Another thing I find more annoying with the recent changes is that previously visited links are not marked as such any longer. When searching for the solution to a problem, it is quite nice to easily know which pages have already been visited using a different search query.
No, I tested in three browsers[1] prior to writing my comment, just to avoid getting caught in something like what you suggest. :) The behaviour seems consistent across all three, independent of whether I'm logged into my Google account or not.
Are you using the HTTPS Everywhere plugin? Sometimes, the link is HTTP but your browser will go to HTTPS instead, so the original never gets marked as visited.
This does not bode well for the employees at google. You get extra features like this (instant preview) when you have too much manpower - you look for things for your employees to do.
But if your customers don't want it, and you can't find anything else for them to do then you start reducing the workforce.
When Google released Instant Preview they claimed it increases click through rates to a website. This makes me think a good number of customers do want it.
That's 100% of the same user base who have to deal with a more complex user interface with more usability snafus and one that evolves less well. If you make a couple of dozen such UI changes based on similarly narrow evidence of improvement, you will end up with a mess.
It isn't 100% of the user base. I would guess the majority of users don't care/use/know about page caches so overall it is a simpler UI. The simpler UI will improve the UX for 80% users (lets say for the sake of the argument) and the other 20% will either be able to figure out the marginal increased complexity or will be outweighed by the improvement of the previously mentioned users.
Instant preview had "Bing fear" written all over it. Probably the biggest feature on Google Search that I found the least use for. I don't understand why Google feels the need to play catch up to Bing.
Totally agree. There is a reason I don't use Bing...I don't like all the clutter. Now Google seems to think that adding more stuff to a SERP is going to help them save market share...I don't get it.
They must be testing this stuff, so maybe it's just me. I could get used to Google Instant....but not sure about Instant Preview.
From my short experience as an intern and much longer experience being friends with several google folks: Bing fear is a disease inside Google. They've done a large number of unreasonable things because Microsoft was looming large on some manager's mind.
I don't agree this is necessarily bad. Arguably, "view cache" is a feature for power-users that know what they're doing.
Moving the cache link into that pop-up did simplify the user interface in the most common case, in which the user just wants to view the real link. It no longer has to be rendered for every result.
IMO it just takes some getting used to that the cache link has been moved. Or are you viewing pages from cache that regularly that the extra clicks/mouse moves are a problem?
Depends on the users, for example my non-techie partner always clicks on the cache link just because it highlights the words that she searched for on the page.
Hmm yes I can see it used for that. However, that will only work for simple passive pages. "view cache" is inherently incompatible with pages that render from javascript (or that make extra requests to get the content). These get broken, and as a growing amount of sites is affected this might be another one of the reasons for obscuring the option.
Pages that render from javascript or make extra requests to get the content were broken already. They fail REST and thus they're not easily cacheable. We shouldn't encourage them outside of those specific web apps for which linking is not a relevant operation.
Yes, yes, yes. I almost always click on the cached link, because the highlighted search terms allow me to find what I'm looking for so much more quickly. This fundamentally changes the way I use the web. Thanks a lot, google :(
Kind of screws over tablet or smartphone users however.
(and no, google, i do not want to use your crappy mobile version, that is why i set my useragent to 'desktop', yet you don't listen!)
yeah, i can't agree with the author's assessment that this isn't a UI improvement. part of a good UI is to only present the elements that a user needs. they have moved an obscure feature to an obscure location. it amuses me that there are so many people in the comments here complaining both that google has become less minimal, and that they've removed stuff - minimalism is less stuff.
Search is just one of those things where power users will always rule, because in an information economy whoever has best access to information becomes dominant, and the copycats follow in order to keep up. So a search engine has to cater to power users.
For the longest time google made good on their promise to keep their search page simple and easy to use.
Now, bit by bit the search page is getting more filled up with cruft that you don't need and stuff that you do need gets removed.
I am getting a hunch (just a vague feeling) that we might be approaching a time where a new, simpler search experience would pick up a lot of users - maybe amongst us HN/early adopters?
Removing the "In Cache" link probably makes the user interface less cluttered. I used it a lot, and had to go look for it yesterday. From the official support thread:
But I don't have the user data that Google has. If less than 1% of the users account for the "in cache"-usage, the solution to require an extra click to get to it, is more sane, viewed in that light.
Shouldn't be too hard to make a browser plug-in / Greasemonkey script, so to add a link to:
I really dislike services like that. Searches cost real money to Google, using them through that is almost stealing, in my opinion. Just use a different search engine.
EDIT: I'd like if someone would reply if they disagree. Do you dispute that each search costs money to Google, or what?
I feel no guilt. Google's main revenue stream is advertisements, which I will never click on. Yet, I still use Google continuously. Does that mean I'm stealing? Either way I'm getting something for free and not contributing to their revenue.
Hmm, I suppose that's true - I never click them either, if only because my eyes skip them unconsciously - but on the other hand, accepting $20 from my aunt or taking it from her wallet are very different, despite her ending up with the same money.
Scroogles lack of cache link isn't relevant to the comment I replied to.
"I am getting a hunch (just a vague feeling) that we might be approaching a time where a new, simpler search experience would pick up a lot of users - maybe amongst us HN/early adopters?"
If it was a top level comment, you'd have a point.
That's how we improve fastest. But generally, the way we get results shouldn't result in a lot of stuff actually missing, which may speak to some bugs in there.
I've been noticing the same pattern -- the results from DDG aren't quite complete enough. Sometimes, it's just missing a few minor things, other times, I'll run a search query and there will be a major search result that I know is missing, that I can get in one of the top 5 results from Google.
Which sucks, because I hands-down full-on no-buts prefer DDG's interface to Google.
I hope I'm not being uncool here, but a while back I privately suggested mining the data from "!g" queries as a way to see where DDG wasn't returning the results that people expected. Is there a reason you can't do that? In my case at least, I usually start with DDG, and if I don't get what I'm expecting, then I use a "!g" -- so you'd have a nice little database of results to perform comparisons from.
Since we can't see vote counts anymore, I just want to chime in and say I agree. As a previous DDG user, I feel much the same way. And mining !g sounds like a great idea, though there might be some privacy issues to deal with (I'm imagining a dedicated DDG user who wants to Google his name).
Actually, something else that bothers me, but I'm not sure there's much you can do about it. I really like the Chrome location-bar search completion thing. Most of the time, when I start searching something, I can see if my search terms are good by seeing whether it's been searched before. If it comes up with nothing, I know my search terms are probably not well-worded.
I used DDG for about a month as my main search engine, I love the bang syntax and lots of other goodies, but for me down in Brazil DDG just responds 10-15x slower than Google -- so my commitment is that I will keep coming back to test for latency improvements until I can switch over completely.
I don't think that's strongly geography-related. I see the same thing from California with a very fast connection.
If you search for some things (try "stack overflow" or "red bull"), you seem to get a near-instant results for the thing judged most likely/relevant in a red box at the top of the page, then the "ordinary" results are loaded separately, I think in a separate javascript call.
They seem to have a some split architecture that keeps a few bits spooled up for quick retrieval, and say to heck with the rest. My first instinct would be that they're RAM-poor, and also wonder if, not being able to cache sufficiently in RAM, they're also being hamstrung by I/O performance on EC2.
Same here, but in Canada. DDG response time is a major showstopper. From a brief examination the issue appeared to be rooted in DNS response time, which is something that I wasn't able to fix by trying different DNS servers. So, regretfully I had to switch back to Google.
That's weird (on DNS). We have been having an issue with in Canada where one of the major ISPs is dropping packets on route. If you'd email us I'd love to investigate this further.
I wonder whether they split test these types of things?
They probably do, but Google is unlikely to be immune to corporate pathologies, where for example it is politically impossible for some team to leave well enough alone. I suspect that could easily end up trumping split test results.
A/B/N testing from what I heard. One of the examples I know of it that they split the users into about ten groups, and very slightly changed the blue hyperlink colour between them. They found that even a slight variation made a difference to the click-through rate.
I've had this same experience at work. I've complained about how ugly some features of our sites are on several occasions, only to learn that they are that way because the ugly (version/size/whatever) performed so much better than the others in our tests.
Other times the differences are subtle but increase the click-through rate by surprising amounts.
What’s that cruft you are talking about? Ignoring for a moment the cache link (I’m not sure how many people use it, maybe it’s worth testing whether Google could do with it being a bit more hidden) Google’s results page is very sparse and only provides truly useful tools.
I use Google’s ability to search for links from a specific time frame all the time, for example. I couldn’t do without it, it’s also accessible and minimalist. I also quite often switch between the different kinds of links I can search for.
I don’t see much on the results page one could reasonably remove. Exposing some of the advanced search options in the UI was the right step for Google to take. They didn’t pick everything, only the most important stuff. It’s all still very minimal.
Many times it seems like it does, to the extent that I've even gone back and replaced double-quotes with singles in hopes that the parser distinguishes literals.
Well, Google sensibly ignore quotes if it doesn’t find anything which is probably what happened to you. Would you rather Google to just display that it found nothing?
I can't scroll the page with the up/down arrows. It don't get why no one mentions this. Sometimes I'm afraid they're targeting just me. Is it really the right trade-off to steal the arrow key to scroll the results with a cursor? Who uses that feature? Leave my arrows alone.
Really? I find being able to go through the results using the arrows very useful. When I'm doing a Google search, I want to get to a web site, optimally without using the mouse. Having this feature routinely saves me from having to use the mouse, which is particularly nice on a laptop.
Having the arrow keys go directly to search results is very useful especially because it takes three or four times less presses to navigate that way than using tab. Besides, if I want to scroll, I can always use the space bar--it's faster anyhow.
Indeed. It is extremely annoying to have my arrow keys hijacked for no apparent reason. I know how to scroll a page and click on links, thank you very much. I tend to look through a page before scrolling, and use the arrows to scroll down and reveal more stuff.
(I know me-too comments are generally frowned on, and quite right too, but we have a senior Googler reading this thread and comment scores are invisible now...)
99% of the time I'm searching, I don't need to use the cache feature.
Thus, I think it makes sense that it's hidden in the preview flyout than having "cached" repeated over and over again. Makes for a much cleaner search results page.
If the feature wasn't widely used I'm sure that's the reason for it's disappearance...Google has a tendency to make decisions by the numbers, if they don't see engagement with certain features, they get the axe rather quickly
Another thing that has been annoying me lately is that it seems like like I have to add a + in front of every word or Google might decide without any indication that it will completely ignore it.
Yes, they are. I don't have the example handy, so you'll have to take my word for it. My query was 'sqlalchemy "some quoted phrase"' and the first result didn't contain the phrase anywhere in the page.
Out of desperation, I tried a +, and when that didn't work I sent my first feedback to Google.
That has been happening for years. If you click through to the cached version of the result, which is marked up to highlight your search terms, Google provides an excuse: "These terms were found only in links pointing to this page:".
I've always had my doubts as to whether they really were found in links.
Only if Google can’t find anything – which makes a lot of sense.
For me it doesn't, and it violates the Law of Demeter. If there are no results, tell me. Don't make me waste time wondering if any of the results have what I'm looking for, since there is no indication that the results I'm receiving are ancillary. Treating your users like they're idiots is evil.
well perhaps somewhat understandable, why should i be happy with an inferior interface because of it? This falls very squarely in the category of "not my problem, but you just made it my problem anyways"
I see this as part of a big trend towards software and software designers that think they know what you want better than you do, and its an endless source of frustration for me, and im sure many others.
No matches _is_ a result. I don't go use a search engine because I must click on a link, any link. I go there to find _relevant_ information. If there isn't any, tell me & I can get on with my day.
There usually is a very clear indication right at the top of the page, informing you that the search yielded no results and that it is showing results for a different search.
In my somewhat brief testing, current Google is simply inconsistent. Sometimes it allows searches for fully quoted terms, sometimes is fails and warns you, sometimes it fails but not warning you...
This is especially annoying as in days gone by if you added + to the query they'd show a message explaining that you don't need to use + as Google only returns results containing all the terms in your query. I wonder when they stopped doing this?
Oh, it's happened to me too. And sometimes it replaces one term with another word with similar spelling but not related at all, the typed term is still in the textbox, but the terms bolded in the summary are different. It started a little after the anti-content-farms changes where applied, so I thought it was some temporary glitch. I haven't seen it recently, but maybe it's because I'm not making complex queries since.
Seriously, though: these are signals that the inmates are running the asylum and it's time to find alternative providers. There are other ways to search.
This has been annoying me a lot too. I remember originally switching to Google mainly because it meant I didn't have to keep pressing + all the time. For the past couple of weeks I've been having flashbacks to 2001.
The second isn't just a Google problem, all sorts of software with autocomplete / move-the-cursor-for-me items has problems with just accepting what I type and not fucking around with it.
Typically breaking backspace, or filling in unwanted trailing information, but often worse.
This reason, wanting my search terms respected, is the reason I switched to duckduckgo. The way google completely changes or ignores my search is maddening.
I was going to suggest that google should insert a short "your search [A +B 'C D E'] returned x results" and then follow up with "Searching for [A B C D E] returned y results" to separate the results.
Now I think about it, Google is most likely doing this intentionally, to get more data for "natural language search" ie, to infer what people might mean by combining the results, then seeing what people click on to validate the technique.
This does mean that intentional input won't work anymore, unless there is a means to turn this semi-semantic search off.
Hmmmm... maybe DuckDuckGo would be a suitable alternative?
I'm very happy with DDG. Their ! commands are really nice, the red-boxed "this is probably what you want" at the top of the results page is nice, and their habit of identifying sites as "official" is nice.
Amazon started doing this about a year ago, too. I think search engines are now catering more to people who aren't extremely adept at using search engines.
I think they're trying to make their interface look exactly like Bing so the only way Microsoft can compete is by having better search results.
You guys at HN probably don't check out Bing very much, but many of the UI changes in Google were in Bing first... hover over a search result to show more info on the side, image search with just images (details when you hover), infinite scroll on image search, background image on main search page, etc.
Which is terrible. I use Bing as a backup for Google when Google fails me (not often), and I just don't like all of Bing's noise, the background graphics, the sidebar stuff, the slow load time, the Facebook Like button (FFS, WHY??), the "Check out our other services!" topbar that keeps the search field from loading until it's finished, ugh.
It seems like Google is becoming more Bing-like with each passing day. This is not a good thing.
What is great and always has been great about Google (and why, I believe, it's a staple for many of us after over a decade!) is its great results paired with simplicity and fast load time (please don't get me started on Instant Search, it's not a pretty rant).
Google Search, be yourself, the self that's kept you as the autocompleted "g" in my URL bar for well over a decade now. Don't go chasing waterfalls. They take forever to load.
I thought I was going crazy when I realized the cache links were gone... good to know I wasn't the only one and that they're still there, though hidden (I never click on the preview arrows).
and it will take you directly to the cached site. This is particularly nice in combination with Chrome's omnibar where you just have to prepend "cache:" before the current URL, hit return, and it will automatically show the cached version of the page you are viewing.
Caches are kind of a touchy subject. I have no information that they are, but I would not be surprised if Google was inexorably moving toward a 'no user accessible cache' policy. The reasoning is pretty simple, people push things they don't mean too, then they 'fix' it, but if the GoogleBot was in the area your 'fix' may not be as durable as you hoped. Recent examples are iPhone 5 leaks on carrier sites, mis-priced sales at Walmart.com, and support sites at HP for products that were going to exist but now aren't.
Clearly its not Google's fault that people screw up and they happen to look at the wrong time, but a strict interpretation of Google's mission would suggest that keeping bad pages 'cached' isn't part of it. And while the vast majority of cached pages provide a great service like when HN exposure overloads a web site you can still see the content, Google cannot practically fix every cache page where the owner doesn't want it cached (they might not even know it is) and then fix it. (Yes you can email them to have them spike the cache but how many people realize that?)
A couple of the newspaper types went after them claiming the cache was an 'illegal copy' but of course the page didn't say 'no-cache' (which would keep it out of most CDN's as well so its painful).
So the cache feature is useful, but not everyone thinks its a good thing. If they have annoyed Google enough, Google may have just said 'screw it, lets get rid of this capability for end users.' But again, that is just speculation based on seeing it get harder and harder to 'discover' that Google has a cached copy somewhere.
One of the things he mentions here is that some sites don't have a cached link at all - it may be because they're explicitly telling Google not to cache the page. You can do that using the noarchive tag, which looks like this:
"For the longest time google made good on their promise to keep their search page simple and easy to use. Now, bit by bit the search page is getting more filled up with cruft that you don't need and stuff that you do need gets removed."
I haven't noticed this till now and now I'm shocked. I hated the preview so much that I had to use a custom stylish addon script for firefox to block the annoying thing. Now that the cache is moved to preview, I'm stuck between getting annoyed with preview again or losing the cache links :(. I just don't understand what they were trying to solve with all these changes...
Google is starting to become a lot less minimal. I like their current design direction but as the OP stated in the article the cruft is starting to build up.
i too dislike the previews.
there's a few things that i find useful tho:
- timeline
- image search
- cache (when it was there and working. lately, it didnt work aka it tries to fetch from the server and if its down, which is what i often use cache for, then it fails)
hum, well thats it.
special search commands used to be cool but they don't work so well now (i mean the filetype stuff and all). and the rest are just bloated reactions to "bing fear" or something
For pages that are rendered using javascript, the text won't be in the cache. Sometimes clicking the "text-only" link at the top of the cached page helps.
I very very rarely do a search where I don't timeframe limit it. This makes me wonder why Google insist on hiding that option every time I visit the search page. I guess they want me to go somewhere else unless I'm going to log in.
Not to mention the annoying +1 button after each link. I don't want to +1 unless I visited it, and I don't mind taking the extra step of sharing if I found a webpage interesting!
The iPad "Tablet" Google results experience has removed them completely, no instant preview, no "hidden" swipe-to-expose (that I could find). You have to go to the "classic" version, via a link on the bottom of the page, to get them back.
The classic version? It's the one we used to have: no instant preview, Cache link present on almost every listing.
So, at least on some platforms, the info-dense but useful version is sill around...
http://www.google.com/search?q=test¬a=1 seems to trigger the 'classic' layout when visiting with an iPad user agent. When visiting with an iPhone user agent 'nota' is replaced with 'nomo' to get the classic layout. Both offer the cache links (they appear to be the same page, at a glance).
Sadly they are doing user agent sniffing and those parameters do nothing when I revert my user-agent back to the desktop Safari default. It seems that nearly all Google sites do user agent sniffing to determine what version of the site to serve, sometimes even going as far as to prevent you logging in at all if you aren't using an approved browser [1].
I didn't realize they'd hidden cached pages this way...but here's a data point on human behavior that may be non-optimal for Google:
So, yesterday, I searched for something on Google, found what I wanted, went to click Cache and it wasn't there.
I didn't think to go mousing over the page...I instead did what any red-blooded search engine user in a hurry would do: I copied the URL, pasted it into Bing, and viewed cache from there. 0_o
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[ 33.4 ms ] story [ 725 ms ] thread[1] Firefox, Chrome and IE.
(Just don't get me wrong, what I really miss is the "Related" link)
This seems to have started a couple of days ago.
But if your customers don't want it, and you can't find anything else for them to do then you start reducing the workforce.
Edit: here is the announcement: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/11/beyond-instant-result...
"In our testing, we’ve found that people who use Instant Previews are about 5% more likely to be satisfied with the results they click. "
This sounds too little to justify a UI change that increases complexity.
They must be testing this stuff, so maybe it's just me. I could get used to Google Instant....but not sure about Instant Preview.
Moving the cache link into that pop-up did simplify the user interface in the most common case, in which the user just wants to view the real link. It no longer has to be rendered for every result.
IMO it just takes some getting used to that the cache link has been moved. Or are you viewing pages from cache that regularly that the extra clicks/mouse moves are a problem?
For some people it may be an important move
http://www.google.com/cse?cx=000183394137052953072%3Azc1orsc...
But scrolling seems to be somewhat broken.
Removing the "In Cache" link probably makes the user interface less cluttered. I used it a lot, and had to go look for it yesterday. From the official support thread:
http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Web+Search/thread?tid=...
But I don't have the user data that Google has. If less than 1% of the users account for the "in cache"-usage, the solution to require an extra click to get to it, is more sane, viewed in that light.
Shouldn't be too hard to make a browser plug-in / Greasemonkey script, so to add a link to:
https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:www.yc...
directly under search results.
EDIT: I'd like if someone would reply if they disagree. Do you dispute that each search costs money to Google, or what?
"I am getting a hunch (just a vague feeling) that we might be approaching a time where a new, simpler search experience would pick up a lot of users - maybe amongst us HN/early adopters?"
If it was a top level comment, you'd have a point.
That's how we improve fastest. But generally, the way we get results shouldn't result in a lot of stuff actually missing, which may speak to some bugs in there.
Which sucks, because I hands-down full-on no-buts prefer DDG's interface to Google.
I hope I'm not being uncool here, but a while back I privately suggested mining the data from "!g" queries as a way to see where DDG wasn't returning the results that people expected. Is there a reason you can't do that? In my case at least, I usually start with DDG, and if I don't get what I'm expecting, then I use a "!g" -- so you'd have a nice little database of results to perform comparisons from.
I'm going to switch again and start sending DDG results that aren't helpful.
Not sure how you could provide for that, though.
If you search for some things (try "stack overflow" or "red bull"), you seem to get a near-instant results for the thing judged most likely/relevant in a red box at the top of the page, then the "ordinary" results are loaded separately, I think in a separate javascript call.
They seem to have a some split architecture that keeps a few bits spooled up for quick retrieval, and say to heck with the rest. My first instinct would be that they're RAM-poor, and also wonder if, not being able to cache sufficiently in RAM, they're also being hamstrung by I/O performance on EC2.
They probably do, but Google is unlikely to be immune to corporate pathologies, where for example it is politically impossible for some team to leave well enough alone. I suspect that could easily end up trumping split test results.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J5RZOU6vK4Q
Other times the differences are subtle but increase the click-through rate by surprising amounts.
I guess Google are sniffing for a WebKit useragent to detect a modern mobile browser.
I use Google’s ability to search for links from a specific time frame all the time, for example. I couldn’t do without it, it’s also accessible and minimalist. I also quite often switch between the different kinds of links I can search for.
I don’t see much on the results page one could reasonably remove. Exposing some of the advanced search options in the UI was the right step for Google to take. They didn’t pick everything, only the most important stuff. It’s all still very minimal.
Big annoyances for me:
1. Auto suggesting and searching for words I didn't mean - common with technical phrases
2. Ignoring "quoted terms" and searching for them as an AND instead
3. Auto refreshing the results page as I modify my terms - it makes the experience slower, and I don't need to see results for half-typed words
There's probably more I can't bring to mind right now.
I for one love instant and suggestions.
Many times it seems like it does, to the extent that I've even gone back and replaced double-quotes with singles in hopes that the parser distinguishes literals.
Having the arrow keys go directly to search results is very useful especially because it takes three or four times less presses to navigate that way than using tab. Besides, if I want to scroll, I can always use the space bar--it's faster anyhow.
(I know me-too comments are generally frowned on, and quite right too, but we have a senior Googler reading this thread and comment scores are invisible now...)
Note to self: read article and comments thoroughly before commenting to avoid being redundant.
Thus, I think it makes sense that it's hidden in the preview flyout than having "cached" repeated over and over again. Makes for a much cleaner search results page.
Out of desperation, I tried a +, and when that didn't work I sent my first feedback to Google.
I've always had my doubts as to whether they really were found in links.
For me it doesn't, and it violates the Law of Demeter. If there are no results, tell me. Don't make me waste time wondering if any of the results have what I'm looking for, since there is no indication that the results I'm receiving are ancillary. Treating your users like they're idiots is evil.
I see this as part of a big trend towards software and software designers that think they know what you want better than you do, and its an endless source of frustration for me, and im sure many others.
No matches _is_ a result. I don't go use a search engine because I must click on a link, any link. I go there to find _relevant_ information. If there isn't any, tell me & I can get on with my day.
http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8...
In my somewhat brief testing, current Google is simply inconsistent. Sometimes it allows searches for fully quoted terms, sometimes is fails and warns you, sometimes it fails but not warning you...
Try: "society of spectacles"
Seriously, though: these are signals that the inmates are running the asylum and it's time to find alternative providers. There are other ways to search.
Another peeve is that the search box on the results page (with Instant disabled) routinely drops input or moves the insertion point.
Typically breaking backspace, or filling in unwanted trailing information, but often worse.
Now I think about it, Google is most likely doing this intentionally, to get more data for "natural language search" ie, to infer what people might mean by combining the results, then seeing what people click on to validate the technique.
This does mean that intentional input won't work anymore, unless there is a means to turn this semi-semantic search off.
Hmmmm... maybe DuckDuckGo would be a suitable alternative?
http://duckduckgo.com/?q=hacker+news
You guys at HN probably don't check out Bing very much, but many of the UI changes in Google were in Bing first... hover over a search result to show more info on the side, image search with just images (details when you hover), infinite scroll on image search, background image on main search page, etc.
It seems like Google is becoming more Bing-like with each passing day. This is not a good thing.
What is great and always has been great about Google (and why, I believe, it's a staple for many of us after over a decade!) is its great results paired with simplicity and fast load time (please don't get me started on Instant Search, it's not a pretty rant).
Google Search, be yourself, the self that's kept you as the autocompleted "g" in my URL bar for well over a decade now. Don't go chasing waterfalls. They take forever to load.
It is really a bummer when you are used to going to a website to use their feature and the feature isn't there anymore.
Clearly its not Google's fault that people screw up and they happen to look at the wrong time, but a strict interpretation of Google's mission would suggest that keeping bad pages 'cached' isn't part of it. And while the vast majority of cached pages provide a great service like when HN exposure overloads a web site you can still see the content, Google cannot practically fix every cache page where the owner doesn't want it cached (they might not even know it is) and then fix it. (Yes you can email them to have them spike the cache but how many people realize that?)
A couple of the newspaper types went after them claiming the cache was an 'illegal copy' but of course the page didn't say 'no-cache' (which would keep it out of most CDN's as well so its painful).
So the cache feature is useful, but not everyone thinks its a good thing. If they have annoyed Google enough, Google may have just said 'screw it, lets get rid of this capability for end users.' But again, that is just speculation based on seeing it get harder and harder to 'discover' that Google has a cached copy somewhere.
<meta name="robots" content="noarchive" />
I completely agree with this...
- timeline
- image search
- cache (when it was there and working. lately, it didnt work aka it tries to fetch from the server and if its down, which is what i often use cache for, then it fails)
hum, well thats it.
special search commands used to be cool but they don't work so well now (i mean the filetype stuff and all). and the rest are just bloated reactions to "bing fear" or something
The classic version? It's the one we used to have: no instant preview, Cache link present on almost every listing.
So, at least on some platforms, the info-dense but useful version is sill around...
I'd like to see what happens when I hit that link from a different platform.
However, when I set my UA back to Default (Firefox), this link did not appear to do anything. YMMV.
Sadly they are doing user agent sniffing and those parameters do nothing when I revert my user-agent back to the desktop Safari default. It seems that nearly all Google sites do user agent sniffing to determine what version of the site to serve, sometimes even going as far as to prevent you logging in at all if you aren't using an approved browser [1].
[1] https://plus.google.com/not-supported/
So, yesterday, I searched for something on Google, found what I wanted, went to click Cache and it wasn't there.
I didn't think to go mousing over the page...I instead did what any red-blooded search engine user in a hurry would do: I copied the URL, pasted it into Bing, and viewed cache from there. 0_o
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/resurrect-pag...