
Google backtracks on search results design - saalweachter
https://techcrunch.com/2020/01/24/google-backtracks-on-search-results-design/
======
userbinator
Previous discussion:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22107823](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22107823)

Does this mean they'll also "backtrack" on their destruction of the URL? I was
extremely disturbed and horrified when I realised that not only did they
replace / with >, but also seemed to arbitrarily remove and rewrite pieces of
URLs shown in the results (e.g. all articles from HM would show nothing more
than "news.ycombinator.com > item", which was intensely confusing.)

~~~
jonny383
I opened Chrome on a friends phone (first time on Chrome mobile in years) and
was shocked to see the url bar is no longer editable. It just gave me a weird
context menu with a copy icon.

I guess they really want to funnel everyone through search...

~~~
Arainach
Right next to that copy icon is a pencil - the edit icon.

~~~
userbinator
In other words, an obfuscation of functionality that clearly shows their
attempts at behavioural conditioning.

~~~
clSTophEjUdRanu
More like- how often do you edit a URL in the bar on mobile? It's a pain in
the ass.

~~~
harry8
Every single time someone im's me some url with a bunch of tracking garbage
after the ?

~~~
rapnie
I don't use Chrome but you have tracking token stripper plugin:

[https://github.com/jparise/chrome-utm-
stripper](https://github.com/jparise/chrome-utm-stripper)

~~~
thenewnewguy
I'll get right to installing that extension on Chrome for Android...

------
pieterk
When will we realize that adwords and everything it inspired was a wrong turn
for the internet?

I’d much rather pay a monthly fee to get the services I want.

I understand that Google and Facebook have gone too far down this path, and
they will say such a service is not as profitable, but ultimately their
business model seems unsustainable. People search for the truth, and while you
can sell anybody anything, the truth will prevail.

~~~
dangrossman
As long as you realize the web without ads is a much smaller and less
commercial one. That may be fine with you. But a lot of things hundreds of
millions of people use every day would have to go away. Subscriptions can't
replace ads, as individuals don't have nearly as much discretionary money to
spend as companies have in their advertising budgets. We've already given them
that money when we bought our groceries, and gas, and paid our bills for rent,
internet, TV, phones, insurance, etc. It's not our bank accounts any more to
reallocate to Google Maps or our favorite websites instead.

~~~
matheusmoreira
> As long as you realize the web without ads is a much smaller and less
> commercial one.

This is fine. People should make web pages because they have something to say,
not because they want to make money. Since the advertisers can stop supporting
a site, they effectively become the arbiters of right and wrong on the
internet. Anything paid for by ads is inherently worse and less trustworthy
than independent creations and platforms because they must necessarily be
advertiser-friendly.

~~~
clarry
I fully agree, and furthermore, I think that if ad-supported sites were wiped
out, the people who genuinely cared about the content would come out and make
a replacement with just the useful content. People who have a need find a way.

Right now I can't think of any ad-supported site that I critically need. It
could all go away and my web experience would probably be better for it.

~~~
scarface74
You realize the entire purpose of HN is to advertise jobs for YC companies?

~~~
clarry
I don't need HN critically, and there are alternatives.

Even if I did, let me clarify something. When I go to amazon.com and start
looking for pens, I don't really consider the product listings to be ads at
that point, even though each is obviously advertising a product. The listing
is the content I am there for. If I go to a company's website to learn about
their products, they are clearly advertising their own (first party) products.
I'm fine with that.

Note that there is a difference between "an ad" and advertising.
Characteristic of ads is that they are not _the content_ you're there for. The
real content is independent of "an ad", and you could block or remove ads and
the real content would not suffer. Characteristic of ads is that they are not
the topic of the site/content/video you're reading/watching (they might relate
to the same subject matter, but they are not _the topic_ ). Also
characteristic of ads is that they're advertising third party
products/services, which again have little to do with the actual content.

If you removed a company's products from their own website, or the products
from amazon's listing, then you'd be removing _the content I 'm specifically
after._ Does not fill my criteria for "an ad."

Now as to how this pertains to HN: HN was specifically created for startup-
related links. So if they're advertising startup jobs here, they are very much
posting the kind of content users would come here for. That would be actual
content, not ads. Also, like a company advertising their own products on their
own website, I think it is quite appropriate for YC to advertise companies
they've funded here.

~~~
scarface74
How would you categorize Computer Shopper back in the day? Most people bought
them for the advertising not the content.

------
bit_logic
It's too late, lasting damage has been done. This redesign made me seriously
look at DDG and I'm impressed with what I found.

~~~
joshbaskin
I switched out to DDG as well today. See how it goes.

Any takers for trying out Bing?

~~~
Klonoar
IIRC, if you're using DDG, you're essentially using Bing (base) + other custom
engine work layered on top of it.

~~~
mattmanser
You don't remember correctly, this is a persistent falsehood I see repeated in
all these sort of threads.

[https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-
pages/results/du...](https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-
pages/results/duckduckbot/)

~~~
pb7
[https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-
pages/results/so...](https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-
pages/results/sources/)

“ In fact, DuckDuckGo gets its results from over four hundred sources. These
include hundreds of vertical sources delivering niche Instant Answers,
DuckDuckBot (our crawler) and crowd-sourced sites (like Wikipedia, stored in
our answer indexes). We also of course have more traditional links in the
search results, which we also source from a variety of partners, including
Verizon Media (formerly Yahoo) and Bing.”

It is not false. The standard 10 links you see come directly from Bing and
they don’t even attempt to hide that fact.

~~~
dx034
I've seen logs of a few medium sized sites and I've never seen DuckDuckBot
really crawling any of these sites. I'm sure they use their own results to
supplement some parts but most of the web results still seem to come from
Bing.

------
blackrock
Can you also tell Google to fix the image search page? The new design is
stupid. I prefer the previous design.

The new design splits the page vertically, when you click on a picture. And
its purpose, which is quite confusing, is to follow a second track of searches
related to that picture.

But that just makes the usage confusing. I want to click on the picture in
order to see it in magnification mode, to have it fill the browser window.
This was the prior design. It worked perfectly, and allowed me to quickly see
the picture I want, in a magnified mode.

But instead, with the new design, it opens the picture on the 2nd split
screen, but the picture is practically the same size.

And to make matters worse, some of the pictures, like if they are portrait
mode, does not magnify, so it makes it very difficult to see the details of
the picture. I’d have to open up the source picture in another tab.

Someone must’ve thought this was a good idea, but to be honest, it sucks.

And also, the split screens with dual scrolling behaviors, is incredibly
frustrating to use. Half the time, I’m scrolling on the wrong half of the
page.

The image search is now such a frustrating experience, that I try to use other
search engines for a better experience.

~~~
harshitaneja
Google was sued by Getty and had to make the change.
[https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/02/internet-rages-
after...](https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/02/internet-rages-after-google-
removes-view-image-button-bowing-to-getty/)

~~~
anonytrary
I remember that, and I am a still a tiny bit salty about how it impacted me as
a user. Ever since, it has been so unnecessarily tedious get the raw image
link from Google. Half the time, I end up with a data url, sometimes I get
taken to the backing website, who usually don't know anything about
accessibility, sometimes I get the image. It's all just so much worse now.

That said, it is absolutely theft for Google to source data from _your_ site,
then use that to add value to their site, without giving you any click-through
traffic.

Tangentially, it would be great if Google sent like $1 (edit: or < $1; the
amount isn't my point) per 1000 clicks out to websites whose search results
get clicked. They already have an ad-engine that does all of this. This would
mean that you would get paid to have good SEO, or to be a central hub. The
websites that comprise the entire web should negotiate better terms with
central data brokers like Google.

~~~
labawi
> That said, it is absolutely theft for Google to source data from your site,
> then use that to add value to their site, without giving you any click-
> through traffic.

Would you be OK, if Google didn't show images from your site on their site? If
so, I believe a simple robots.txt statement should be sufficient.

> This would mean that you would get paid to have good SEO, or to be a central
> hub. The websites that comprise the entire web should negotiate better terms
> with central data brokers like Google.

I don't really get the logic by which someone letting people find you, should
pay for that privilege.

(have not used Google search in a long time)

~~~
lyjackal
> I don't really get the logic by which someone letting people find you,
> should pay for that privilege. Images ends up being more of a media platform
> than search engine. I'm rarely looking for a site. Doesn't seem too weird
> that they could pay for some of the content

~~~
labawi
I don't really understand. Are you saying Google is creating a media platform
based on image search and they should somehow find a way to pay for the images
in it?

If you want to use an image that is not free, you should go pay for it, no?
You have a link for the site. You can even go visit the site as a courtesy for
free images. Are you saying Google should be paying for the images?

If you want to be mad at someone, look at getty - they take² people's images
and charge for them, even managing to file DMCA takedowns on the author[1]. As
a consolation, at least they host the images themselves.

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12180039](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12180039)

² Quick skim says they may merely let other people do the uploading of
effectively stolen images.

------
Animats
This may be a major event in Google's history - the point where they overdid
ads and started to be perceived as a inferior service. This is sometimes
called "pulling a Myspace".

Myspace was once the top social network. They looked unchallengeable. Then
they got greedy. Myspace kept upping their ad content until usage dropped.
Instead of backing off the ads, they upped the ad content even more to
maintain revenue. Usage dropped further. That death spiral ended with Myspace
irrelevant.

~~~
product50
Nothing like this is going to happen. Google Search is leaps and bounds ahead
beyond anything else. And Google Assistant on top of this makes it even more
effective. This was a mistake by Google and they heard the feedback and
corrected it.

MySpace analogy doesn't make sense since there is no Facebook, which was a
competent social network, here. Search is a massive investment and you don't
just have random companies suddenly rising taking over the users. Duckduckgo
itself uses Bing Search as its backend.

~~~
thih9
> Google Search is leaps and bounds ahead beyond anything else.

Nothing is too big to fail. If there's no direct competitor, an indirect one
or a group could take over too.

> Duckduckgo itself uses Bing Search as its backend.

This reads to me as if Bing was the only backend they use, which isn't the
case. According to Wikipedia they use multiple backends:

"DuckDuckGo's results are a compilation of "over 400" sources, including
Yahoo! Search BOSS, Wolfram Alpha, Bing, Yandex, its own Web crawler (the
DuckDuckBot) and others. It also uses data from crowdsourced sites, including
Wikipedia, to populate knowledge panel boxes to the right of the results.",
source:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DuckDuckGo#Overview](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DuckDuckGo#Overview)

~~~
hn_throwaway_99
Whenever I hear people complain about Google and that they'll switch to a
competitor, I'm reminded of the "Delete Facebook" memes that happened, only to
have FB reach a new user record every subsequent month.

Don't be deluded by the HN bubble. I like DDG and am glad it exists, but it's
usage in a year is probably what Google gets in a few minutes, and I'm willing
to bet that ratio hasn't really improved significantly for years.

~~~
justinpombrio
For anyone actually curious about the numbers:

Google traffic is about 4 million searches per minute, which comes to 6
billion searches per day. DDG traffic is about 50 million searches per day, so
about 1%.

It looks like DDG traffic has been doubling every 1.5-2 years or so for the
past decade. I presume that Google's traffic is relatively constant at this
point.

[https://duckduckgo.com/traffic](https://duckduckgo.com/traffic)

~~~
jedberg
> I presume that Google's traffic is relatively constant at this point.

Probably a poor assumption. The total number of internet users is still
growing significantly.

------
nonbirithm
It seems every time Google ruins the user experience for its products, the
reason is money. I guess that sounds obvious by now.

For example, the the size of the skip button on YouTube ads on Android changed
so it only has the width of the seconds counter instead of including the "Skip
in N" text. Before you could keep pressing the button before the timer ran out
without triggering the ad, if you were impatient, but now you have to be
careful not to accidentally click on the ad since the button is so small.

Why? Because it results in more accidental clicks, if so many people have the
habit of tapping it over and over. Which means more money. At the expense of
user frustration or worry over clicking it unintentionally.

Look at Dropbox's redesign. They slapped a bunch of completely useless
collaboration tools that have nothing to do with my singular use case for
Dropbox: syncing files. And that's because, as they say, syncing is a feature,
not a product, so they probably had no choice to find new ways to "keep
growing" and making revenue or simply die out. Because they can't afford
otherwise. But Dropbox was the one company with the capital to fine-tune their
algorithm so it "just worked" across network instability and numerous system
configurations (until they dropped support for everything until ext4 on Linux
at least), so that's what so many people used.

I believe that if the only goal was to develop a program to sync files across
devices, then everyone at Dropbox would have declared all the extra features
unnecessary. But people have to eat.

I keep wondering if the limitless pursuit of capital growth is worth the
downsides. It can give us things like Dropbox, but ultimately Dropbox is not
worth the hassle for me anymore due to the bloat. As a naive question, will
there ever be point where we've had enough growing?

~~~
distant_hat
I work for an mobile ad company and we would not consider accidental clicks
for billing. I wonder how Google handles it. Advertisers would complain if you
got a high fraction of clicks where the user closed the window right away or
did not engage with the website in a desired fashion.

------
40four
This has been trending now a few days, but I still don’t get it. Seems nobody
can really say what exactly about this design says ‘advertisement’?

I get the feeling Mr. Mod’s tweet caught fire because of the sentiment, of
Google oppression and dominance, and not many stopped to think what in
particular about the design they don’t like.

Personally there is nothing immediately offensive to the way the results look.
In fact I might argue it’s actually a good esthetic. I like seeing the favicon
@ the top, and it _does_ mimic the way mobile search results have looked for a
while now. Nobody freaked out about that change?

If the anger over this is because people think this is a dark pattern, trying
to obfuscate the difference between advertisements, that might not necessarily
be wrong. But progression has been happening for a long time now. The picture
in the article shows that at least since 2013, they eliminated the different
color background that used to highlight ads. So it’s been a good 7 years since
ads were nearly indistinguishable from regular results.

~~~
jccalhoun
Totally agree. I can understand that someone might think the favicon makes it
look tacky but ads have the word AD next to them. It isn't hard to tell the
difference.

~~~
doublerabbit
Double exposure.

Expedia for example, if you searched for "flights" you would get an advert for
Expedia and a search result for expedia.com

~~~
jccalhoun
That isn't new is it? I know that I have seen that for years.

------
callinyouin
For me it was the straw that broke the camel's back. When this change went
live I decided to switch to DDG and it's been a great experience. Search
results are, in my opinion, more relevant and generally of better quality. I
wish I would have switched sooner!

~~~
nostromo
I'm in the exact same boat.

To be honest, for a long time I'd role my eyes at the DDG users in every
thread, talking about how it's _hey, pretty good now_.

Well, now I'm _that guy_ , because I think it's actually better than Google
now. It looks crisper, cleaner, has way fewer ads, and does less fuzzing of my
actual search terms. I love it -- I'm hooked.

~~~
philistine
Me too! I get less junky websites in the results.

------
andy_ppp
I’m amazed that Google is essentially late 90s Microsoft at this point. It
should be help in the same contempt.

~~~
toyg
Late ‘90s MS was still in ascendancy on merit, technically speaking. This is
more early ‘00s MS, all hubris and contempt for competitors.

------
gdm85
I think that a constant pressure to optimize this specific aspect (layout) has
caused this. However, optimization is not innovation.

What are novel ways that search results can be presented to (and consumed by)
the user? Where is search going in the future?

I am a bit surprised to not see them on top of this game, but at the same time
it would be a ripe chance for someone else to give it a spin (assuming that
they have a sizable number of users to begin with).

------
burnJS
They backtracked for now, but they'll try something else in the next year or
so. Their goal is obvious.

~~~
ehsankia
The goal of showing favicons?

~~~
mthoms
The goal of making ads and organic results look more and more similar.

------
dreamer7
For a company that had the least distracting ads for a very long time, this is
definitely a questionable move.

But, all the hullabaloo in the article about Ad links making money for Google
v/s the others that don't seems misplaced. After all, the point of a search
engine is to find stuff. And if an ad shows an alternative, that is possibly
better, you can click on it.

These ad links are definitely not going to download malicious malware onto
your devices.

I am more worried about ads on social media platforms with infinite scroll
because those ads are more unpredictable in placement.

------
LaserToy
I use google a lot, but I can’t escape the thought that every time I really
need to find something (a book which title I barely remember, a product based
on the job it does) I just can’t do it using google and that most of my
queries are mostly key value lookups.

And yes, ads are annoying. Double ads in YouTube are annoying. f you google.

~~~
xiphias2
At least in Youtube I can (and do) pay to make ads go away, which I'm happy to
do, as I get a great service in return. I just wish that I could do the same
for Google search.

~~~
SquareWheel
I'd bet that Contributor will work there.

[https://contributor.google.com](https://contributor.google.com)

~~~
xiphias2
I view Google Contributor as a bad product offering, as it doesn't give me any
guarantee.

Matt Cutts wrote that it works like if I would be bidding with an empty ad,
but Google ad system works by CPC, so actually the product should be free in
theory :)

Google exactly knows my long term value, so it could ask for that amount of
money. Also it's for AdSense / DoubleClick, not for Google.com, where ads
matter the most.

~~~
tristador
So my bid just drives up the prices advertisers need to bid to show me ads?
Sounds like a win for a company that sells ads.

Asking for your "long term value" is interesting, although for users who run
ad blockers and therefore never click an ad, isn't their value super low
anyway? Imagine Google asking for $50/yr to not show ads, installing an ad
blocker, then a year later seeing Google ask $5/yr as your value plummets.

~~~
xiphias2
Don't worry, Google is not that stupid :)

It could just use my interests to predict how much I'm willing to pay for
getting rid of ads.

Or even the type and number of devices that I'm using Google on should be a
good enough predictor, or just the country (which is the case for Youtube
Premium).

------
pastelsky
Even discounting for the fact the results looked closer to ads, they were also
very distracting from an information heirarchy point of view.

My eyes first move thorough the colourful favicons first, then the url of the
page and then the _real_ content.

This flies in the face of good design.

~~~
thomasahle
> My eyes first move thorough the colourful favicons first, then the url of
> the page and then the real content.

I'm not sure this is a big deal one you get used to it. Other search engines
also have favicons. My browser tab has favicons. Most internet content (like
twitter) has some kind of colourful icon to the left of the text.

------
seanwilson
Duckduckgo shows favicons in search results as well but nobody complains about
it. People should be focusing on how to make Google ads stand out more and not
the use of favicons.

~~~
PixyMisa
Check the settings panel. You can configure everything, including the
favicons.

~~~
seanwilson
I like the favicons feature. I meant that favicons themselves aren't what
people should be complaining about.

------
jophde
The original version of Ad Words always seemed ethical to me. Its simply
showing users ads for something they were looking at the present moment.
Mixing results and ads is bad. We know for a fact the first couple hits are
clicked at a much higher rate.

------
okareaman
I just switched to Edge and Bing (Will do DDG in the near future) and I'm not
looking back. Edge is very snappy and crisp compared to Chrome. Bing doesn't
show tons of ads as the top links. I wonder if Google noticed many people like
me switching and became concerned.

Edit: Edge operates just like Chrome. Microsoft has made a better Chrome with
less memory usage.

~~~
lesquivemeau
Do you use edge because you don't like firefox or because it's preinstalled ?
I personally prefer ff but i'd love to hear what you prefer in edge

~~~
okareaman
I haven't used Edge enough to compare it to Firefox, which I don't use. I like
Edge over Chrome. I like Firefox but I don't see how they can compete over the
long run against Microsoft and Google.

------
baddox
I’ve been on the test for this design since October 4, 2019, so I’ve actually
gotten used to it! But it’s probably a good thing for them to backtrack. I
wonder what went wrong in their clearly lengthy experiment about how this
would perform.

~~~
tiles
How did you remember the precise date? Impressed.

~~~
baddox
Searchable Slack logs :)

------
TekMol
When I click this link, it redirects me to

    
    
        https://guce.advertising.com/collectIdentifiers?sessionId=...
    

Which is blocked by umatrix.

The Verge seems to cover it with less dirty tricks:

[https://www.theverge.com/2020/1/24/21080424](https://www.theverge.com/2020/1/24/21080424)

~~~
tigrezno
uMatrix user here too. The same happened. Totally disgusting from techcrunch.

------
longtimegoogler
I go to bing.com and honestly it is more egregious. I couldn't tell which were
the Ads and which were the search results.

As a Google employee, I am not a fan of the new design and can appreciate
consumers' dissatisfaction with it and will be happy if it is reverted.

But, I can't help feel like there is a double standard, here.

For instance, Google didn't even opt to bid on the recent giant contract to be
the cloud provider for the U.S. Government.

Microsoft beat out Amazon for this and there wasn't a peep about it.

It seems to me that Google is unfairly targeted in this space for some reason.
It makes me question the motivation of some of those pushing this agenda.

------
BLanen
Only slight related:

Google's last big search update has been a complete disaster for me. Very
naive and arrogant assumptions of the semantics of my search. I can't search
anything more than a few words strung together. If you try to search a
sentence that you don't precisely know (like a couple words are different)
then you're shit out of luck now even though it used to work great.

Google is literally becoming worse at search.

~~~
jeen02
Why not give a few examples?

~~~
tatersolid
Google is now totally useless for any error message from popular software. I
was getting an esoteric error from nginx; pasting the long error in quotes to
google gave a _full page of irrelevant ads with no organic results_. DDG and
Bing both had a forum post from Igor himself explaining the error as the first
hit.

This sort of highly targeted search used to work so well in GOOG and now it
doesn’t work at all and hasn’t for a while. I moved to DDG a year ago and
never even seem to use !g.

------
blobs
2 things come to mind here:

A leopard cannot change its spots.

Confidence comes on foot but goes on horseback

I moved to FF + Duckduckgo engine a while ago, it will be extremely hard for
them to win me back.

------
mal10c
The new look is annoying, but in my case I'm running a PiHole server. Clicking
on ads just presents me with a page not found error.

I guess if I really get tired of the new look, there's other options out
there. DuckDuckGo is great and I use them occasionally. Bing actually isn't
terrible either, so there's alternatives out there. Maybe I'll give some
others a try for a while.

------
pdimitar
That website refused to open in my uMatrix-enabled Firefox, and didn't open
properly on mobile Safari (1BlockerX adblocker). Only desktop Safari (with the
same adblocker) opened it.

So here's another link: [http://archive.is/aRU3O](http://archive.is/aRU3O)

~~~
read_if_gay_
that website also contains borderline malicious js making the back button
nonfunctional (at least on ios safari). funny considering they felt the need
to specifically point out how evil googles strategies are.

------
tjpnz
What strikes me the most about this debacle is how blatant it seemed. If their
intention is to remove the distinction between ads and organic links entirely
there are more subtle (albeit slower) ways they could've moved in that
direction.

------
jedberg
Good. I recently got dropped into the new design, and for the life of me I
can't figure out which ones are ads and which are not. Either I've never
gotten an ad with the new design, or they blend in so much that I can't tell.

------
modzu
to all the duckduckgo comments: ddg also has ads that look like search
results. ublock origin nukes ~5 elements for me on a google search and ~ 8 on
DDG. as far as i can see the only real differentiator for ddg is that it
returns "universal" search results instead of individualized results (based on
location, history, etc). aka, results that are 'private' but also more likely
to be less relevant. more than ever the internet is ready for a new search
engine, but DDG aint it. we need one that isnt based on f'ing advertising: its
antithetical to the point of search!!!

------
Stubb
Don't care. Haven't used Google since they put social engineering and ad
revenue ahead of search quality and usability When I peek in from time to
time, it looks intolerable compared to DDG's clean results.

~~~
supersrdjan
I tried using duckduckgo but gave up after I kept getting irrelevant results
for simple queries

~~~
sgc
After many tries at ddg, I am using startpage.com since it uses anonymized
google results. Still far from perfect, but the best I have found for now.

~~~
thomasahle
Did you actually try Startpage without an adblocker?

[https://i.imgur.com/KAZWb9i.png](https://i.imgur.com/KAZWb9i.png)

The Ad maker on Startpage is way less visible than it ever was on Google or
even DDG.

~~~
sgc
No I confess I never have :/

------
zxcb1
Maybe we need to be bailed out? We're broke on data, privacy and autonomy.
Perhaps a 50% nationalization where democratically elected representatives
serve on the board? The money can be printed.

~~~
zxcb1
This comment fared better than expected.

------
room271
Okay, Verizon's consent process is a disaster. After following several options
to try and opt out I gave up and left. Which unfortunately means I can't read
this article.

------
hncensorsnonpc
I have not even seen this in real because I use startpage and duckduckgo on
top of ublock that blocks google ads anyway. Its strage to me that not
everyone just blocks all ads.

------
huffmsa
Now if Ben Gomes could roll back whatever new NLP models they've recently
deployed, that'd be great.

Oh and "by date" ranking doesn't work at all in the news tab

------
nerdbaggy
Thank goodness. Aside from everything looking like Ads I just really hated the
design. I had a harder time extracting data from it when looking for a
relevant link.

------
negamax
What's a good alternative to Google?

~~~
kevsim
Well since this is HN, the overwhelming majority will say DuckDuckGo. I
switched to DDG as my default browser search around 3 months ago and it's
mostly been fine. However, when I _don't_ find what I'm looking for, I do find
myself popping open Google for that specific search (sometimes finding things
I didn't find with DDG). So I guess I don't have full faith in DDG just yet.

~~~
negamax
I switched to DDG. It seems quite good to me. I am mostly interested in recent
events and Twitter Search and news websites is good for that for my needs. DDG
is perfect replacement.

------
arendtio
Maybe they should simply get back to a design with a yellow background for
ads, as they had in 2007 and 2011.

------
RivieraKid
Adblockers should default to blocking Google search ads.

------
moviuro
If you wish to avoid being redirected to guce.advertising.com when reaching
the article: [https://outline.com/YEmwdW](https://outline.com/YEmwdW)

You know, GDPR, and otherwise respect of readers.

See also
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22019822](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22019822)

------
dijit
Defuse, wait, continue.

------
blazespin
How is that facebook gets away with this?

------
gwittel
While I’m glad they reverted, the doublespeak is absurd. As if they didn’t
know users would hate it. User experience had nothing to do with this. It was
all about revenue. The main question after this is what user hostile move will
they attempt next?

Without major changes all over the company I don’t see how Google will get
better.

~~~
hinkley
Don’t they have 100,000 employees that could’ve told them this just as well?
You’re right this isn’t about UX. It’s about ego.

~~~
gwittel
Either many employees did tell them it was a bad idea and they ignored them.
Or no one told them. Both ways reflect very poorly on Google.

They rolled the dice hoping it would blow over. Government attention was
likely the killer.

------
ronilan
It’s a little meta but I think the way this has unfolded doesn’t shine well on
Danny Sullivan and his role at Google. Danny been in the search industry from
pretty much the get go, he knows anyone who was anything in search, he
“studied the great machine, knows things even Draal doesn’t know” [1], and yet
he has been reduced to some sort of an after-fact PR person for decisions it
seems he had no say on. Pity.

[1] [https://youtu.be/dn6sWdxpk90](https://youtu.be/dn6sWdxpk90)

------
bronz
well AMP was the death rattle and this is the flat-line. Google is officially
dead. Another corporate zombie. if you want to be plugged in to new and
exciting things, look elsewhere. What a crazy ride its been.

------
netcan
The perspective of this article feel naive for 2020. _" You can't put out
forest fires by pissing, but if we all piss together... uhm maybe... no wait_"

Here's what I mean:

 _withering criticism from politicians, consumers and the press over the way
in which search results displays were made to look like... .. It’s also a
pretty evil by a company whose mantra was “Don’t be evil.” ..paid
advertisements are ever more indistinguishable_

This is like addressing the plastic straw problem on Shell oil rigs. Google
and Facebook are both (among other things) more influential over media than
Murdoch and the next five runners-up combined. Traditional media obviously
also violate their own "journalistic ethics" for money reasons, but at least
there is such a code. They teach college courses on it.

Google & FB have _more_ influence on things like elections, war/peace &
culture, but they don't even have an ethic to violate. Zuch won't even admit
that Facebook _is_ a political media outlet, despite being the most
significant one to have ever existed.

 _Withering criticism of font choices_ is so 2007. "Vehement demands for
antitrust action" is what we're about in the 1920s.

