Ask HN: What's Up with Google?

There's a number of ways that you can expose paywalled content to Google without showing it to the user. The obvious one is paywalling content on the client side and hiding it from the user. I actually think this probably explains why client-side paywalling is so prevalent even though it's obviously far less effective. You can also serve your content in structured data that google's bots read (e.g. json+ld). I also think it's a tricky question because people often want to see authoritative sites high up in the search results even if they're paywalled, so "delisting these sites" isn't a solution that satisfies most people.

IBM made Deep Blue, Watson (the Jeopardy player), two of the 10 most powerful computers in service today, and outperformed the S&P 500 from 2001 to 2014.

What's your point? A gigacorp has tons of inertia?

One day I hope either ddg becomes good, or a good alternative pops up.

You are correct. I tried DDG before but it just isn’t good enough. I have been trying the new you.com search engine for a couple of months and it is really good, more so if you are in tech and your searches are work related.

It’s less the DDG/Bing is good and more that Google is declining.

I'm mostly recalling the occasional headline news when Google does a big engine revamp [0] then extrapolating to say they probably do a lot of smaller ones that they don't draw attention to.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_Google_Search

Kiwi Browser on Android, then install User Agent Switcher?

Won't work if they care, as there are other verifications: IP addresses https://developers.google.com/search/apis/ipranges/googlebot..., domain name https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/crawling/...

It's not "large" UI changes that are needed. (I mean, they are needed, the current google UI for most of their products sucks).

But it's small improvements that make the big difference. A small user interface element added or removed to speed up an interaction. An updated user experience so that data can be found or organized in a slightly different way.

I could pick on almost everyone of Google's products and have gripes about some UI or UX choice. Missing functionality here, overly complex there, etc. Every product has obvious low hanging fruit that could be improved.

That's what parent is referring to (I assume). There's no more micro-innovation happening. If it's not a change that makes 100 bazallion dollars, then it's just not a change worth doing, apparently.

Calendar is great; but I wish it would let me edit an event the same way I can quick-enter one; from a pop-up. I'm half-inclined to write a browser ext to do it.

Also the latest updates to Sheets in the menubars have been welcome

Plus it's more fun to make a new chat / meet or payment app. Apparently.

I don't think it came across the way I intended, because I am one of those users who don't really care for most large UI changes. It feels like UI designers are the only people in large organisations who are actually allowed to throw old code away. My point was more that non-UI improvements are extremely rare, probably because they are both difficult to get right and not "sexy" in the sense of being nicely demo-able to less technically savvy managers.

I think innovation != backwards-incompatible UX changes. There's quite a lot that Excel can do that GSuite can't, for instance. There's probably room for additional features that don't affect current workflows.

Oh, I don't want them to "innovate" like they've done elsewhere, just that they need to continue actually improving their services. I've had lots of interoperability, standards compliance and currency conversion issues with their services and practices, such as that time when I spend something like a year getting false promises from their support about being able to pay them in a different currency from the one with which I'd set up the account. In the end they exhausted the grace period for payment, and just shut down access to my account. Luckily by then I'd shopped around and found (to my surprise) a cheaper alternative which I'm still using.

Just works? Have you tried moving a file in g drive?

I think there's a market for sites that have optimized search around a specific category of information. For example, imagine you had a hybrid directory+search model, where you could drill down into the directory: Top -> Programming -> Lisp -> Scheme

And from there, search a repertoire of Scheme related articles, tips, blogs, etc.

This model already exists, somewhat, in the form of scholarly articles, medical journals, etc. But there seems to be some innovation needed.

If there were such a "site" that focused on and aggregated Scheme related documentation, you'd think that being listed on that search-directory would be totally acceptable to the website owner. After all, a web article or blog generally wants to be read, especially by an interested reader.

Somehow we need to get back to the web being like a library, with a librarian and a well organized categorical index for references.

Getting humans back into the search loop I think is where we're going to circle to. Like asking your local librarian for information about a topic that is in their special collection.

In the past Google appeared to better honour advanced searches using boolean operators. You could add operators to narrow a search quite effectively.

From my experience, they have diluted that functionality in favour of keyword and context matching against popular searches. Often the thing I want to find is not the most popular thing. Breaking out of that and the search bubbles you get associated with is becoming increasingly difficult. I find myself more and more clicking past the first page if results hoping what I want is there just with less SEO. Rarely is there anything relevant beyond page 3. I definitely remember sometimes digging multiple pages deep into the search results and still finding useful information.

In the early days of Google the speed at which you got the search results was a major factor, I remember being surprised at the speed of response and the quality of the results the first time I was introduced to Google. They still include the search time at the top of the results.

I would prefer to regain strict boolean logic in search at the cost of increased search time. I often care more about actually finding what I want than how fast the result can be returned.

Maybe something like the default search works as it does today as it gives a fast result that has a high likelihood will contain what most people want to see. Then allow for advanced search that strictly adheres to the search terms but could take a few minutes to return the results.

Yandex searches the long tail better and doesn't have really awful politicized censorship like Google does for some searches.

I've been using a browser extension aptly named "Search the current site". Just click the icon and type a search term, while being on that website. It will append site:domain to your search.

I hear you. But arguably, imagine you could search a "collection" after you drilled down into your category.

  Top -> Finance -> Credit Card -> Merchant Fees + Search
  Top -> Finance -> Stock Market -> Algorithms + Search
  Top -> Health -> Vitamins + Search

And of course, the Wikipedia is a good jumping off point for all of that information. But imagine a wikipedia-like place that then allowed you to find the top level information that you're looking for with additional search capabilities in its supporting collection.

Maybe the start of this is taking a Wikipedia article on Price Parity and then enumerating the referenced articles in the footnotes and putting a search engine over those perhaps.

I don't know. But there's got to be something better than what we have right now. I feel another leap of search innovation happening soon.

You'll have to think for yourself a bit. Which platform and country are the merchant fees about? Do you want the official source and legal text, a professionals opinion from a magazine or newspaper, or a blog post by someone detailing what they experienced?

A good search engine can and should ask you about this and present you with your choices. Or, of course, they can choose what to show you to optimise for something, be it response time, resource consumption or ad profit.

Funny, Google search is so cluttered these days I almost automatically append "reddit" to any product or technique search. I think a lot of people are doing this, because the "People also ask" block on search results will often have questions like "best lawnmower reddit?" (a fine example of that Google quality we've all heard so much about)

Which is why reddit is starting to flood with spam. It won't last long.

Sshh, you're ganna ruin it.

I think that's a fair point. The world of "apps" has certainly changed the meaning and usefulness of search. There's no exploring and random discovery when you're in the walled garden, unlike what it used to be like when you could really "surf" the web.

"coming soon to your region"

Ugh, that triggers me hard. I haven't lived in Germany nor Sweden for ~7 years now and Google never really figured out (despite me telling it so) that I don't need gmaps results in Stockholm and Berlin, and that yes, all my g products should be showing the English UI.

If these folks are ex-google they might consider not doing shit like this in the first place.

You won't be a good beta tester without providing feedback so good for them.

It's a paid search engine, they're going to get your name, address, credit card details and everything you search for and click on. If a survey puts you off, that's probably a good early warning.

Got a "The invite you provided is invalid or expired.". I guess it's used up.

You should be able to do this by navigating to google.com/?gl=us, google.com/?gl=sg, etc.

I’m all for paying for high quality information, but wasn’t the point of the Web that anyone could participate? For example, I’d rather pay an independent blogger in Ukraine to tell me about the border crisis from their lens than go through a centralized gatekeeper like NYT to have some office worker in NYC opine on the crisis.

Unfortunately Google downranks primary sources and sends secondary sources to the top. Essentially the Web has become cable television instead of a global system for the open exchange of knowledge and information and something about that is super depressing and rubs me the wrong way.

Hey. We will work on it together with the community this year.

Private mode is even more private than DDG so we will likely have to do private ads just like them.

But for the personalized experience we have a few ideas that I think are more creative and more aligned with users and privacy but not fully fleshed out yet. We're still a very small team but hoping to ship them this quarter.