
Ask HN: Will you stop Googling now, that it removed URLs and added favicons? - vizzah
I am seriously considering moving away from Google (or writing a browser addon) which will revert search results back to clean and readable form.<p>It seems &quot;ad blending&quot; made a final step towards morphing into organic results. It was distinct background first, ads count limited, then it went further and further and now it&#x27;s just a favicon saying &#x27;Ad&#x27; which distinguish sponsored content from the organic.
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aosaigh
Ugh, I only noticed the favicons today. It's such a clear attempt to blur the
lines between the regular results (now with favicons) and the ads (now with
something that looks very like a favicon, particularly when scrolling).

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

~~~
danShumway
Yeah, I should have clarified more.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

~~~
freediver
Fair enough. Btw I find link wrapping is annoying, you could do it also with
javascript, but it is necessary to improve the quality of search results. I
would also want to know what results work for which queries.

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

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

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

~~~
Jemm
You can pretend !g to your search and DDG will forward you to Google search.
Just FYI

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mrr54
It just _looks_ awful. It's incredibly unaesthetically pleasing that they've
replaced the green URLs with the black breadcrumb things.

~~~
johnnycab
You can make some of the pain go away, for now at least..

[https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/395257-better-
google](https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/395257-better-google)

------
MilnerRoute
Gah. That new design is horribly ugly. One other thing I've always hated about
Google: if you just want the URL for a page, you can't right-click on it in
the search results and copy the URL -- because Google will instead give you
some Google-riffic hybrid URL that first refers you through a Google address
so they can capture your clickthrough.

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

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

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

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

This attribute is useful for monitoring/tracking."

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

------
is_true
What is worse is that most of the advanced queries aren't working anymore

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

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

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

------
manbearpiggy
Google search has become less user unfriendly, turned their back on their old
business model. It seems they've deliberately blurred the lines between ads
and relevance.

Bing is now easier to use.

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Snetry
The more shady stuff Google pulls the less inclined I am to even consider
using them.

------
Kihashi
I looked at it, was confused, then downloaded the duckduckgo search for
Firefox.

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JohnFen
I would, yes, if I hadn't given up on Google already.

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Narretz
The biggest issue for me is that github issues in the results don't have the
issue title as title anymore but the name of the project. Makes it much harder
to find an issue in all that noise.

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mortivore
No. The favicons are cool. The ads are no worse for content than the other
links so it's not a big deal. Often it just makes something that is already in
the top 3 have a duplicate.

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PixelPaul
As a business owner that relies on organic traffic, this is a huge hit

~~~
rococode
If you don't mind my asking, why?

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PikachuEXE
I won't I stopped using Chrome / Google long time ago (> 1 year) I started to
dislike Google since AMP introduced

------
dfghfhgf
What do you mean? I don't see difference, can any1 take a screenshoot?

~~~
Gustomaximus
At the risk your joking;

[http://prntscr.com/qp1cs6](http://prntscr.com/qp1cs6)

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

~~~
NullPrefix
Partial rollout. They started doing these fugly icons months ago for selected
users.

------
smarri
Me too. The recent change is really disappointing.

------
Mockapapella
not at all. Every search engine I've tried has paled in comparison to Google's
results.

------
rasz
nah, I just whipped 10 line userscript to fix it back

~~~
SturgeonsLaw
I don't suppose you'd be so kind as to share it?

~~~
rasz
a part of a bigger script:

    
    
        let resultLinks = e ? e.querySelectorAll('.r>a:not([class])') : document.querySelectorAll('div#search .r>a:not([class])');
        for (let link of resultLinks)
        {
          //LC20lb yWc32e iUh30 B6fmyf
          link.removeAttribute("ping");
          link.querySelector('a>div>cite.iUh30').innerText = link.querySelector('a>.LC20lb').innerText;
          let div = document.createElement('span');
          div.innerText = link.href;
          div.className = 'LC20lb';
          link.querySelector('a>.LC20lb').parentNode.insertBefore(div, link.querySelector('a>.LC20lb').nextSibling);
          link.querySelector('a>.LC20lb').parentNode.removeChild(link.querySelector('a>.LC20lb'));
        }
    

It was just a quick fix to get urls back, still needs fixing the
cache/translation links etc, havent gotten around to making it look 100% like
the old search page
[http://i.imgur.com/RoTJ5vG.png](http://i.imgur.com/RoTJ5vG.png)

