing ever more effective ways to spy on people's behaviours for the benefit of their advertisers.
I admit it's weird seeing a sudden change to how search results are displayed, but I think the use of favicons help draw your eye to brands you trust so I don't mind it.
If this helps ads mix in with real search results, maybe the ads need to be changed to stand out more? I feel people are focusing on "favicons = bad" instead of "ads looking the same as search results = bad".
I do think that Google has done a lot of work to objectively add value to the results page of most search queries (eg pulling data straight from websites like Wikipedia, giving better page previews, etc).
However they are an ad company - and they ultimately benefit from blurring the line between an advertisement and a "real" result. I do feel like it is harder to find certain types of results as a "power user" though, and it feels like the quality of results rapidly drops off after the first page. I am not sure if the fault lies with Google or with spammy websites hacking the SEO.
I wish Google had something like duckduckgo.com/lite (also ddg.gg/lite) for the atypical "power user." It's nothing but text results. I find it really useful for certain types of searches and when you don't want to be bothered by how "busy" the Google search results page has become.
> it feels like the quality of results rapidly drops off after the first page
Interesting -- I've been playing with Google search this morning, and it's behaving much like it did when I stopped using it: there is only a very low chance that I'll get a relevant search result before the third page.
>you are all whining about: the organic results have icons and the ad says "Ad" instead.
You're being condescending but appear to have missed the point. The "Ad" text in Google's results is in the exact same position and is effectively the same pixel dimensions as the favicon.
It's cleverly designed and placed to resemble a favicon, to give the over-all layout more uniformity between ads and organic results.
As a user, I want less uniformity between ads and organic results, not more.
DDG is hiding the "Ad" label on their shopping carousel, with unreadable #888 light grey text. That part is worse than Google's darker #666 (and longer word) "Sponsored".
The screenshot doesn't show any Ad links in the text list results (unless the ads are wholly unlabeled).
One could argue the words surrounding the carousel on DGG ("Shopping" and "Ad") are slightly more transparent than Google's "Sponsored" heading, but that's splitting hairs I guess.
In either case, I find both carousels pretty obvious in their intent. Maybe it's because the prices are being shown? I think more sophisticated internet users are trained to know that when you see a $xx.xx price on the internet, along with a link to purchase the item, there's probably some kind of commercial relationship happening behind the scenes.
These days, whenever I see a product mentioned anywhere on the web with links to purchase it, I default to assuming it's an affiliate link.
Well.. the DuckDuckGo and Google implementations are a little different but on both sites the ads are designed to blend into the organic results. If we weren't talking about the icon we could talk about the background colour, font, text colour, layout, URL in green etc. I don't begrudge DuckDuckGo, they have a very large competitor on their hands and wish them a lot of luck.
Here's some userstyles I made for myself to help get rid of some of the visual clutter. I use it combined with uBlock Origin though, so it's likely not perfect. I use the Stylus extension for Firefox.
I think that's the point - when everything looks like an ad, then nothing looks like an ad. (Read: ads blend in more - so users are probably more likely to click on promoted links.)
I don't like it, but I'm glad I'm not alone. I thought something was off as I was trying to "skip" the ads and get to the actual results but the "ads" seems to go on and on... Took me a while to realise they are not "ads" but actual results. I guess they are trying to blur the lines between paid and organic content by going the other way - instead of making the ads less obvious, they make the non-ads more ad-ish.
I also have one I submitted over the weekend. They haven't taken it down yet :). Mine is just geared towards my dislike of the favicons, not distinguishing the styling of the ads.
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 364 ms ] thread> "The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users. ...we expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers. "
(http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html)
At the time they thought this was a bad thing...
https://abc.xyz/investor/other/google-code-of-conduct/
a moral is not something that IS "good", its something ABOUT "good". saying someone is moral is calling someone principled - it says nothing about whether their principles (morals) are good or bad.
we need to discuss morals because they are axiomatic and foundational. if you take a strict moral view that doing harm of any kind is always wrong, you will never be able to discuss anything with someone who believes in the needs of the many over the needs of the few.
saying "moral people always recognize evil" is dangerously blind, circular reasoning, and the mechanism of several atrocities in history.
Almost everyone agrees that killing children is immoral. People in favor of abortion stick to a definition in which abortion is not killing children.
Whether that definition is right or wrong is what is at the center of the debate.
Almost isn't everyone, meaning it is still subjective for some.
>People in favor of abortion stick to a definition in which abortion is not killing children.
That shows that even the notion of 'children' is subjective.
>Whether that definition is right or wrong is what is at the center of the debate.
For some, not for others. There are many arguments on both sides and some depend upon this while others do not care about the distinction.
But we can use other examples. Take murder. There is subjective disagreement on what counts as murder and when certain forms of murder are wrong. Laws concretely differ between what is acceptable self defense and what is considered murder, and these differences mirror the moral differences people have that gave rise to these laws.
Many times you'll find people who will agree some word is wrong, but then disagree on what is covered under that word. If we both agree X is wrong, but then have totally different views on what constitute X, do we really both agree that X is wrong or do we have fundamental disagreement?
Swapping to something more technical, if we both agree commenting code is good, but you think comments are those blobs of text with syntax telling the compiler to ignore it while I think comments are super long method and variable names and don't count those blobs of text with syntax telling the compiler to ignore them as comments, then do we really agree that commenting code is important?
The world is a complex place and humans are complex beings. Nobody considers themselves the bad guy in their own story, that is, unless they feel they've been labeled the bad guy and they act to fulfill that label.
Painting people and actions as inherently evil, to me, is to overly simplify the person or misunderstand their motive and it prevents us from learning from their misdoings.
The only thing left then is, what do we want? It becomes a question of what do I want, and who can I view as allies in achieving my goals.
I want a search tool that serves my needs, not the needs of advertisers. I want privacy and I don't want distractions. So Google is not on my side, they are my opponent in this game[1]. And I suspect if the average user understood the implications of Google serving advertisers and not them, they'd be on my side, and not on Google's side.
In this framework, good and evil are just shorthand for shared goals. When someone says "Google is evil" they are saying "Google doesn't share our goals," and when they say "Google is good" they are saying "Google shares our goals". Of course, within this framework, the speaker is assuming that the listener has the same goals as the speaker, which is likely not a rational assumption.
But that assumption makes sense, because the goal here isn't actually to communicate, it's to persuade, and there's a good chance that when the listener hears "Google is evil" they will come up with their own goals that Google doesn't align with, and create an alliance with the speaker based on those goals even if they don't actually align with the speakers goals. In short: good and evil are sophist rhetoric, designed to persuade through soft power[2] rather than communicate meaning.
Of course, saying good and evil are subjective is also sophist rhetoric, because you aren't actually communicating about shared goals, you're just trying to undercut the argument that "Google is good" or "Google is evil".
I'll be careful to add that calling something "sophist rhetoric" isn't equivalent to calling it "evil" at any level, because we're operating in the framework where good and evil don't exist, so sophist rhetoric can't be evil. So if you're trying to persuade, there's no reason to think that sophist rhetoric is somehow beneath you.
But since I think people actually share my goals, playing the good and evil game is a poor choice for me, so I reject the whole framework of good and evil here. Anyone who uses these words, even to say they're subjective, is trying to sell you snake oil, because if they were actually being honest they would talk about how the thing they are arguing about aligns with your goals, because that's always a stronger argument.
So I'd suggest that if you actually believe good and evil are subjective, you make your argument based on what you think isn't subjective. Otherwise we can just discard your opinion as non-informative sophist rhetoric.
On the other hand, since most people actually do have goals they would consider to be part of a moral code, and we can objectively describe what most people would call good or evil, good and evil work just fine as shorthand, sophist rhetoric aside. If, for example, we can agree that we want to be able to differentiate between ads and search results, then we can agree to call that feature "good" and we can agree to call not having that feature "evil". If you don't agree to that terminology, it's because you don't share our goals, so why should we care? Go away, advertiser, we don't want you here. ;)
This too is meaningless, a chasing after the wind.
[1] Using "game" in a game-theoretical sense here.
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soft_power
How did you make that giant leap? Subjective doesn’t mean irrelevant, it means everyone has their own opinion on it which makes it quite relevant.
Your tangent was difficult to follow on the sole basis that Google is no different than any other entity. The US government is evil because we don’t share the same goals. Vegans are evil because we don’t share the same goals. Football players are evil because we don’t share the same goals. I can go on but you should get the picture by now.
At the end of the day, you should understand that businesses exist solely to make money. If they didn’t make money, they wouldn’t have investors. Without investors, most businesses would not exist. Without those businesses, we would be objectively worse off.
Relevant to what? If objective and subjective ideas are both relevant, why even bother pointing out that it's subjective?
Subjective ideas aren't admissable as evidence in most debates. Whether or not you intended it, when people go through the effort to say an idea is subjective, it's usually because they're trying to cut down the validity of that idea. So if that wasn't your intent, maybe you should have been more clear.
> Your tangent was difficult to follow on the sole basis that Google is no different than any other entity. The US government is evil because we don’t share the same goals. Vegans are evil because we don’t share the same goals. Football players are evil because we don’t share the same goals. I can go on but you should get the picture by now.
No, actually I don't get the picture. Yes, anyone can label anyone evil.
> At the end of the day, you should understand that businesses exist solely to make money. If they didn’t make money, they wouldn’t have investors. Without investors, most businesses would not exist. Without those businesses, we would be objectively worse off.
Actually, that's not objective, that's subjective. I don't agree that the world is better by having a huge amount of private data centralized under Google's control.
(Incidentally, see how saying that's subjective sounds a whole lot like saying it's irrelevant?)
I agree with you that good/evil feels like an objective dichotomy (A), especially in binary matters: e.g. alive or dead, working or not, arrived or not.
I agree with parent that evil is subjective (B) for other objects: e.g. capitalism, masturbation, violence, assistance, immigration.
I also move that good/evil is but one spectrum of evaluation, of assessing the world; there are many (hundreds, thousands) of such dimensions in our inner world.
Finally, I submit that good/evil is but the "feeling" of old/deep brain structures wherein emotions are generated and maybe felt too (nucleus acumbens, amygdala...), and that the dichotomy we feel and then think, theorize is but an interpretation of the manifestation of these primary emotions (they likely date back before we were apes, even before we were mammals; this is like the earliest system that lets a shrimp or fish move "towards" the cold and "away from" the light; there may not even be the "feeling" of it yet at that evolutionary stage).
Now is it all meaningful or pointless?... You tell me ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Edit: bonus question: is there a reunion space AB? (!) bonus 2: are some objects neither in A nor B?
> > > They cared not to be evil back then. Now they say they do the right thing, and “right” is subjective.
Yes, it's 'evil' when you're a poor disruptive startup trying to change how ads work, it's 'not evil' when you're a behemoth incumbent trying to maximise revenues.
The never did, that was just marketing nonsense we all naively swallowed.
> In general, it could be argued from the consumer point of view that the better the search engine is, the fewer advertisements will be needed for the consumer to find what they want.
> we believe the issue of advertising causes enough mixed incentives that it is crucial to have a competitive search engine that is transparent
This change seems to go directly against their belief that it's crucial for search engines to be transparent. After the change, it's way less transparent, or "easy to perceive or detect", that an ad is an ad.
I used to place a high value on how long people had been on the team, but the two extremely stable places I subsequently worked at were a shitshow, because there just weren't enough outsiders to argue them out of their circular reasoning.
At the boardroom level, the situation we warn about is "surrounding yourself with yes-men". I don't think Page & Brin remember where they came from. And they probably forgot long before they started trying to convert a 767 to be their corporate jet, which was already more than 10 years ago.
( https://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/07/07/google_bed_plane/ )
Google I can bang in cryptic queries like > centos 7 tuned no daemon
and get the 3rd link about how to run tuned in a no daemon mode. Bing/DuckDuckGo have the article at around 7th or 8th place, but prefaced by a lot of "while technically not wrong, not what I'm looking for" links. It's even worse for more niche errors or code snippets.
We cannot, as a healthy internet, let Google control so much of the web.
I know Google also factors in how long people spend on the resulting webpage.
Ideally you could use Bing as your default engine, then fall back to Google whenever there's a search that doesn't yield good results. If you have the time, you can also use the Feedback link on the bottom-right of the page to report bad search results; people do actually triage and read those.
This is what I do with DDG. Unless I have a pretty specific search, or want Google's really nice live sports scores widgets, DDG is usually pretty good.
Interesting. Can you explain more on what is tracked after a user clicks a result and how this data is used?
Obviously ranking search results is immensely complicated with lots of accumulated insider wisdom, but the short answer is that "static" page features (PageRank, how well the query matches text on the page, etc.) are good for pruning down zillions of pages to generate a candidate list of 10 or so results to show the user, but not great at ordering those results, and serving the results in the best order is really important for user satisfaction. For generating the final top-10 ordering, "dynamic" features like how many people clicked that link, how long did they spend on the page, etc. are the most useful.
Regarding what is tracked, obviously Bing can only track what you're doing on Bing itself, so clicks on blue links and backs are tracked, but they can't see what you do on the destination page. This data is used to train models/NNs/etc. but the raw click data isn't kept for very long: it's too large and it has to be removed for GDPR compliance.
Do Google do this as well?
Downvoters: why on earth are you downvoting Analemma's post? It's constructive, on point and overall the kind of post which makes HN comments valuable.
Because of the way that downvoting works on HN, the few times I use it, my thought is "nobody should see this comment". Because enough downvotes delegitemize and hide a comment, it's effectively telling other people that it's not worth being read.
I don't know if that's actually going through people's minds when they downvote, but that's what I think which is exactly why I rarely use it. But too many people now are simply using it on posts they don't like, even if a post deserves to be there. For some reason, it's an unpopular opinion to believe that an idea or opinion you think is wrong deserves to be seen and rebutted rather than silenced.
A million flies are attracted to shit. I don't believe this sort of training data will ever become useful if it's in the same pool with the rest of the world. See also: voting with your wallet against the tyranny of the majority of uninformed consumers who buy whatever is most marketed. Those pennies don't matter.
In fact, I believe this sort of training and optimization for the mainstream plays a role in allowing bad results to proliferate.
This is before we even consider the fact that clicking on many results can indicate that they're bad (I click another result because the previous wasn't good), or because they're good (I'm browsing choices). Dwelling long can be bad (crappy & slow site, it takes me long to find the information I want or turn away) or it can be good (I found good stuff and I'm spending a while on it). Whatever conclusion your training system draws might be completely wrong. And probably prone to being gamed.
Sorry, appeal to authority is no argument. Direct experience is valuable if there's an argument or some real scenario we can dissect, otherwise it's nothing more than a baseless claim. Without concrete examples, it's not even an anecdote. And there are plenty of anecdotes about search results for in-depth content becoming harder and harder to find.
The person I was responding to posted that they're using this training data to order the top 10 results or so. That's already an indication that it's not very helpful for me. I don't get frustrated if the top few results are in suboptimal order, I get frustrated when I get pages and pages of garbage and irrelevant results and can't seem to get anything useful out of it.
Specifically they also measure metrics like "regret" - if you went back to the search results and chose something else this indicates it wasn't a useful search result for the query and this counts against it.
In theory this is quite a nice defense against clickbaity, content free results.
I explicitly addressed this:
> clicking on many results can indicate that they're bad (I click another result because the previous wasn't good), or because they're good (I'm browsing choices).
You don't know the reason why I clicked back. Maybe I got what I needed at a glance, and I'm browsing to the next thing to see if there's more of what I need.
You don't know that the Average Joe (and a million other Average Joes) wasted 15 minutes on clickbaity content free crap despite not getting anything useful out of it. You know, those same SEO spam sites are trying to find ways to make the user stay as long as possible; they are in the game. And I'm sure there are plenty of gullible users who will stay. Who knows, maybe SEO spam is working and that's precisely why we see SEO spam sites in results?
Again, I think training like this is pretending the problem is much simpler than it is. And I think that there is a real danger that training like this just optimizes for 1) average users 2) sites that managed to game the system with their SEO. Neither is optimizing for quality results.
That theory has so many holes and pitfalls.
Maybe the best bet is for a search engine to try to include a simple, non-intrusive method of getting user input to determine the usefulness of a search result. Like, if it determines you came back as a "regret", maybe a ThumbsUp/ThumbsDown icon next to the last link you clicked to get you to say whether that link was useful in any way, or maybe a "block" option as well to say that you never want sites like that again.
I should, then, expect dramatically different results when I use someone else's PC or a public computer. I have not witnessed dramatic differences.
We may not know exactly why you clicked back, or why Joe wasted 15 minutes on a site, but from all clicks in aggregate and from the human-labelled data, we can tell how that correlates with the clicked site's relevancy and quality and utilize your clicks accordingly to improve the ranking.
Finding such correlations is still by far and large what all search engines do, rather than trying to truly understand the query. It's only now starting to change with recent advances in deep learning and NLP.
The gaming part is where there's a lot of importance, since it forces the machine to learn which users are acting nefariously.
Speaking as someone who worked for another big web search engine in the past (not G, not B)
And counting good/bad clicks for a given (query, url) pair is just the tip of the iceberg. There's a lot of other interesting stuff you can do with them _if_ you have the data. Deep learning/NLP with clicks as training signal is probably the most exciting area to me, to name one. Unfortunately almost all of the data currently gets nabbed by google, other search engines are just getting by with the scraps. And it's very hard to bootstrap a competitor from scratch - for example Cliqz had to resort to some shady deals with Mozilla just to get any data to start with.
It's getting worse too.
Back in the day, you could Google something for a manufacturer and include the name of the manufacturer like, "Pioneer 10" Subwoofer" and automatically the first result would be a like to Pioneer's subwoofer page or their main ecommerce site.
You type that into Google today? You will get 15 results for AMAZON pages with Pioneer speakers. No, I want to buy it from Pioneer, not Amazon. Oh yeah? The actual link to the actual company, who actually makes those speakers? They're on Page 2.
When you have the actual manufacturer being buried in the results, we have a major problem.
Think of modern google as a question answering machine not a serch engine. And do "Show me Pioneer 10 subwoofer manufacturer specs" instead of just jamming keywords and hoping for the best.
Maybe, but if so then they're singularly bad at it. Google consistently gives me worse results than DDG and Bing, anyway.
I really think it's because Google is trying to figure out what I "really mean" by my search queries, and it's really terrible at guessing.
Not buying stuff you already own again serves neither the economy nor Google's advertising profit. Go on, buy another set. Infinite growth depends on it.
That really is their attitude to every product and service.
> When you have the actual manufacturer being buried in the results, we have a major problem.
How do you know though? What if the majority users actually do what you describe in hopes of buying something and thus the shopping results are more relevant for them?
I imagine either there is a bug or this is the case, because I'm sure the links people actually click feed back into the algorithms and the results are modified accordingly.
This being said, it seems like the fact that your results aren't personalized enough to your liking is a shortcoming, assuming you were signed in.
Google's results are uglier and blatantly revenue based. They have now lapsed behind DuckDuckGo in usefulness for me. I fall back to Google a few times per week, with inconsistent results when I need a "second opinion."
I'd suggest giving DDG another try.
I plan to remove Google from my life this year, at least as a central dependency. Search is already behind me. Mail, calendars, docs, and drive will be taken care of throughout the year. And my Android phone will be replaced with an iPhone.
However, some folks are a little spooked by the privacy implications of it being ran out of Australia, so be sure to research that if you're interested in Fastmail.
Proton has appeared somewhat bumpy to me -- I can't say for sure why, but they give me some spidey tingles.
Migrating / transferring is indeed a problem. I would suggest using Google Takeout, their data export tool, and permanently archiving your data with a third party service and / or physical backups. See https://takeout.google.com/. You probably won't be able to import into your new provider.
I ended up trying fastmail and found the transition much easier.
You should take a closer look at DDG, it has the answer from serverfault.com in an instant answers box for your query and it highlights the required setting in a perfectly chosen excerpt from the correct answer:
Do you have the URL?
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=centos+7+tuned+no+daemon&t=iphone&...
Not only can you bang in whatever query you want to DDG, you can bang it in via Google, using bangs (https://duckduckgo.com/bang). I think that "!g <query>" is the second stop for many DDG'ers, when DDG itself disappoints. (My understanding is that it still offers some anonymisation over searching directly through Google, but I'm not sure.)
ex. Adobe updates come faster than I can update, so I run into issues, so finding the most recent answer is what I am looking for and not a similar issue from Adobe pre CC.
If companies want to track me and build profiles on me, I accept that I can't stop that without refusing to use their products and every site that's integrated with it (Google Analytics, Adwords, etc). But if they're going to do it, at least use that information to help me. What's the point otherwise?
That means you see a second helping of ads.
You still use Google.
From their perspective this is probably working perfectly.
I know you can manually filter results, but why show 10 year old answers to software that gets updated so frequent! I am sure there are other areas where this exists, dated results should be pushed back a few pages.
I am amazed that no search engine gives me easy way to blacklist domains from my results. That would make the usefulness of any of them to increase by orders of magnitude. (and if they are careful, they might be even able to use the blacklisted data to adjust their general results , not only my personal results as well)
And I can't help to add qwant.com to the list of alternative search engines. No affiliation whatsoever, but I am pretty happy to use that as my daily search engine here in Europe.
Yep. Ironically enough, that was killed soon after I found about that. And anyways, it was implemented far from easy to use. It should be just behind the green arrow that gives the options to see cached version etc. And obviously with cross-platform effect on all my devices as long as I am logged in.
b(tab) Whatever I want to search for
and it goes to Bing with that query. It's a great example of what you're looking for. On my personal devices, I try to use Bing for as much as I can to see whether its personalized results will ever marry up to Google (it's gotten extremely close, lately), but I often prefer searching Google Maps, so I have gMaps added as a search engine with keyword "m", so I can search for anything with "m (tab) place" and immediately see gMaps results.
I have about 50 keywords.
As a user, I want the ads more easily distinguishable, not less.
The internet is slowly being turned into a corporate power grab and it's only getting worse YOY =|
I believe nearly all the search engines are still guilty of this one.
I also think firms should be able to buy "blank space." For example facebook or amazon could pay NOT to have an ad above their result. Maybe they already do, I dont see an ad when I search facebook, however I do see an ad for amazon above the top amazon result. Google should just be smart enough to see the top result and the ad are the same link, and handle the situation more appropriately, like tucking the ad text underneath the result, or signifying that the top result owner has paid to hide ads. I have to say, I dont find these results differentiated ENOUGH from the ad. https://i.imgur.com/8Dhr1mj.png
That sounds an awful lot like a shakedown practice. "Nice search result you got there. Would be a shame if it would be obscured by an ad..."
Deduplication is the lesser of two confusings.
Backblaze had a competitor who bought ads for the search term "backblaze". The CEO successfully contacted the competitor CEO and they agreed they'd be in a pissing match throwing money at Google if the practice and retaliation (backblaze buying on their search term) occurred. The competitor promptly stopped the ad campaign.
https://www.backblaze.com/blog/save-marketing-money-nice/
I don't know exactly where my opinion lies in this case. I think the cloud backup space currently has many players and that even if all players agreed to this - the net result would be Google earning less, each of those companies having less ad spend, and therefore greater profitability.
Heck, imagine if a 3rd party existed to "bypass" the Google ad auction through collusion on generic terms like 'computer backup'. (I'm not in this space, so some of the feasibility is speculative). Each company puts in their bid parameters for search terms. 3rd party evaluate the bids, submit 2 slightly different bids to minimize ad spend, and since the whole market coluded, Google made less money.
It's fragile, it's collusion. It's easily by passable by anyone going to Google directly. Was anyone harmed?
Why does Amazon need to appear twice in a row - https://i.imgur.com/8Dhr1mj.png
If at some point you slipped down the organic list, you would have the option to buy a normal ad again.
They are smart enough, but they don't get any money from people clicking on search results, only ads, so of course they're going to show the ad - some people will click it.
A visual guide: "A (mostly comprehensive history of Google's ad shading and labeling" https://i.imgur.com/0RxdzBE.png
E.g. https://i.imgur.com/SfomkdQ.png; the second result is a competitor's ad, the third result is the organic result.
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2019/09/04/google-paid-search-ads-shake...
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/17/technology/antitrust-hear...
Edit: Disclosure - I work at Google but this is my own opinion on multi-sided markets
If for example changes to the marketplace makes it harder to determine who is a fraud and who is not or simply making it difficult to determine the quality of products, competition between the companies with the quality products and fraudsters may increase and that would be a bad thing.
https://www.popehat.com/2016/06/14/lawsplainer-its-not-rico-...
It's like saying that you want to regulate what can advertising companies display on billboards, ex. they cannot display competitor's ads nearby your company's offices. Since the billboard space is private and owned by the ad company (similarly to the ad space on Google servers served pages), they get too decide to put there whatever they want (barring free speech limiting regulations).
This is part of Google's attempt to de-prioritise the URL. Their destructive AMP service confusingly shows you Google's domain instead of the website's — and as they can't fix that without losing out on tracking, they're trying to change what the URL means.
Thanks for ruining the Web, Google.
Then Google relented and provided a non-solution in the form of an obscure bar on top of AMP pages (in which the link to the original page is deliberately designed to not look like a link).
The signed exchanges is a bone thrown towards standards committees after all the damage has already been done.
And the "solution" has been directly called by Mozilla harmful, they are not going to implement it. Safari shares Mozilla's concern.
Enjoy the popups, video ads, autoplay, bloated sizes, etc.
I find the non-AMP version to be superior every single time, but I use NoScript so I don't see the popups, video ads, autoplay, etc.
Your "choice".
Bing also uses the AMP standard: https://blogs.bing.com/Webmaster-Blog/September-2018/Introdu...
All these certificates do is make it so Google's browser (and only Google's browser) will mask the fact you're on Google's domains if you sign the file a certain way.
If anything, this shows more anti-competitive practices -- they're adding features into their browser that specifically benefit a features of their search engine.
https://amp.cloudflare.com/
If the criteria is just "needs extra work" then unfortunately almost nothing can change and we're all going to live with the existing technology. Change inherently has friction and requires "extra work" with the hope that's an investment which provides returns long term.
In other words, say you are a large Internet company that is trying to improve web page loading times. You profile why most web pages are slow and identify issues. You publicly report on those issues and develop guidelines and criteria. Nobody bothers because "extra work". You develop new technology that directly addresses those issues, this technology works within the existing environment but it requires both client and server support to be most effective. Do you think anyone cares? No, because of "extra work". That's why there needs to be incentives. Now you have a "penalty" for not doing that "extra work". You can file it under "it's anti-competitive" (maybe it is) but if you do the "extra work" then suddenly the anti-competitive part works for you, not against you. IMO that's why it's not anti-competitive.
Other examples: why do you think there are so many people that complained when iPhone released with Flash reader? "extra work". Similarly when it removed the audio jack. Change is friction and friction is extra work. But most of the time that's not anti-competitive...
HTML is already fast (see HN for an example). HTML is already universal across devices and browsers. HTML is already published and easily cached for billions of pieces of content.
AMP is a fork of HTML that only targets mobile browsers specifically linking from Google search results. It's useless on its own, but AMP is required to get higher placement on search results pages, so publishers are effectively forced to spend technical resources to output an entirely new format just to maintain that ranking.
If Google wanted faster pages then it can do what it always does and incentivize that behavior by ranking results based on loading speed. These signals are already collected and available in your Google webmaster console. There's nothing new to build, just tweak ranking calculation based on existing data. Sites would get faster overnight, and they would be faster for every single user because HTML is universal.
Do you know why they didn't do that? Because it's the ads and tracking that's slow, not the HTML. Google's Doubleclick and Google Analytics are the biggest adserver and tracking systems used on the web. This entire AMP project is created to circumvent their own slow systems. It creates more work for publishers while increasing data collection by running a "free" CDN that never leaves a Google-owned domain and thereby always supports first-party cookies. It's a perfect solution to protect against anti-tracking browsers and why Chrome now will also block 3rd-party cookies, because it won't affect AMP hosted on Google domains.
Probabilistic techniques are used for anonymous users or environments like iOS Safari that are very strict.
https://amp.businessinsider.com/lambda-school-online-coding-...
If you visit the page from search results (which is the only place it would be linked) then it would never leave Google's domain.
Here's the actual URL used from search results: https://amp-businessinsider-com.cdn.ampproject.org/v/s/amp.b...
In other words: if it behaves exactly as a page hosted on your site (just faster), why do you care?
I'm getting the impression that HN users care a whole lot about seeing the request in the nginx log they are tailing.
Google is strong-arming the entire web to switch to AMP in order to increase their control over the distribution of content, and to be in a better position for tracking users.
The fact that Microsoft and Cloudflare have joined the party does not change the fact that you're about to lose control over your own content if this is not stopped.
https://amp.cloudflare.com/
Please disclose your affiliation to Google either in your bio or in comments, and don't post the same comment in multiple places.
This...doesn't make sense. You lose the value of a CDN (both to you and to the consumer of your content, in this case Google and the end user) if you're rolling your own.
We were talking about CDNs because your collegue mentioned AMP CDNs, but the main point doesn't change: we cannot serve our own content from our own servers and get the same placement in search results as AMP content, even if our content loads verifiably fast and is as performant as an AMP page on the client.
I have no clue who bdeurst is. They certainly aren't a colleague of mine.
> even if our content loads verifiably fast and is as performant as an AMP page on the client.
Can you explain to me how your page load time is 0ms? My understanding is that a correctly functioning AMP-cached page will load for the user in a whopping 0ms, because it can be preloaded.
The entire design of AMP starts from a fairly straightforward premise: "How do we reduce (user-visible) page load times to 0, safely, cross origin?" If your pages user-visible loading time is longer than 0, you're failing to keep up with AMP.
prefetching isn't private cross origin:
> Along with the referral and URL-following implications already mentioned above, prefetching will generally cause the cookies of the prefetched site to be accessed.[1]
IDK about you, but I'd generally prefer that my cookies and IP not be exposed to all of the links that happen to be in the first page of search results.
[1]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Link_prefe...
Yes, for example Signed Exchanges, which on a technical level solves all of the problems of rel=prefetch (and a number of the problems with AMP, like link pasting and copying).
> Should we allow a handful of companies to be pinged every time we load a page on the web
I'm hopelessly confused here: you're only going to "ping" one of the handful of companies if you were referred by that company. (In a world with signed exchanges) You're not going to come across an AMP-cache link organically. You'll navigate to example.com directly, without anyone except example.com (and your DNS provider) knowing. The cache provider will only know if you navigate to the cached site via the cache provider. Concretely, you don't go to the Google amp-cache unless you're navigating there directly from Google's search results. Same for Microsoft/Bing.
So if your metric is
> Should we allow a handful of companies to be pinged every time we load a page on the web
Then yes, absolutely, because nothing changes!
Edit: To address your other question,
> should we give Google and a handful of other companies disproportionate control over how we publish and consume content, for 50ms of load time?
Alright: how is AMP materially different from <whatever other algorithmic choices rated search results before>?
You seem to be claiming that AMP is harmful to someone but who? It's not harmful to competitors or to end users, and its only harmful to developers if you make the most strained argument.
My premises here are that users actually prefer AMP results. You may not, but my understanding is that most users do. So from the perspective of an end user browsing the internet, AMP leads to an improved experience.
So it's good for users.
No one has yet been able to explain to me how its actually harmful to a web developer who now has an incentive to make AMP-compatible sites. Like sure, you now have to work with a framework you may not like, but that's not a compelling argument when people are claiming that AMP is a threat to the sanctity of the internet.
So it's not like bad for web developers, it's just sort of a lateral move.
That leaves competitors to the giants. But AMP is an open standard, and DDG could, if they wished, implement an AMP cache themselves today and it would just work. And they'd, if anything, benefit from the bigger players pushing that ecosystem. There's the potential for abuse via the caches.json registry, but the AMP project is aware of this and notes that the registry could be decentralized using Subresource Integrity or similar, if such a standard was adopted[1].
So again: I'm confused by how exactly it's bad, beyond the "I am forced to develop in a way I don't want to if I want to appear near the top of the search page", which isn't new.
[1]: https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/pull/18495/commits/c5d...
> So if your metric is
Google being pinged obviously isn't my main metric, as you can see from all my posts in our discussion. My main concern is that publishers will be forced to use specific publishing mechanisms (AMP, Signed Exchanges) to appear at the top of Google Search results. That loss of control puts publishers in a vulnerable position, and hurts innovation across the web.
> Then yes, absolutely, because nothing changes!
Everything changes. Google's influence and control won't end at the moment the user navigates away to a top result on Google Search.
And iiuc, sites are still free to revoke their certs. So this is actually probably more secure compared to something like https in that regard.
[0]: https://github.com/WICG/webpackage/blob/6cc3237b36c2f9ce7534...
Also, everything I say on HN reflects my own opinion and not any organization, which is what my profile states. I do not hide behind an anonymous username precisely for this reason. Poisoning the well by doxxing me doesn't change how the AMP standard works for CDNs either, and only serves to derail the conversation.
Sorry, but I agree with dessant. Your profile doesn't disclose your affiliation and nor do your comments. It's absolutely relevant to the discussion, because whether you want to admit it or not (or try your best to act neutral), your day job will have some influence over your opinions on these sort of projects.
You're right that it doesn't change objective facts about the specification, but I think it's misleading to suggest that, in general, external third-party CDNs are first class citizens in the AMP ecosystem when they're not treated the same within search.
URLs have always been an implementation detail and not a user feature. From the very beginning it was intended that users would follow links, not type in URLs. HTML was built on hiding URLs behind text. Then AOL keywords happened. Then search explosion happened. And short URLs. And QR codes for real-world linking. And bookmarks because yet again typing in URLs is not a major driving use case.
Typing in un-obfuscated URLs has almost never been a key feature or use-case of the web. If anything URL obfuscation is a core building block of the web and is a huge reason _why_ the web skyrocketed in popularity & usage. Don't pretend that somehow AMP obfuscating URLs will be the death of the web. The web exploded in growth despite massive, wide-spread URL obfuscation over the last 20 years. Nothing is actually changing here.
Two words: corporate greed. It's so much easier to persuade and herd them to where they can be "monetised" when they don't know how things work, nor can't figure out how and where to learn.
There's nothing I can do it about it, but I tend to hate it.
If my name is Mike and someone powerful calls me Chucklehead, I will have to start answering to that name in order to continue doing business.
But what REALLY concerns me is if a year later, that powerful someone calls someone ELSE Chucklehead.
So, if I search for something on reddit, I already learned to use duck duck go. Cause then I don't have to edit url to get rid of amp part not scroll up and down for that link.
Isn't that just a protection racket?
Your link is being shared from Google's search results and their application, so you might not like it but they have every right to control how it's displayed. Is it difficult to accept traffic from an AMP link? Are there technical downsides besides being called a name you don't want?
so, about that
you can't copy a page title into a client and expect it to find the right resource, now, do you?accessing the URL is listed as one of the fundamental use case for them, and for good reasons, detailed elsewhere in the same rfc
You (often) can copy a page title into a client (Google) and expect it to find the right resource. This is usually done with articles, etc.
Even your comment provides a perfect example - you didn't link to RFC 1736, but the text "Locators are human transcribable" is unique enough that the first Google result is correct.
So you didn't have to provide a URL to lead someone to this page, just 'enough' unique text for it to be findable.
Which is kind of amazing - and maybe not what the original RFC intended.
none of the result here are pointer to the source I've used
sure the content is the same, but the resource isn't, if anything this demonstrates how easy is to misled a user, directing him on a different resource thinking it's the same.
compare with stack overflow result:
https://i.imgur.com/maJi47G.png
luckily prominent sites get pushed on top of the result queue (had to cut it because it was submersed by advertisement) but the attack vector is evident.
So web was designed with using Google in mind? woot
You can type it into Google, though...
But on another note, it will be the day when your mother (or anyone else for that matter) types in 'www.walmart.com' and actually goes to 'www.target.com' (names taken from other examples that I've seen on Twitter).
I made a new webpage for my father, and my mother cannot open it, since google does not know about that and there are no links to it.
There is unfortunately a tax on stupidity, and in this day and age it is paid with one's personal data to multinationals.
The "point" of the web was to serve humans, not machines. If we wanted to serve machines, we'd just throw binary blobs around, which would be orders of magnitude more efficient.
That said, I still have a bunch of "ancient" tech magazines that had directories of URLs for (then) popular websites, grouped by category. That's how we found things then.
People forget that there was a world before Google.
Making people type in URLs is not a key feature of the web. Letting people interact with their various signifiers has always been.
Too many people involved in UX and product and commentary have forgotten that "don't make me think" doesn't mean "don't let me think."
The URL is a set of half a dozen affordances.
Same as I'm not going to type a long path to a file on my file browser or CLI, I'm not going to type the full, character-by-character URL. But being able to see the path also provides extremely useful information.
I posted the solution below, which I found a few days ago. The script will work with greasemonkey and tampermonkey, it will provide you with results similar to the ones before the change. If you also use uMatrix, there will be no ads.
https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/395257-better-google
That's a solution, but not a particularly great one since it requires too much from the user to see mass adoption.
...which brings me to another great point this illustrates: if you want to customise your experience, if you want to be able to control how you see the Web, then you need to make an effort, and the amount you exert is essentially proportional to how much you can change.
Yet the majority of users have shown that they are willing to take whatever Google throws at them with little opposition. I find that a little sad and ironic in this era of "everyone can code" propaganda (I've seen even Google advertises something like that on its homepage); or perhaps the latter is just an attempt to increase the population of intelligent yet docile and obedient corporate drones... I know developers --- web developers --- who really hated the changes yet made no effort to fix it themselves, despite almost certainly having the skills to.
Nope - its green, and hasn't been updated since June... of 2003. I have no idea how it is able to be effective against the modern web, considering in 2003 the biggest issue was annoying pop-up Flash ads which no longer exist. Maybe there are updated plugins or something.
Yes, the UI is still skinnable, and the default skin is rather... psychedelic.
There's something to be said about the adblocker being a filtering proxy, it can really get anything before it hits the browser.
Do you know how it compares to Privoxy nowadays? Way back then it was the open source but harder to configure alternative, that didn't quite work as well as Proxomitron. But maybe Privoxy continued development and got better, I don't know what direction that project took.
Oh and I personally always really liked the default skin :D
Sorry to be "that guy" but for me the solution is to use DuckDuckGo.
It's not perfect, but neither is trying to play arms race with Google's JavaScript.
But psychologically it's rather different. If you find the Google search page to be visually aversive then your goal is to get in and get out quickly. That's a bit harder if Google is your default search.
Just as a contrived example a search like "R33 RB25DET Motorsport ECU" typically got me specific links relating to the exact car, engine and topic. But the past 5 years or so it seems like it is weighting the more common word and more general terms. Often excluding the target topic altogether and just giving general motorsport results. Perhaps it's a consequence of every SEO specialist and their dogbot hammering general search terms and gumming up the machine with cruft.
The results just seem really bad lately, especially for anything technical. Just now I'd been looking for "html5 canvas torture test". The top result is a video called "Torture Testing my Nut Sac!!" and then some videos about testing Glock guns. Umm, no, that's not even close to what I'd wanted. (Bing does way better here and DDG is somewhere in between.)
I'm not sure what Google engineers are using to find technical information on the web these days, but I can't imagine it's the public Google search.
At least both of us are pretending the same level of intelligence, which takes away a lot of the irritation.
I also tried talking to DDG like a duck, but it doesn't give as good results as talking to Google like an idiot.
Top result doesn't have the word responsive, very handy.
It is getting more and more annoying getting workarounds for everything though. It is more annoying, because I liked G layout, default colors snd so on. It was cleaner.
Now not only is their search quality getting worse ( I got what I asked for on bing of all places ), their presentation managed to degrade too.
If it is testing result, I would be curious to see the data that informed that decision.
Just being able to keep scrolling and seeing more results is very helpful. I guess it increases the value of the "first page" for Google.
I run an instance on my local network, but you can run it for free on Heroku, AWS or GCP or even on a Raspberry Pi. There are several Docker images you can choose from.
[1] https://github.com/asciimoo/searx
Edit: Looks like Dogpile still works, and flags the google ads properly. I'm switching back!
Making profit, obviously. You to be less efficient at distinguishing ads and results, increasing time you look at ads, increasing chances of you interacting with ads.
I suspect there's naturally a laundry list of biases that all the work we designed and implemented needs to succeed or boy do we look silly.
Me too. It just looks ugly.
Google is really not good at creating beautiful products...
No, it doesn't. It's actually served from Google's URL, but it (the AMP service) shows you the original site URL (well, it shows the domain by default but that's a button that expands to the URL if you click it.)
Your address bar shows you the Google URL, but that's not misleading, either, since what the address bar has always shown is what location content is being served from, not a content identifier distinct from the mechanics of content distribution.
> they can't fix that without losing out on tracking
Nah, they could track of they worked like a classic CDN
SEO really translates to "How to fool Google into boosting your ranking artifically".
So much so that I now specifically use their search tool rather than go through google just in case some interesting thing pops up.
Check it out, because it sounds like it might start to match your workflow: https://duckduckgo.com/bang?q=
Google used to put the Wiki article right at the top of the results list. It virtually never does that anymore. This is what's bullshit.
The point of a good search engine is that it is supposed to conglomerate good results, relevant results - let's say I'm looking up 'Phillip J. Fry' from 'Futurama', but I still want wiki information. Wikipedia won't even spellcheck for you if you don't know how to spell something correctly, like a city name.
If I use a search engine, I'll get this Wikipedia result: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_J._Fry
But I will also get the far more informative Futurama-wiki result: https://futurama.fandom.com/wiki/Philip_J._Fry
Wikipedia is not a search engine. Although, at this point, Google is barely one, so plastered with sponsored results it can be hard to find the result you're looking for, and with this change, I've finally made the long-needed jump to DuckDuckGo.
Yes, it's time to 'stop the fucking bullshit', and save all our mental states - searching Wiki isn't going to solve that - but not using Google can help. ;)
Comparing a search engine to wikipedia search is like comparing a search engine to a local file search.
If you're looking for a specific driver on your computer that you know the exact spelling and version number of, a local file search will help you find that. A search engine will return many results with download links as well as potentially other drivers, or other versions of drivers for your product - and will generally forgive you if you misspell something.
I wish by each search result there was a button that said “banish this domain to oblivion, I never want to see it again.”
You could improve search really fast that way if you still cared about things like that.
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/personal-blocklist...
It's silly that it's necessary to create separate bookmark for this, though. Native search engines, surprisingly, don't support keywords there.
I feel silly adding bookmarks for the things I already have in search engine list.
Do you find their search tool more effective than appending "wikipedia" to your Google search?
I also use hoogle a lot for work so I'm used to switching search tool.
Strength of SEO is irrelevant to the ads. The only thing Google hate is when sites manipulate themself to rank higher and offer a worse user experience.
It wouldn't be very surprising if Google varies the number of ads in a search results page based on the search term. For sites that have strong SEO for all of their key search terms that would be indistinguishable from Google placing more ads in pages where that site ranks highly.
Occasionally you can find pockets of less competitive search's that 1) allow ads 2) relate to your product via the algorithm even if they don't to a human brain 3) Align to your desired audience and these can give great return.
When does the mass-migration to DuckDuckGo go mainstream?
Not useful results will change habits.
https://twitter.com/jack/status/1199783221162053633?lang=en
https://www.businessinsider.my/twitter-jack-dorsey-duckduckg...
I have been having several issues with google search recently, this just seems like a good time to make the jump.
Tracking what users click to as the result of a search is critical feedback information for training your models/algorithms, it's not just about "hey let's see where this user goes to fine tune ad targeting for them". And, AFAIK, every search engine out there does it(?)
Now sure, we can argue that maybe the company should provide options where you can say "you can use what I click on for search training but not for targeted advertising" (I think Google does provide a set of options that pretty much disable all web history/targeted ad collection), assuming you believe they follow through. But the company needs to pay for its services somehow so I can't blame them for tying the two types of tracking together, I still have tools as a user (private window) to avoid it if I care enough to.
I use StartPage which has the benefit of local results (but can be fully anonymous) but still uses Google search results. DDG is a great alternative, but isn't for me. And then there's Bing
https://restoreprivacy.com/startpage-system1-privacy-one-gro...
...and at the end of the day, who is actually better out there, and that can prove that no data is leaking? Maybe running your own searx is the only option? (http://asciimoo.github.io/searx/)
Also, a couple of things that set Startpage apart from DDG: 1) We're HQ'ed in the Netherlands, ensuring all our users are protected by stringent Dutch & EU privacy laws, 2) we give you Google results without tracking, 3) with Anonymous View you can visit results in full privacy.
I left a strongly worded feedback on their form
Wow...
So, they helped make the web a far easier place to look around on things for a few decades and one layout change and you call them that they ruined the web?
It's easy to be on the barking side.
Barking side, indeed
The problem I see is that Google does not care about us Geeks anymore. They are 100% focused on consumers now, and that sucks a lot.
Focused on exploiting consumers, that is. Consumers are the livestock in Google’s factory farm. They are actively hostile to end users now.
google amp on mobile overrides behavior on mobile, even on android, so instead of web links opening up in the respective and selected default app, it opens up the amp link within google search or the browser. there is no way to turn off this feature on any browser, chrome or not.
In Gmail for instance: settings: General settings:
Open links in gmail. Turn on for "faster" browsing.
Default is on. Tip: Use firefox focus instead as the default browser to open all links. If the link warrants further look copy the url to your main browser.
The above has nothing to do with amp.
But to not detract, amp truly is a plague.
I find their UX approach to SEO more concerning than, say, scoring. For example, AMP pages will receive the same score as equally performant non-AMP content. However, they won't benefit from the carousel view, with instant page loads (prefetch), etc...
Small changes like this, applied at a huge scale to a user base that just can't afford to constantly fight hostile UX are damaging, regardless if they come from Google, an airline site, your mailbox switching to "Promotions" at random intervals or Twitter not allowing you to permanently change the feed order.
Internet feels more hostile than it used to. I don't mind the trolls (I can always block them) but I do mind that we depend on services that deploy hostile UX practices.
It's not Internet, it's software.
You can really feel it when switching from Android to LineageOS, or from Windows to Linux.
It's the difference between software where "you are the product" and software that has been created to serve the user, to be the best tool it can be.
I'm not talking about UX in the sense that open source software can sometimes feel clunky and unfinished, but I'm talking about breath of freedom you feel when you switch, and suddenly ... you notice that this current you have been forced to swim against, just isn't there any more.
I helped a friend get LineageOS on his bootlooped phone, and he's so happy with it. All these features in the settings that are actually helpful (when in Android you always have to second guess, you know that feeling when a setting's description is really vague and uninformative, "this is probably going to spy on me", is it vaguely positive or negative, because the switch can go either way). All the very basic features that would otherwise require an ad-filled app to perform, of course already there. You get privacy controls that aren't mystifying or reset on updates.
Similarly, I've now been on Instagram for about half a year. Always avoided FB, but there's some art I wanted to put out there, so I gave it a try. And oh my god, Instagram is probably the shittiest software ever? Or at least the most user hostile. It's a social thing where you can share images, comments and messages. Except it isn't, it just appears like one. Literally every interaction feels forced, to show me more ads, make me spend more time in this app (??) and mainly constantly throwing up barriers against interacting with any kind of software or data outside its ecosystem. You can't upload from your laptop, many links are not clickable, many text fields are not copyable, most features in the browser are locked unless you make it pretend to be an iPhone (!!), you can't post or reply to comments. The chat is such basic functionality that it seems hard to fuck up but they did. I should stop, but I can go on ...
This is that feeling of constantly swimming against a current, and somehow we're tricked into believing that is how it's supposed to be, because ... I don't know, some people told me when I complained, that most people don't use instagram in the way I do. Well I guess, but that doesn't seem to be most people's choice.
You haven't tried snapchat btw. It keeps getting worse. I'm sure many of us in here are feeling like dinosaurs, unable to fit in.
Instagram is not some generic photo sharing software that tries to be open and modular and integrate with everything and proliferate arbitrary visual media with a rich tightly coupled messaging system. It was never that and won't ever be that.
Instagram from the start was just about taking low res pictures with your phone camera, putting a filter on them so they look less terrible and then sharing them with your friends. Every other feature was begrudgingly added to increase accessibility and hence DAUs. So you were never supposed to be able to interact with anything outside of the app. You can't cross-post your posts to facebook or twitter, you can't post from your computer, you can't spam links in your photo descriptions. All of this is literally the point of Instagram. It was like this before it and slightly after it got acquired and people loved it, not in spite of the restrictions, but because of them.
Then Zuck crammed it full of ads and a terrible glommed on messaging system and ruined it.
I understand that what you describe is what Instagram was, but given what they have both become, they actually have little functional difference.
[1] https://developer.chrome.com/multidevice/android/customtabs
> In Gmail for instance: settings: General settings:
> Open links in gmail. Turn on for "faster" browsing.
I changed this setting, but now I clicked a link in gmail and indeed it opens via Firefox, but it still gets redirected through a google-URL before getting to the real page. I want to disable that behaviour most of all.
Unfortunately iOS doesn't support this nearly as well as Android does. On Android you can enforce this pretty much everywhere whereas on iOS a bunch of apps still open links in Safari no matter what you do.
Notably, there is absolutely no way for the end user to disable it, short of spoofing your user agent.
[1] https://googleweblight.com/i?u=https://news.ycombinator.com/...
Here is a way for Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/amp2html/
And people wonder why phishing is a thing?
I have been trying to switch from google to duckduckgo for years but its only the past few months that I have been successful and I have google to thank for that.
The changes seem to have added enough noise to make parsing the page annoying, but maybe it's one of those things you brain learns to ignore after a while.
My legit first reaction when I saw it last week on my daily driver was "I wonder what extension is trying to cash out".
It's a little confusing to read now, so for context: at the time Google published this, it only put ads in the sidebar to the right of search results. This post was written to criticize the practice of putting ads atop search results, which competitors sometimes formatted almost indistinguishably from organic search results.
Amazing how clear the writing is, how simple the message. That’s, like, totally not the corpspeak Goog emits now on a daily basis.
So, let’s do some digging.
Earliest version of url dates back 4+ years. https://web.archive.org/web/20151213182805/https://www.googl...
Things were a little better than, but not by much. This has to be earlier.
Ah, here is:
https://books.google.ca/books?id=oNT3AwAAQBAJ&pg=PA289&lpg=P...
This page is from a book by Douglas Edwards, employee number 59 published in 2011.
The content of OP url, written by same, is dated March 2002.
That company no longer exists. Goog should remove it from their website.
(I'm fairly certain that I have not viewed anything from this book, nor any book for that matter, this year.)
The site was created by Russians though, just not sure it is hosted there anymore.
https://web.archive.org/web/20151213182805/https://www.googl...
The load speed difference between these two archived pages is huge.
The other thing I've noticed is that more and more of the top results are from garbage content farms. Filtering this kind of crap out was the original reason Google existed and everyone switched to them, but they're failing at it now. IMO Google is overripe to be replaced with something better.
“For example, entering the query "buy domain" into the search box on Google’s home page produces search results and an AdWords text advertisement that appears to the RIGHT of Google’s search results” [1]
It is from October, 2000. It is so ancient, it is even before Schmidt happened. I don’t believe anything preceded that, but to be sure we’ll have to wait for Larry to chime in and clarify.
[1] http://googlepress.blogspot.com/2000/10/google-launches-self...
> Google’s quick-loading AdWords text ads appear to the right of the Google search results and are highlighted as sponsored links, clearly separate from the search results. Google’s premium sponsorship ads will continue to appear at the top of the search results page.
Verdict is this: they started at the top, then things went sideways ;)
https://i.imgur.com/cPQmHB0.png
"It is clear that a search engine which was taking money for showing cellular phone ads would have difficulty justifying the page that our system returned to its paying advertisers. For this type of reason and historical experience with other media [Bagdikian 83], we expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers."
http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html
That's why 'ppl are surprised'. To many, Google's ethos is still 'do no evil', an absurd mantra for a for-profit enterprise whose business model relies on developing ever more effective ways to spy on people's behaviours for the benefit of their advertisers.
What's rapidly
If this helps ads mix in with real search results, maybe the ads need to be changed to stand out more? I feel people are focusing on "favicons = bad" instead of "ads looking the same as search results = bad".
However they are an ad company - and they ultimately benefit from blurring the line between an advertisement and a "real" result. I do feel like it is harder to find certain types of results as a "power user" though, and it feels like the quality of results rapidly drops off after the first page. I am not sure if the fault lies with Google or with spammy websites hacking the SEO.
I wish Google had something like duckduckgo.com/lite (also ddg.gg/lite) for the atypical "power user." It's nothing but text results. I find it really useful for certain types of searches and when you don't want to be bothered by how "busy" the Google search results page has become.
Interesting -- I've been playing with Google search this morning, and it's behaving much like it did when I stopped using it: there is only a very low chance that I'll get a relevant search result before the third page.
You're being condescending but appear to have missed the point. The "Ad" text in Google's results is in the exact same position and is effectively the same pixel dimensions as the favicon.
It's cleverly designed and placed to resemble a favicon, to give the over-all layout more uniformity between ads and organic results.
As a user, I want less uniformity between ads and organic results, not more.
The screenshot doesn't show any Ad links in the text list results (unless the ads are wholly unlabeled).
It's not really the same case as the OP.
One could argue the words surrounding the carousel on DGG ("Shopping" and "Ad") are slightly more transparent than Google's "Sponsored" heading, but that's splitting hairs I guess.
In either case, I find both carousels pretty obvious in their intent. Maybe it's because the prices are being shown? I think more sophisticated internet users are trained to know that when you see a $xx.xx price on the internet, along with a link to purchase the item, there's probably some kind of commercial relationship happening behind the scenes.
These days, whenever I see a product mentioned anywhere on the web with links to purchase it, I default to assuming it's an affiliate link.
Is GreaseMonkey the best for that, or is there a nice lightweight alternative more fit to purpose?
https://gist.github.com/keb/8a51c42daeb4c230e7f76664e62f9f42
I'll try and submit to the Chrome Store, let's see if it gets in :)
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/hide-google-s...
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hide-google-search...
Source: https://github.com/Jtfinlay/gsearch-hidefavicon
In uBlock Origin one could add the rules:
www.google.com##.TbwUpd > .xA33Gc www.google.com##.TbwUpd > .K7JcSb
Or more generally: www.google.com##.TbwUpd > img
to hide the icons...