I've been in this A/B test for a couple of months now, so I've had time to adjust, and I still hate it. I've just become so used to seeing the complete URL in green. The complete URL! If you hover over the results, you'll see that they like to take bits like numeric components or the query string out.
This is part of Google's attempt to de-prioritise the URL. Their destructive AMP service confusingly shows you Google's domain instead of the website's — and as they can't fix that without losing out on tracking, they're trying to change what the URL means.
google amp is a plague on the internet and should have been shutdown by regulators. it is definitely anti-competitive. i am sick and tired of our government completely slaving to the big tech companies when it comes to regulations and anti-competitive behavior.
google amp on mobile overrides behavior on mobile, even on android, so instead of web links opening up in the respective and selected default app, it opens up the amp link within google search or the browser. there is no way to turn off this feature on any browser, chrome or not.
Unless I misunderstood, that is something you disable in each (google)app that has that "feature".
In Gmail for instance: settings: General settings:
Open links in gmail.
Turn on for "faster" browsing.
Default is on. Tip: Use firefox focus instead as the default browser to open all links. If the link warrants further look copy the url to your main browser.
Thanks for the tip. Most of the people here would fix that somehow, e.g. by tweaking browser settings, finding and following comments like yours. But, why does someone who doesn't deal with tech have to think about that, and will they, should they?
I find their UX approach to SEO more concerning than, say, scoring. For example, AMP pages will receive the same score as equally performant non-AMP content. However, they won't benefit from the carousel view, with instant page loads (prefetch), etc...
Small changes like this, applied at a huge scale to a user base that just can't afford to constantly fight hostile UX are damaging, regardless if they come from Google, an airline site, your mailbox switching to "Promotions" at random intervals or Twitter not allowing you to permanently change the feed order.
Internet feels more hostile than it used to. I don't mind the trolls (I can always block them) but I do mind that we depend on services that deploy hostile UX practices.
You can really feel it when switching from Android to LineageOS, or from Windows to Linux.
It's the difference between software where "you are the product" and software that has been created to serve the user, to be the best tool it can be.
I'm not talking about UX in the sense that open source software can sometimes feel clunky and unfinished, but I'm talking about breath of freedom you feel when you switch, and suddenly ... you notice that this current you have been forced to swim against, just isn't there any more.
I helped a friend get LineageOS on his bootlooped phone, and he's so happy with it. All these features in the settings that are actually helpful (when in Android you always have to second guess, you know that feeling when a setting's description is really vague and uninformative, "this is probably going to spy on me", is it vaguely positive or negative, because the switch can go either way). All the very basic features that would otherwise require an ad-filled app to perform, of course already there. You get privacy controls that aren't mystifying or reset on updates.
Similarly, I've now been on Instagram for about half a year. Always avoided FB, but there's some art I wanted to put out there, so I gave it a try. And oh my god, Instagram is probably the shittiest software ever? Or at least the most user hostile. It's a social thing where you can share images, comments and messages. Except it isn't, it just appears like one. Literally every interaction feels forced, to show me more ads, make me spend more time in this app (??) and mainly constantly throwing up barriers against interacting with any kind of software or data outside its ecosystem. You can't upload from your laptop, many links are not clickable, many text fields are not copyable, most features in the browser are locked unless you make it pretend to be an iPhone (!!), you can't post or reply to comments. The chat is such basic functionality that it seems hard to fuck up but they did. I should stop, but I can go on ...
This is that feeling of constantly swimming against a current, and somehow we're tricked into believing that is how it's supposed to be, because ... I don't know, some people told me when I complained, that most people don't use instagram in the way I do. Well I guess, but that doesn't seem to be most people's choice.
I think you're definitely misunderstanding what Instagram is. I'm not saying it isn't user hostile and full of ads, because it definitely is, but you're complaining about all the wrong things. All of those things you're complaining about are conscious design choices and have been from the very beginning.
Instagram is not some generic photo sharing software that tries to be open and modular and integrate with everything and proliferate arbitrary visual media with a rich tightly coupled messaging system. It was never that and won't ever be that.
Instagram from the start was just about taking low res pictures with your phone camera, putting a filter on them so they look less terrible and then sharing them with your friends. Every other feature was begrudgingly added to increase accessibility and hence DAUs. So you were never supposed to be able to interact with anything outside of the app. You can't cross-post your posts to facebook or twitter, you can't post from your computer, you can't spam links in your photo descriptions. All of this is literally the point of Instagram. It was like this before it and slightly after it got acquired and people loved it, not in spite of the restrictions, but because of them.
Then Zuck crammed it full of ads and a terrible glommed on messaging system and ruined it.
This is not AMP. It’s a feature originally called Chrome Custom Tabs [1], and it’s a faster way to open a webpage than a regular “open URL” intent (that would have to launch the entire browser app) or a custom WebView (which sucks for other reasons). The thing is, this feature takes into account your default browser, so if you set Focus as your system default browser, the custom tabs will launch in Focus, with all the privacy protections it offers.
if you use google search as your default search, then there is no way i know of to disable amp, no matter which browser you use, even if you request the browser to handle opening the link. google search passes the amp link to the browser.
> Unless I misunderstood, that is something you disable in each (google)app that has that "feature".
> In Gmail for instance: settings: General settings:
> Open links in gmail. Turn on for "faster" browsing.
I changed this setting, but now I clicked a link in gmail and indeed it opens via Firefox, but it still gets redirected through a google-URL before getting to the real page. I want to disable that behaviour most of all.
> Tip: Use firefox focus instead as the default browser to open all links.
Unfortunately iOS doesn't support this nearly as well as Android does. On Android you can enforce this pretty much everywhere whereas on iOS a bunch of apps still open links in Safari no matter what you do.
Its been enough to make me change my iPhone's search default to DDG. I've been using it for about a month and I'm surprisingly happy with the results so far.
Semi-off-topic, but I recently found out that there is an even worse version of AMP, called Google Web Light. Running Firefox on an ARM device (e.g. Raspberry Pi), the results speak for themselves [1].
Notably, there is absolutely no way for the end user to disable it, short of spoofing your user agent.
I posted the solution below, which I found a few days ago. The script will work with greasemonkey and tampermonkey, it will provide you with results similar to the ones before the change. If you also use uMatrix, there will be no ads.
DuckDuckGo is great, but Searx[1] is even better. It's a metasearch engine that aggregates several search providers that you can self-host, or access via one of several public instances.
I run an instance on my local network, but you can run it for free on Heroku, AWS or GCP or even on a Raspberry Pi. There are several Docker images you can choose from.
Extra irony: I went to try Dogpile, but got redirected to some anti-something site (seems to not like my VPN IP) that wants me to do a Google Recaptcha.
I use DDG as much as I can but when I need to find something very specific, or find a solution to a bug Ive encountered, it takes 2x as long on DDG vs Google
I find Google ignoring my attempts to be more specific more often.
Just as a contrived example a search like "R33 RB25DET Motorsport ECU" typically got me specific links relating to the exact car, engine and topic. But the past 5 years or so it seems like it is weighting the more common word and more general terms. Often excluding the target topic altogether and just giving general motorsport results. Perhaps it's a consequence of every SEO specialist and their dogbot hammering general search terms and gumming up the machine with cruft.
That's something that really drives me nuts about it lately. If I just wanted general results, I'd do the lazy thing and not put in the additional terms. Worse, I've been finding that it still ignores some of the terms even when I put them in quotes.
The results just seem really bad lately, especially for anything technical. Just now I'd been looking for "html5 canvas torture test". The top result is a video called "Torture Testing my Nut Sac!!" and then some videos about testing Glock guns. Umm, no, that's not even close to what I'd wanted. (Bing does way better here and DDG is somewhere in between.)
I'm not sure what Google engineers are using to find technical information on the web these days, but I can't imagine it's the public Google search.
I personally find it most helpful to just ask Google a question like I'm a complete idiot. I got the idea from the meme about "that guy wot painted them melty clocks", which works extremely well in my opinion. Looking in my history "how to multilingual in java please", worked fine. You get a laugh out of it, 90% of the time Google figures out what you need, and the rest of the time it's going to show whatever the hell it wants to, any way.
At least both of us are pretending the same level of intelligence, which takes away a lot of the irritation.
I also tried talking to DDG like a duck, but it doesn't give as good results as talking to Google like an idiot.
Just to be clear, I still use !g pretty frequently.
But psychologically it's rather different. If you find the Google search page to be visually aversive then your goal is to get in and get out quickly. That's a bit harder if Google is your default search.
Firefox has been my main browser for about 15 years. Never saw the advantage in Chrome, aside from using it once in a while when a webpage didn't work correctly on Firefox. These latest years we are seeing very aggressive behaviour from Chrome (reducing effectiveness of ad blocking, for example) and that just reinforces my decision.
I think I agree. Google still seems like my first choice mentally, but I used ddg a lot more as first search lately ( past month or so ).
It is getting more and more annoying getting workarounds for everything though. It is more annoying, because I liked G layout, default colors snd so on. It was cleaner.
Now not only is their search quality getting worse ( I got what I asked for on bing of all places ), their presentation managed to degrade too.
If it is testing result, I would be curious to see the data that informed that decision.
I usually start with DDG (it's my default search engine on all the devices I use) and then quickly move on to !s (for Startpage) since DDG still is lacking in the quality of results for many searches. It's a bit rare that I go to !g (Google search).
That still requires somewhat less from the user than my solution: a filtering proxy. On the other hand, the latter enables a far more customised browsing experience and one that isn't restricted to a single browser on a single computer.
...which brings me to another great point this illustrates: if you want to customise your experience, if you want to be able to control how you see the Web, then you need to make an effort, and the amount you exert is essentially proportional to how much you can change.
Yet the majority of users have shown that they are willing to take whatever Google throws at them with little opposition. I find that a little sad and ironic in this era of "everyone can code" propaganda (I've seen even Google advertises something like that on its homepage); or perhaps the latter is just an attempt to increase the population of intelligent yet docile and obedient corporate drones... I know developers --- web developers --- who really hated the changes yet made no effort to fix it themselves, despite almost certainly having the skills to.
Good call, I think you hit it right on the money. We have all seen these problems (basically Google attempting to MITM the entire Internet) getting worse for years along with all of the very real malvertising threats. We have partnered with the Privoxy project to do exactly what you are doing with Proxomitron but a system that will scale to enterprise environments. We have it running in corporate and educational environments already w/out SSL inspection. What we will be able to do with SSL inspection will be a game changer. Check out the virtual appliance! Any feedback or ideas are appreciated. https://www.nextvectorsecurity.com
The creator died 16 years ago... but the (rather small) community has made a lot of patches and continues to work on filters. Given that it's basically the equivalent of running all the sites you visit through sed, with a syntax that's more suited for filtering HTML than plaintext, the strength lies in its flexibility and generality.
Yes, the UI is still skinnable, and the default skin is rather... psychedelic.
Ohhhh, right! I remember when that happened, forgot ... Amazing that the software is still in use. And that it's still useful given the temporary nature of these filters. Its syntax was pretty neat; writing your own cosmetic filters was pretty easy. And I suppose that the community wrote some code to auto convert public block lists maybe?
There's something to be said about the adblocker being a filtering proxy, it can really get anything before it hits the browser.
Do you know how it compares to Privoxy nowadays? Way back then it was the open source but harder to configure alternative, that didn't quite work as well as Proxomitron. But maybe Privoxy continued development and got better, I don't know what direction that project took.
Oh and I personally always really liked the default skin :D
Haha I just took a look, expecting a cool Github project page.
Nope - its green, and hasn't been updated since June... of 2003. I have no idea how it is able to be effective against the modern web, considering in 2003 the biggest issue was annoying pop-up Flash ads which no longer exist. Maybe there are updated plugins or something.
This is available only on Android though. On iOS, Firefox Focus (or any Firefox or other browser) is tied to Apple's restrictions. So there's no scope for browser extensions as we generally think of it.
And Mozilla is about to roll out Firefox Preview soo with all add-ons but uBlock Origin disabled until they can fix up and test the add-on ecosystem on the new browser. Unfortunately there's more add-ons for privacy/security/ethics than uBlock (Decentraleyes, tracking token strippers, et. al) which will include add-ons that redirect to the original source from AMP.
Depends on what Google’s mission is. If it’s to show you ads, it doesn’t matter how long you’re on their page as the destination will (almost certainly) have more. If it’s to help you, it’s not successful.
Making profit, obviously. You to be less efficient at distinguishing ads and results, increasing time you look at ads, increasing chances of you interacting with ads.
Google hates strong SEO sites, because they won't make them any money. So that's a clever way of pushing them further down. I wondered when all results on the first page will be Ads only.
Google decides the layout. You can have the 'strongest SEO' in the world and Google still decide if they put 1 ad or 9 in front of the result.
Strength of SEO is irrelevant to the ads. The only thing Google hate is when sites manipulate themself to rank higher and offer a worse user experience.
It wouldn't be very surprising if Google varies the number of ads in a search results page based on the search term. For sites that have strong SEO for all of their key search terms that would be indistinguishable from Google placing more ads in pages where that site ranks highly.
My understanding it is very linked to 1) Profitability. Search terms around things like lawyers and credit cards. You'll almost always see 4 ads. 2) Genuine relevance. Google know for certain searches your not likely looking to buy something and to keep credibility don't show ads.
Occasionally you can find pockets of less competitive search's that 1) allow ads
2) relate to your product via the algorithm even if they don't to a human brain 3) Align to your desired audience and these can give great return.
I guess sites with real, useful content (e.g. Wikipedia) don't need strong SEO since they have a ton of back-links from other sites that validate their high ranking, so "strong SEO" is really about making a less useful site look more useful, which makes sense for them to hate.
SEO really translates to "How to fool Google into boosting your ranking artifically".
There used to be such feature in the results page. I just went looking for it and I got 'Cached' and 'Similar' when I click in the little drop-down arrow. Nice feature that appears to be removed. How does removing that feature benefited the users?
No, it used to be part of the official results before the personal blocklist extension ever existed. Then some features were removed from the search results and then partially reimplemented in that extension.
If you know which site you want to search, and its search feature is as decent as wikipedia’s, I suggest adding it as a search keyword. Saves me some time to type e.g. ”wk turtle” in the address bar instead of going through the front page or lazily searching via some third party search engine.
I use duckduckgo, and for the most part, you know what you are searching for so the !tags are really good. !w search term, just takes you right to wikipedea. When I really have no ideal what or where I'm looking for something, I still find myself looking on google a bit, but for the most part, !youtube, !arch, !git, !stack, get me exactly what I want about 99 percent of the time.
Which is complete fucking bullshit. It's driving me mental that when I search for something, Wikipedia usually isn't on the front page. It's almost always the best result for most things, it should be on top.
Wikipedia's search is totally inferior to google. It requires correct spelling within one or two edit distances and the SERP is far less informative. This is a common enough action that those seconds add up. If ddg wants to be competitive they need to fix this.
Google used to put the Wiki article right at the top of the results list. It virtually never does that anymore. This is what's bullshit.
The point of a good search engine is that it is supposed to conglomerate good results, relevant results - let's say I'm looking up 'Phillip J. Fry' from 'Futurama', but I still want wiki information. Wikipedia won't even spellcheck for you if you don't know how to spell something correctly, like a city name.
Wikipedia is not a search engine. Although, at this point, Google is barely one, so plastered with sponsored results it can be hard to find the result you're looking for, and with this change, I've finally made the long-needed jump to DuckDuckGo.
Yes, it's time to 'stop the fucking bullshit', and save all our mental states - searching Wiki isn't going to solve that - but not using Google can help. ;)
Comparing a search engine to wikipedia search is like comparing a search engine to a local file search.
If you're looking for a specific driver on your computer that you know the exact spelling and version number of, a local file search will help you find that. A search engine will return many results with download links as well as potentially other drivers, or other versions of drivers for your product - and will generally forgive you if you misspell something.
You are perhaps joking but that has been my tack for a while now. Having specific sites I use to search through. I used to web search the pick from the offerings presented, not caring what site it was so long as it had the information I needed. But now I really value a good website that respects UX and good, honest content with low commercial influence.
I think it's Google's work to deprioritize them on other search engines it is still showing up at first DDG gives it special treatment, by highlighting its summary, which is often what I'm looking for.
I noticed that as well over the years. Also, one thing that really drives me crazy is that Google is trying to steer me into using the german wikipedia, even though I am already explicitly searching for the english article name. I really prefer reading the english version for techie topics, no matter if there might be an article in my native language.
This is the sort of "smart" behaviour that really feels dumb.
The way Google defends its income stream against that is simple: They allow your competitors to buy ads on your own names and trademarks, then you're forced to do so as well because otherwise your organic link is below the ads. It used to be that it mattered since only dumb users would click the ads. But now that they're unshaded and look 99% identical, only super nerds bypass ads. Meaning your #1 organic result is basically only good for bragging rights and nothing more if there's anyone willing to pay even a small amount to jump up above you.
Wouldn’t having strong SEO incentive competition to buy ads? Of course it also incentives them to work on SEO, but the only way to ‘get above’ a top ranking site would be to buy an ad, no?
> It is not a requirement for AMP. CDNs now let you roll your own domains on the AMP standard
All these certificates do is make it so Google's browser (and only Google's browser) will mask the fact you're on Google's domains if you sign the file a certain way.
If anything, this shows more anti-competitive practices -- they're adding features into their browser that specifically benefit a features of their search engine.
You don't need lock-in to be anti-competitive. The requirement of extra work to implement AMP to get that higher search results page placement is the issue.
At which point pushing for new technologies as a private entity is anti-competitive vs moving technology forward?
If the criteria is just "needs extra work" then unfortunately almost nothing can change and we're all going to live with the existing technology. Change inherently has friction and requires "extra work" with the hope that's an investment which provides returns long term.
In other words, say you are a large Internet company that is trying to improve web page loading times. You profile why most web pages are slow and identify issues. You publicly report on those issues and develop guidelines and criteria. Nobody bothers because "extra work". You develop new technology that directly addresses those issues, this technology works within the existing environment but it requires both client and server support to be most effective. Do you think anyone cares? No, because of "extra work". That's why there needs to be incentives. Now you have a "penalty" for not doing that "extra work". You can file it under "it's anti-competitive" (maybe it is) but if you do the "extra work" then suddenly the anti-competitive part works for you, not against you. IMO that's why it's not anti-competitive.
Other examples: why do you think there are so many people that complained when iPhone released with Flash reader? "extra work". Similarly when it removed the audio jack. Change is friction and friction is extra work. But most of the time that's not anti-competitive...
Let me explain based on my 15 years of adtech experience:
HTML is already fast (see HN for an example). HTML is already universal across devices and browsers. HTML is already published and easily cached for billions of pieces of content.
AMP is a fork of HTML that only targets mobile browsers specifically linking from Google search results. It's useless on its own, but AMP is required to get higher placement on search results pages, so publishers are effectively forced to spend technical resources to output an entirely new format just to maintain that ranking.
If Google wanted faster pages then it can do what it always does and incentivize that behavior by ranking results based on loading speed. These signals are already collected and available in your Google webmaster console. There's nothing new to build, just tweak ranking calculation based on existing data. Sites would get faster overnight, and they would be faster for every single user because HTML is universal.
Do you know why they didn't do that? Because it's the ads and tracking that's slow, not the HTML. Google's Doubleclick and Google Analytics are the biggest adserver and tracking systems used on the web. This entire AMP project is created to circumvent their own slow systems. It creates more work for publishers while increasing data collection by running a "free" CDN that never leaves a Google-owned domain and thereby always supports first-party cookies. It's a perfect solution to protect against anti-tracking browsers and why Chrome now will also block 3rd-party cookies, because it won't affect AMP hosted on Google domains.
First party storage won't be affected without some major AI tech in browsers so cookies are still the best deterministic connection, especially since most people are logged into a Google service already (gmail, chrome, android, youtube, etc).
Probabilistic techniques are used for anonymous users or environments like iOS Safari that are very strict.
Then why are you searching on Google? That's where you would see an AMP page served from a Google AMP cache. If you searched on Bing, you would get AMP pages served from a Bing AMP cache instead.
AMP pages hosted by the publisher, Google's AMP cache, Bing's AMP cache, or some other company's AMP cache? GGP was complaining about sending any information to Google. Only one of those options does so.
It's not always faster. There are plenty of performance and usability issues with AMP pages, not to mention all the extra development effort needing to maintain a different version of the site just for a few mobile browsers.
The content is still served from their CDN regardless of the domain. There is no way to serve AMP sites from your own servers and appear in the search carousel among other AMP articles.
Google is strong-arming the entire web to switch to AMP in order to increase their control over the distribution of content, and to be in a better position for tracking users.
The fact that Microsoft and Cloudflare have joined the party does not change the fact that you're about to lose control over your own content if this is not stopped.
By "their CDN" I meant Google, Cloudflare and Microsoft. Can we set up our own CDN to serve our own content from our own servers and receive the AMP badge in search results?
Please disclose your affiliation to Google either in your bio or in comments, and don't post the same comment in multiple places.
> Can we set up our own CDN to serve our own content from our own servers and receive the AMP badge in search results
This...doesn't make sense. You lose the value of a CDN (both to you and to the consumer of your content, in this case Google and the end user) if you're rolling your own.
It no longer makes sense to be able serve our own content without it being pushed down in search results?
We were talking about CDNs because your collegue mentioned AMP CDNs, but the main point doesn't change: we cannot serve our own content from our own servers and get the same placement in search results as AMP content, even if our content loads verifiably fast and is as performant as an AMP page on the client.
> We were talking about CDNs because your collegue mentioned AMP CDNs
I have no clue who bdeurst is. They certainly aren't a colleague of mine.
> even if our content loads verifiably fast and is as performant as an AMP page on the client.
Can you explain to me how your page load time is 0ms? My understanding is that a correctly functioning AMP-cached page will load for the user in a whopping 0ms, because it can be preloaded.
The entire design of AMP starts from a fairly straightforward premise: "How do we reduce (user-visible) page load times to 0, safely, cross origin?" If your pages user-visible loading time is longer than 0, you're failing to keep up with AMP.
AMP pages are preloaded, that's how your get the 0ms load time. If Google would instruct the browser to preload other search results the same way, those would also be available in 0ms when the user accesses them.
I think the correct term I was looking for is prefetching. That's a secure way to tell the browser to start loading search result links in the background.
> That's a secure way to tell the browser to start loading search result links in the background
prefetching isn't private cross origin:
> Along with the referral and URL-following implications already mentioned above, prefetching will generally cause the cookies of the prefetched site to be accessed.[1]
IDK about you, but I'd generally prefer that my cookies and IP not be exposed to all of the links that happen to be in the first page of search results.
Browser specs can be improved, and new ones introduced. And even if safe prefetching is deemed technically impossible, the question remains: should we give Google and a handful of other companies disproportionate control over how we publish and consume content, for 50ms of load time?
> Browser specs can be improved, and new ones introduced.
Yes, for example Signed Exchanges, which on a technical level solves all of the problems of rel=prefetch (and a number of the problems with AMP, like link pasting and copying).
> Should we allow a handful of companies to be pinged every time we load a page on the web
I'm hopelessly confused here: you're only going to "ping" one of the handful of companies if you were referred by that company. (In a world with signed exchanges) You're not going to come across an AMP-cache link organically. You'll navigate to example.com directly, without anyone except example.com (and your DNS provider) knowing. The cache provider will only know if you navigate to the cached site via the cache provider. Concretely, you don't go to the Google amp-cache unless you're navigating there directly from Google's search results. Same for Microsoft/Bing.
So if your metric is
> Should we allow a handful of companies to be pinged every time we load a page on the web
Then yes, absolutely, because nothing changes!
Edit: To address your other question,
> should we give Google and a handful of other companies disproportionate control over how we publish and consume content, for 50ms of load time?
Alright: how is AMP materially different from <whatever other algorithmic choices rated search results before>?
You seem to be claiming that AMP is harmful to someone but who? It's not harmful to competitors or to end users, and its only harmful to developers if you make the most strained argument.
My premises here are that users actually prefer AMP results. You may not, but my understanding is that most users do. So from the perspective of an end user browsing the internet, AMP leads to an improved experience.
So it's good for users.
No one has yet been able to explain to me how its actually harmful to a web developer who now has an incentive to make AMP-compatible sites. Like sure, you now have to work with a framework you may not like, but that's not a compelling argument when people are claiming that AMP is a threat to the sanctity of the internet.
So it's not like bad for web developers, it's just sort of a lateral move.
That leaves competitors to the giants. But AMP is an open standard, and DDG could, if they wished, implement an AMP cache themselves today and it would just work. And they'd, if anything, benefit from the bigger players pushing that ecosystem. There's the potential for abuse via the caches.json registry, but the AMP project is aware of this and notes that the registry could be decentralized using Subresource Integrity or similar, if such a standard was adopted[1].
So again: I'm confused by how exactly it's bad, beyond the "I am forced to develop in a way I don't want to if I want to appear near the top of the search page", which isn't new.
I've actually removed that second question before I noticed your answer, because I knew you would then skip over the first one. Feel free to address the main point I was making in all my posts in this thread, whenever you feel ready.
> So if your metric is
Google being pinged obviously isn't my main metric, as you can see from all my posts in our discussion. My main concern is that publishers will be forced to use specific publishing mechanisms (AMP, Signed Exchanges) to appear at the top of Google Search results. That loss of control puts publishers in a vulnerable position, and hurts innovation across the web.
> Then yes, absolutely, because nothing changes!
Everything changes. Google's influence and control won't end at the moment the user navigates away to a top result on Google Search.
The signed exchanges protocol requires that the content be signed with a key with a short expiry date (< 1 week), sites are free to make it shorter. In extreme cases, the providing site could sign with an expiry of < 1 day or even something like 1 hour.
And iiuc, sites are still free to revoke their certs. So this is actually probably more secure compared to something like https in that regard.
I see what you're saying but im not sure that's a problem - how many people are building CDNs in their garages that need to be certified?
Also, everything I say on HN reflects my own opinion and not any organization, which is what my profile states. I do not hide behind an anonymous username precisely for this reason. Poisoning the well by doxxing me doesn't change how the AMP standard works for CDNs either, and only serves to derail the conversation.
>Everything I say on HN reflects my own opinion and not any organizations, which is what my profile states
Sorry, but I agree with dessant. Your profile doesn't disclose your affiliation and nor do your comments. It's absolutely relevant to the discussion, because whether you want to admit it or not (or try your best to act neutral), your day job will have some influence over your opinions on these sort of projects.
You're right that it doesn't change objective facts about the specification, but I think it's misleading to suggest that, in general, external third-party CDNs are first class citizens in the AMP ecosystem when they're not treated the same within search.
It seems faster for me across devices but there’s usability issues, at least on some sites/pages. In my experience “find on the page” is spotty or impossible on mobile sometimes.
Or even reader mode - I don't mind flashing the cruft for a few seconds while I turn it on, and it's the best of all worlds. The site gets their ads (briefly) loaded, and I get a clean page to read.
You either choose AMP and appear in the search carousel at the top of search results in the biggest search engine in the world. Or you choose not to implement AMP and you don't appear there.
I use StartPage which has the benefit of local results (but can be fully anonymous) but still uses Google search results.
DDG is a great alternative, but isn't for me.
And then there's Bing
...and at the end of the day, who is actually better out there, and that can prove that no data is leaking? Maybe running your own searx is the only option? (http://asciimoo.github.io/searx/)
Startpage person here ️. Maybe I can shed some light on this. Last year, Startpage announced an investment in Startpage by System1 through Privacy One Group, a wholly-owned subsidiary of System1. With this investment, we hope to further expand our privacy features & reach new users. Rest assured, the Startpage founders have control over the privacy components of Startpage (https://support.startpage.com/index.php?/Knowledgebase/Artic...).
Also, a couple of things that set Startpage apart from DDG: 1) We're HQ'ed in the Netherlands, ensuring all our users are protected by stringent Dutch & EU privacy laws, 2) we give you Google results without tracking, 3) with Anonymous View you can visit results in full privacy.
> Their destructive AMP service confusingly shows you Google's domain instead of the website's
No, it doesn't. It's actually served from Google's URL, but it (the AMP service) shows you the original site URL (well, it shows the domain by default but that's a button that expands to the URL if you click it.)
Your address bar shows you the Google URL, but that's not misleading, either, since what the address bar has always shown is what location content is being served from, not a content identifier distinct from the mechanics of content distribution.
> they can't fix that without losing out on tracking
Nah, they could track of they worked like a classic CDN
I mean, I generally get the gist of what you are saying, but you are saying "no, you're confused, it's not misleading..." It's kind of like saying "no, you don't have hypochondria, it's all in your head!"
Yeah for a long while I felt like an idiosyncratic person for using it and it did feel like a minor sacrifice. Nowadays it really does seem like a competitive platform on quality. Slightly less good at parsing the semantics, but much better at actually showing me search results instead of ads.
I hate to be that guy, but have you considered moving to another search engine? For example, DuckDuckGo is very decent once you adapt to it. And for the few cases where you absolutely need Google to read your mind, just add "!g" to your query and you're automatically there.
The thing which I use Google most for is typing some random place’s name in and it gives me that little card which shows how busy it typically is, what time it’s open, directions, contact number, etc. DDG just gives me a search result and 90% of the time that’s not what I want. I’m looking for information, not a list of URLs.
It's funny to think that, of all the products Google kills on the regular, the one thing most everyone wants them to be done with (AMP) is probably gonna stick around forever.
> I've been in this A/B test for a couple of months now, so I've had time to adjust, and I still hate it.
I have been trying to switch from google to duckduckgo for years but its only the past few months that I have been successful and I have google to thank for that.
Google is satanic.
They a mirror of the Soviet Union. Google also works with 3rd party websites to blacklist IP addresses so you can never post on a forum . And people always say you get blacklisted because you spam. I think that's bull crap . I think people get blacklisted for their political beliefs.
Just saying IMO Google isn't ruining the internet. Of course every decision being scrutinized they can't have a perfect record. They have a search engine that due to it's popularity is the target of all kinds of stats gaming and optimizing, While at the same time trying to grow a profitable product. So it's not like there are simple solutions or easy quips like Google Ruined the Internet. It sounds like a lazy argument.
So, they helped make the web a far easier place to look around on things for a few decades and one layout change and you call them that they ruined the web?
Google gave us a lot, but that does not mean they should not be criticized. Without emotion I can say that using Google is far worse today than it was in the early 2000s. Besides delivering the results in a much more readable format, at that time we were able to search specifically in forums and there were a lot of advanced features like "linkto:" that are not supported anymore.
The problem I see is that Google does not care about us Geeks anymore. They are 100% focused on consumers now, and that sucks a lot.
Google has done away with most of its original competitive advantages. Its biggest advantages now are its name recognition and its size. If Google had started off with paid search results and what-you-search-for-is-not-what-you-get we'd probably all still be using Altavista.
that's a rather simplistic and faulty argument. there are plenty of things wrong with "lure and then abuse" scenarios, and it isn't really an argument at all to say "but look at all the good the lure phase did".
It's the intended side-effect. For the longest time ever AMP wouldn't even acknowledge it's a problem (oh, we just provide the standard, it's the browsers' fault).
Then Google relented and provided a non-solution in the form of an obscure bar on top of AMP pages (in which the link to the original page is deliberately designed to not look like a link).
The signed exchanges is a bone thrown towards standards committees after all the damage has already been done.
And the "solution" has been directly called by Mozilla harmful, they are not going to implement it. Safari shares Mozilla's concern.
Is any site using this? It requires a special certificate and signing your content (which admittedly Cloudflare will take care of for you) but even then it’s only for Chrome and Firefox and Apple have said they won’t support it. Over a year after announcing it I’ve yet to find a single site that does this.
> and as they can't fix that without losing out on tracking
Tracking what users click to as the result of a search is critical feedback information for training your models/algorithms, it's not just about "hey let's see where this user goes to fine tune ad targeting for them". And, AFAIK, every search engine out there does it(?)
They can track it with a simple js onclick handler, or a simple redirect on their server, that's not the problem. (They do both btw.) The problem is that they want to track what I do on the links I already clicked - which is absolutely none of their business.
Just search in a private window then, the part of the tracking that I assume you find objectionable (gathering info on what sites the current user visits) goes away when you close the window while the part that helps the search engine (and thus results in better search results for everyone) still works.
Now sure, we can argue that maybe the company should provide options where you can say "you can use what I click on for search training but not for targeted advertising" (I think Google does provide a set of options that pretty much disable all web history/targeted ad collection), assuming you believe they follow through. But the company needs to pay for its services somehow so I can't blame them for tying the two types of tracking together, I still have tools as a user (private window) to avoid it if I care enough to.
> This is part of Google's attempt to de-prioritise the URL.
URLs have always been an implementation detail and not a user feature. From the very beginning it was intended that users would follow links, not type in URLs. HTML was built on hiding URLs behind text. Then AOL keywords happened. Then search explosion happened. And short URLs. And QR codes for real-world linking. And bookmarks because yet again typing in URLs is not a major driving use case.
Typing in un-obfuscated URLs has almost never been a key feature or use-case of the web. If anything URL obfuscation is a core building block of the web and is a huge reason _why_ the web skyrocketed in popularity & usage. Don't pretend that somehow AMP obfuscating URLs will be the death of the web. The web exploded in growth despite massive, wide-spread URL obfuscation over the last 20 years. Nothing is actually changing here.
Well then don't use AMP? It's your domain, it's under your control. You at least have a choice here, whereas you can't block most other forms of URL obfuscation when being linked elsewhere.
Google is deprioritizing sites without amp in search to force them to use it.
So, if I search for something on reddit, I already learned to use duck duck go. Cause then I don't have to edit url to get rid of amp part not scroll up and down for that link.
Isn't google already the front door to everyone's website? Are the amp URLS really crazy? If you have a .com address is that roughly the URL in search results?
Your link is being shared from Google's search results and their application, so you might not like it but they have every right to control how it's displayed. Is it difficult to accept traffic from an AMP link? Are there technical downsides besides being called a name you don't want?
The "web" is built around "human readable" technologies. Even actual implementation details that the user doesn't care about - like the application layer protocol (HTTP) and the source code for pages (HTML, CSS) - is human readable.
The "point" of the web was to serve humans, not machines. If we wanted to serve machines, we'd just throw binary blobs around, which would be orders of magnitude more efficient.
That said, I still have a bunch of "ancient" tech magazines that had directories of URLs for (then) popular websites, grouped by category. That's how we found things then.
People forget that there was a world before Google.
> From the very beginning it was intended that users would follow links, not type in URLs.
so, about that
4.6 Locators are human transcribable.
Users can copy Internet locators from one medium to another (such as
voice to paper, or paper to keyboard) without loss or corruption of
information. This process is not required to be comfortable.
you can't copy a page title into a client and expect it to find the right resource, now, do you?
accessing the URL is listed as one of the fundamental use case for them, and for good reasons, detailed elsewhere in the same rfc
I agree with most this... but have somewhat of a counter point to "you can't copy a page title".
You (often) can copy a page title into a client (Google) and expect it to find the right resource. This is usually done with articles, etc.
Even your comment provides a perfect example - you didn't link to RFC 1736, but the text "Locators are human transcribable" is unique enough that the first Google result is correct.
So you didn't have to provide a URL to lead someone to this page, just 'enough' unique text for it to be findable.
Which is kind of amazing - and maybe not what the original RFC intended.
none of the result here are pointer to the source I've used
sure the content is the same, but the resource isn't, if anything this demonstrates how easy is to misled a user, directing him on a different resource thinking it's the same.
luckily prominent sites get pushed on top of the result queue (had to cut it because it was submersed by advertisement) but the attack vector is evident.
Because web browsers default "home screen" has a large text box by default. People think that's where the address goes, but not really, that's actually a web page which does search.
Shame on us for designing it that way.
But on another note, it will be the day when your mother (or anyone else for that matter) types in 'www.walmart.com' and actually goes to 'www.target.com' (names taken from other examples that I've seen on Twitter).
Maybe Firefox should change the default screen from containing search to containing the address bar instead. That way if you type in a proper URL there it should go directly to it rather than doing a search.
URLs have always meant something to users. It’s how you trust the content and indeed the link. And now with so many exploits and phishing it’s even more important. Typing in a URL might be rarer, an honour only reserved for google, facebook etc. but reading urls is very important
Let's distinguish between obfuscating the query parameters, the the path, and the domain. They are different things, and the domain name especially is a major security boundary.
Most of what I mentioned did obfuscate the domain name. Users do not care about domain name security boundaries - that's yet again an implementation detail. An important one, but still not something most users recognize or care about. Hence, you know, why phishing is so successful.
Users used to care about paths and other descriptors. A decade ago, we were fighting for human readable resource locators. However, users have been taught progressively to ignore them as too complex. (Just the same as it happened for any advanced, but user accessible browser controls.) Why is it that 25 years into web usage, any controlled access is deemed too complicated? (Mind that other technologies were already approaching the end of their lifespan at a similar age. The web is neither new nor disruptive anymore.)
Why is it that 25 years into web usage, any controlled access is deemed too complicated?
Two words: corporate greed. It's so much easier to persuade and herd them to where they can be "monetised" when they don't know how things work, nor can't figure out how and where to learn.
Somehow the knowledge industry has turned into dumbing down as a business. There's a TV ad for a smart speaker integrated car, showing a hip, but managerial type man downloading the route to his workplace to his car by a voice command from home and subsequently happily arriving at work. – How do you manage to make a living, if you can't memorize you daily drive from home to work? How is this a product? Has augmentation of human intellect turned into a zero-sum game?
This is categorically wrong. URL is the fundamental part of the web and without it, the Internet couldn't be decentralized. Imagine if I must reach tweeter by typing "tweeter" somewhere then that somewhere now becomes the gatekeeper. The URL allows distributed gatekeepers. A mechanism with a distributed structure will need something like URL infrastructure.
You're talking about writing URLs as if that's the only purpose they serve. You also read URLs.
Same as I'm not going to type a long path to a file on my file browser or CLI, I'm not going to type the full, character-by-character URL. But being able to see the path also provides extremely useful information.
Sidenote: your comment gets downvoted,huh. Though I don't agree with you I'm happy to see someone with opposite arguments. Have an upvote as you contributing greatly to this conversation.
It's funny, because if you run AdSense on your website, Google has very strict guidelines about not misleading users and making a clear distinction between advertisements and your content. However, when Google shows ads on their site, they don't need to follow those rules, they blend them in as closely as possible.
Also, what's the deal with showing an advertisement for the same result that's number one? See the below screenshot.
Doesn't this seem wrong? For a lot of people, Google has become a site to not only search the internet, but to simply navigate it. It's normal for someone wanting to visit Expedia to search "expedia.com" or "expedia". They are trying to navigate to that website, Expedia is the first organic result, and yet Expedia is pressured into paying for an advertisement to prevent one of their competitors from appearing first. Even when a competitor hasn't advertised, they're still stuck paying like the above screenshot. To me, this feels inappropriate. Google is getting a hefty payday by simply redirecting someone searching for "expedia.com" to the Expedia website.
They display both because Google is selling ad space on searches like these, where people search the name of a site. If that site doesn't buy the ad, their competitor will. So sites are being forced to buy ads on their own trademark.
I understand why it's happening and I mentioned it in my comment. However, I just find it incredibly inappropriate that...
1. When I search an exact domain Google will take money from a competitor and show their "advertisement" first. I say that in quotations, because it looks like they're showing a search result, not an advertisement. At this point it feels like companies are paying for their search placement. Pay enough money and you can be the first result for any search term.
2. Does Google give Expedia the option to not pay for an advertisement when there is no competition? I don't think so, and in the example I posted, Google has basically scared Expedia into outbidding no one.
The whole thing feels like extortion. Pay us money or we'll send people trying to navigate to your website to one of your competitors.
Your statement has unquantified "enough, "many" and unqualified "in fact". It also completely misses the point - it is the proportion of unethical decision makers that matters. Not the absolute numbers.
I aggree with your point #1, if you search for an specific term / domain it should always appear first if there's a direct match.
but for #2 there's a pro-competition argument here. If you search for Expedia and all you ever get is Expedia and expedia pages underneath that, in theory that's good. But what if you don't know about other online travel sites? You'll never see them, so it kind of makes sense that you are shown other sites in there.
Google should recognise that a search for Expedia is either:
a) For Expedia
b) For a travel holiday
and let other competitors rank for b), showing Expedia as the biggest and main CTA on the page.
so it kind of makes sense that you are shown other sites in there
Why? If I search for a specific thing (Expedia), why would Google assume I want to see other options that I did not ask for other than "it's more profitable for Google"? More specifically, in the event I want other options, why is the correct answer "you want to see the other options that are paying Google the most"? That's not "pro-competition", that's "pro-Google".
Google should recognise that a search for Expedia is either: a) For Expedia b) For a travel holiday
Why, short of mind reading (I assume they're working on it, but it's not in the 10Q), should Google ever assume B?
What about generic or almost generic trademarks? If I search for something like bandaid I am certainly _not_ expecting Google to rank Johnson and Johnson (the owner of the trademark for bandaid) above other potentially more relevant results.
And the same applies to other terms like Kleenex, Ziploc, aspirin, etc.
> But what if you don't know about other online travel sites? You'll never see them, so it kind of makes sense that you are shown other sites in there.
I don't think that makes sense. Or, at least, such results should be below all the actually relevant results.
If I'm searching for Expedia, then what I want is results about Expedia. Nothing else. If I want to know about other travel sites, I'd be searching for "travel sites" instead.
And if you don't know the name for the generic product to search for?
Jacuzzi, styrofoam, and Super Glue are all brand specific trademarked items[0], but I doubt most users care about that when they're searching for those terms.
To play devil's advocate, these kind of brand ads are usually very cheap and frequently generate some incrementality - you're basically paying to have your links take over a larger part of page 1. Even if competitors weren't going to advertise, it might be worth it.
Similarly with GTLDs. Many companies have to register their own .sucks so someone else doesn't stand a website up there. What a pointless waste of money.
If customers searching for your brand are happy to buy from your competitor with a different name, maybe your brand isn't so strong?
And if you are profiting from advertising your brand to people who don't choose your product over alternatives, isn't your marketing just "stealing" purchases from competitors?
Yeah, that's not how it is working right now. It's more like:
User: "Google, how do I get to Costco?"
Google: "Here are directions to Target."
User:"But I asked for directions to Costco."
Google: "Target gave us a lot of money. So, firstly here are directions to Target. If you still want Costco, keep scrolling, but Target is great. You should shop here."
When you literally search for one brand and the first result is a competitor, just because they bought out the ad space for your brand name's keywords, that is theft, imo. Or extortion if you'd prefer. It's at the very least, extremely disingenuous and sleazy. Customer loyalty is looking up the preferred brand to begin with.
Two stores, A and B are competitors. I visit company A and say that I'll stand at the entrance of their competitor, store B. I'll tell each customer trying to enter store B about store A and attempt to refer them, as long as store A pays me $0.50 for each person I try to send their way.
This works, some people that drove to visit store B now go to store A instead. Now, store B is getting annoyed at me "stealing" their customers, but I have a solution. I tell store B the more money they pay me, the less likely it is that I'll refer their next customer to store A. So, store B starts paying me $1.00 each time someone tries to enter their own store, and in return, I do nothing but stand there.
A year goes by and I'm standing at the entrance of every store in the country. I collect a dollar when someone tries to enter every store, and I do nothing but let them pass.
That's naive way of looking at things. Do you know how many brands and trademarks exist in the world? It's over 40 million! Do you know how many brands easily gets mixed up with normal English? When someone searches for best buy, do they always want to go to best buy store? When I type subway, do I want a sandwich shop or subway station? Doing things at scale is very different. And you can't be unfair to small brands while only taking care of big brands. While I understand your issue, there is no clear cut solution here.
To be fair, they don’t do that on Google Maps. However they will push their own Google Flights service when searching for United. Eg “Book United” redirection to Google Flight.
If I promise to give you a truthful answer to a question you ask, "What's 2+2?", and then I say, "5" (because math teachers pay me to give that answer), the same argument could be made.
Why do I owe you a fulfilled promise? Because I said I'd be honest? Why do I owe you honesty about my honesty?
Reductio ad absurdum
If I build a search engine and promise that it will give accurate and honest results to your search queries, and then it doesn't do that... why do I owe you? "I didn't force you to trust me" is the most childish way to try and weasel out of broken promises there is.
To answer your question though - they don't, but it makes them a shitty company to lie to/manipulate their users.
It's lying insofar as grocery stores having two brands of chips on an endcap that you see first before you get to the actual aisle with the other 30 brands is lying.
More like specifically asking a clerk where the Lays Salt & Vinegar chips, and they walk you to the chip aisle and respond with "Here are the Doritos", but sure...
Except this store only makes money on showing you where the chips are and not on the sales so if they can't show you the Doritos first, there's no store and no chips of any kind. If that's what you'd prefer, then pretend the store doesn't exist and go to a different one.
That's not the only way they make money though. Even if it was the only way they make money, giving accurate results in those cases is the cost of keeping your users for cases you can serve them ads that are relevant. The only reason they got big was their accurate results so it is a shitty thing to do.
Google owes mostly-unbiased accuracy to the internet at large. They built their brand and reputation on that. It should not be possible to purchase a shortcut on the accuracy, especially someone else's.
It doesn't owe anyone anything. It trades this unbiased accuracy for eyeballs on its advertising, the same advertising that many folks in this comment section are condemning. Without the advertising, Google doesn't owe anyone anything. It's not a charity.
Its a sad world you live in where businesses don't owe you to behave ethically.
You'll probably figure out at some point that they do, and that this whole law thing is a proxy for ethics we put in place so that we can punish people that don't.
Google shouldn’t be a purveyor of brand quality in the case where the user has made an explicit request. If a user types in “shoes” should they 100% get shoes.com as the first result? Of course not. But Expedia? It feels wrong not to make that the first result.
Expedia is indeed the first result for "Expedia", after the 0-2 slots of advertising that may or may not be Expedia. If Google can't monetize the search results page, why are they obligated to provide the search results in the first place? Until Google recoups the costs by showing ads, the relationship between Expedia and Google is one sided: Google provides a lot of traffic to Expedia with nothing in return. How is that fair?
It doesn't. And I totally understand from a business point of view why they do what they do. This is an unfortunate side effect of the monopoly they have on web search, which due to network effects and aggregation is unlikely to go away.
The only real solution is to regulate this to make competition fairer again.
I can't speak for the OP, but in our situation, the customer doesn't realize they are buying from a competitor. We regularly get support requests from customers we can't find an order history for. It's almost always the case that they ordered from someone else thinking they were ordering from us. They searched our name, clicked the first result, and placed the order.
We've even seen this happen with repeat customers of ours. It's tough since Google allows the ads to be very confusing, but then we also have competitors who have blatantly copied our style, content, and have even named themselves in a similar manner.
We also spend just under five figures a month on branded keywords to combat this. We rank #1 organically for all of them, but there are always 3-4 competitors bidding on them so we only get a small portion of that traffic if we don't pay for those keywords and get the #1 paid spot as well.
Even with that in place people will still get duped and click ad #2, #3, or #4 that go to competitor sites.
It's absolutely extortion, but it's cheaper for Expedia to buy than a competitor due to Google's auction rules.
Essentially, the bid to be #1 is discounted by the click-through rate. If 90% of people who search "expedia.com" will click an ad for Expedia, and only 10% of people who search "expedia.com" will click an ad for travelsite.com, travelsite.com has to pay 10x what Expedia does to make up for the lost revenue.
Does this create an opportunity for 'number one' sites to band together and create a competing search engine?
Would it be possible to fund a search engine startup by selling shares to all of those sites who now have to pay to stay at the top? In the long run, it should be cheaper to fund a competitor.
I'm not sure regulators would look kindly on an pan-industry cartel explicitly designed to suppress smaller business from appearing in the marketplace.
To me (which may well be a minority view) that actually makes it feel less official, because "/Expedia/Official_Site" is the sort of tactic a scammer would use.
I'd worry about it having the unintended consequence of building people's trust in something like "/Official_Site" vs focusing on the domain name. At the very least it's muddying the waters in this respect.
Scammers use the messaging of legit companies, and vice versa, because by assumption consumers can't tell the difference and companies use the most effective messaging they know.
You do you, but (1) you aren't moving anyone's needle on revenue or expenses, and (2) you're using the search engine for its main business proposition and then circumventing the compensation model, so you are not being ethical either. You could use another engine or spend some money to compensate the search provider.
> and then circumventing the compensation model
> spend some money to compensate the search provider
what?
Wait so you're saying everyone owes it to Google to click the ads? How much? Always? Sometimes?
Does this mean that if you go to the movies you are literally obligated to buy popcorn and soda? I agree with you that if no one clicked ads then Google wouldn't "be able to operate it" for free. But I think that like any business they operate in the aggregate. Some people make you money, some don't. In Google's case, everyone I have ever watched click ads 100% of the time so I don't think they're hurting.
And also, I think if everyone stopped clicking ads and Google was forced to just charge users say $12 a month for search as an informational service with zero ads, I would gladly pay it. And the Internet and the world would be a LOT better.
Is it plausible they've created a Church/State style separation between the Ads and Results? Seems like that would be desirable in a lot of cases, though perhaps not in cases when someone is Googling for something with an obvious first result
This amounts to racketeering. Given Google’s power. If you want to find a particular brand name, that brand name has to pay up for the ad space or their competitors will take it, and either way, Google makes money.
Fully agreed - and the necessity for the client here can't be overstated: was doing some research into nearby apartment buildings and searching the exact name of the building I was looking for returned an ad with their neighboring competitor as the top result, above the site of the building I was looking for.
It's a little confusing to read now, so for context: at the time Google published this, it only put ads in the sidebar to the right of search results. This post was written to criticize the practice of putting ads atop search results, which competitors sometimes formatted almost indistinguishably from organic search results.
This bit from the 1998 paper by young researchers Brin and Page, in which they introduce a novel search engine called 'google,' is also fun and instructive:
"It is clear that a search engine which was taking money for showing cellular phone ads would have difficulty justifying the page that our system returned to its paying advertisers. For this type of reason and historical experience with other media [Bagdikian 83], we expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers."
The post was written to criticize "paid placement" search engines like Goto.com/Overture (see https://www.searchenginewatch.com/2002/03/04/how-overture-go... for details). I believe Google has put ads above search results for as long as AdWords has existed (since 2000).
No, at the very beginning, Google only had the ads in little yellow boxes over to the right. They were very distinct. Then they started putting ads above the search results, but they still had a yellow background. Then they got rid of the background, but the results were still fairly visually distinct from the ads, and there would only be one or two ads above the search results. Now they just put this tiny little box that says "Ad" next to the ad, and they're no longer easily visually separable from search results. Also, very often the first screenful of results is entirely ads. The overall experience has massively degraded.
The other thing I've noticed is that more and more of the top results are from garbage content farms. Filtering this kind of crap out was the original reason Google existed and everyone switched to them, but they're failing at it now. IMO Google is overripe to be replaced with something better.
I have also observed people totally ignoring the top link and clicking a lower one even on searches where the top link was not an ad and was the correct page.
They don't show full URL, and a few times when I clicked on "correct" link I got to a shitty landing which I could not escape. Of course most of the blame is on shitty website design, but still I want to see where the link actually goes to because most of the times for me it's confusing.
“For example, entering the query "buy domain" into the search box on Google’s home page produces search results and an AdWords text advertisement that appears to the RIGHT of Google’s search results” [1]
It is from October, 2000. It is so ancient, it is even before Schmidt happened. I don’t believe anything preceded that, but to be sure we’ll have to wait for Larry to chime in and clarify.
> Google’s quick-loading AdWords text ads appear to the right of the Google search results and are highlighted as sponsored links, clearly separate from the search results. Google’s premium sponsorship ads will continue to appear at the top of the search results page.
Vendors pay for placement throughout google's interface and search results, even if the 'list' of links is still 'organic'. For example, the placement of buy links for movies, flights, hotels, etc. Now with instant articles, google places content higher if it allows google to track and advertise within the article.
I searched for "google search advertisement" in the period 2000 to 2005, looking for screenshots of how Google ads have changed in style and placement over the years. Turns out the first result was this page... oh, the irony.
The google books link appears to have died: "You have either reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing limit for this book"
(I'm fairly certain that I have not viewed anything from this book, nor any book for that matter, this year.)
With each AdWords display change, Google's been adding billions of dollars to their revenue by confusing and fooling their users and blurring the line between the content and ads.
For branded keywords, it's not just shady, it's racketeering. You wouldn't want your competitor to show up first when someone searches for your brand, would you? Then pay up.
This is a tricky proposition. Google has free speech rights to display whatever they want on their own server pages. These aren't statements of fact so it's not falling under libel & co.
It's like saying that you want to regulate what can advertising companies display on billboards, ex. they cannot display competitor's ads nearby your company's offices. Since the billboard space is private and owned by the ad company (similarly to the ad space on Google servers served pages), they get too decide to put there whatever they want (barring free speech limiting regulations).
The difference being that you pay magnitudes less for your branded keywords than the competition, through the quality score. Allowing companies to advertise against their peers is actually creating more competition on the marketplace (which is a good thing).
Edit: Disclosure - I work at Google but this is my own opinion on multi-sided markets
You're right, edited my comment to be more clear that this is my opinion only. I don't use an anonymous username on HN because, as you saw in my profile before searching me, everything I say reflects my opinion only.
more competition is not synonymous with good, it is a thing that can have good effects or bad.
If for example changes to the marketplace makes it harder to determine who is a fraud and who is not or simply making it difficult to determine the quality of products, competition between the companies with the quality products and fraudsters may increase and that would be a bad thing.
A little while back I started experimenting with changing the user agent string and found that there are actually many different variations of Google’s search UI that are currently accessible. For example, I was surprised to find that by setting the user agent string to Netscape Navigator 4, I could get a lightweight, no-JS version of Google that looked like it was from the early 2000’s. By using a user agent string from IE6/IE9, I could get a version of Google they looked like it was from around 2010 (the former with a simple white navigation bar, and the latter with a more complex black navigation bar). I found it interesting that these UIs seems to be almost frozen in time: many of their navigation bars contain some outdated links that either redirect or 404. I assume this mean that old browser versions are stuck in time in terms of Google search UI also.
Many of these UIs don’t have the controversial changes that Google has recently been implementing, including adding favicons and hiding full URLs.
I also found that there were several different mobile UIs for Google with different navigation schemes and search box styles.
I implemented what I found in a simple Firefox extension that changes the user agent string for Google searches [1].
Crazy. User agent strings are such a broken concept where every browser pretends to be another. How anyone is still attempting to use them to do anything useful is beyond me.
If you a building a webapp, use feature detection not user agent strings.
I agree with that advice for most sites, especially SPA's, 100%.
But Google search has some weirdly specific requirements. It needs to know if it can show a result that required a polyfill mere ms after it gets your request, for example, or if it would be better to just send less bytes and a scaled down version of the same result that might need different data to assemble. It's not perfect but a UA string is one of the only practical ways to do this. Having qa and engineers to keep track of this mapping for the most commonly used browsers may make sense for search to shave off a bunch of time shipping js and doing feature detection to figure out what it needs next, but may not make sense for your website.
In general there are no blanket general guidelines that apply to every single site regardless of usage patterns or business needs.
Disclaimer: Former web search eng, current Googler.
Many of these UIs don’t have the controversial changes that Google has recently been implementing, including adding favicons and hiding full URLs.
I used the UA workaround up until near the end of last year, when they broke it and instead replaced with an even more dumbed-down mobile UI. (If you know of a UA which can still "unlock" the old JS-less full-featured UI, please say so!)
I just realized that most of these UIs unfortunately redirect to a simplified mobile UI. Thanks to those who pointed this out in the comments; after Google had left the UIs in-place for 15+ years, I wasn’t expecting them to remove in the few months since I put together this extension. I’ll look into seeing if there are any user agent strings that still work in the future.
I did a little testing, and found that Google Images still uses the old UI with these user agent strings.
I also found another, even simpler mobile UI available with this user agent string, though results seem to be sent through a mobile-formatting proxy operated by Google:
Mozilla/5.0 (PlayBook; U; RIM Tablet OS 2.1.0; en-US) AppleWebKit/536.2+ (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/7.2.1.0 Safari/536.2+
Your post got me excited, sadly it doesnt work :( I installed "User-Agent Switcher for Chrome" and played with strings from this extension. Even verified in dev console "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1)" was being send, cookies/localstorage deleted. At best what I was able to get is "Second Alternate Mobile UI". I was really hoping for "Last-gen, Black Bar", but it seems unattainable :(
Very much a way to mitigate the FTC's requirements on making advertising more distinct than organic results.
It is an unpopular opinion but I believe Google is dying. They have been for a long time. The cancer is that nothing other than search ads generates the revenue and margins they need and the margins on search ads are now down 90% from where they were in 2010.
Personally I'm long on Microsoft/Bing as a candidate for the surviving English language web index. My prediction (which isn't shared by many so don't be surprised if you disagree :-)) is that once Google's dying becomes mainstream and they start heading into ground that Apple will buy their assets, keep Maps, Search, and maybe Waymo and throw the rest away.
They're just turning the big dial that squeezes more money out of every user. They resisted for so long, but now they can't grow YoY without turning it. It's a one-way dial too, you can never turn it back.
Yahoo did this, most easily seen back on Yahoo Messenger, where I believe they fit an ad in 6 point type between two elements.
I've seen it at plenty of places that does revenue based A/B testing. You do an A/B test, measuring $ vs User retention. Money goes up, and retention maybe is affected, but over a few weeks, it looks like its the same. So you go on to the next test. Eventually, you find you have to do drastic measures to stop bleeding money. I wish I could say how long you need to measure retention for, but its probably too long for the test to make sense.
You're not the only one. It seems like G itself thinks that, hence all the desperate attempts to diversify - which I see as an attempt to parley a short-term cash and talent surplus into something, anything, that will have value in the long run.
It will be interesting to see what a desperate Goog might do with access to everyone's email, calendars, and docs.
To be honest I’m not sure what everyone else is searching for on Google the search engine anymore. I personally use it as a Wikipedia search engine in 90% of the cases while 9% is for stackoverflow queries, other than that I get all the info I’m interested in from dedicated FB groups and different sub-reddits.
And I’m also a 40-year old guy, from what I can see at people younger than me they spend almost all their web-related time on Facebook properties: Instagram, WhatsApp groups, Facebook private groups (FB the main app is also dying), with TikTok coming strong from behind. All of these are places where Google Search doesn’t have any reach. So one could say that the 2011 mantra “all arrows behind the same big arrow” (or whatever it was) was quite correct, Google+ was Google the company’s major chance of still remaining relevant in 10 or 15 years’ time. They still have YT, too bad they don’t know how to manage it.
Huh, I've just realised I'm much the same. Google is used by me primarily for (and in this order in decreasing proportion): Wikipedia search, Stackoverflow search, company name search, medical related search, current event search (sports scores, election results), (smallest minority of the time) other random queries.
Everything else I get from HN, Reddit, FB, etc.
The instant google results are the vast majority of the time taken from wikipedia. Sports scores and election results are taken from other sites that Google has started top present quite nicely, but that I could easily get elsewhere. Company name searching is basically just using Maps indirectly.
Google as a raw search query product is dying. A competitor could probably service 90%+ of queries just by being great at serving instant result previews at the top for a set of the most popular data (mass-media, wikipedia, local maps).
I use ddg as my default search and try !g when I'm not finding something, and it's rare that I find something on google that I couldn't find elsewhere.
Usually I find success when it's extremely niche results (usually rare error messages) that have only a few hits on google on some random forum that the other crawlers just didn't index.
For anyone reading this thinking "what a killer feature I need to switch to DDG now". All browsers do this natively now. In Chromium engines it's found under "Manage Search Engine". In Firefox it's under "One Click Search Engine".
My Firefox install has seven search engines by default in the "one-click search engine" options. By contrast, DuckDuckGo has 13000 bang shortcuts. Sure, you don't need all of them, but I use dozens: some of them almost daily (like !w for Wikipedia and !wt for Wiktionary), some sporadically (like !tw for Twitter or !a for Amazon) and some of them only rarely (e.g. I picked up a Pokémon game recently and consequently have used !bulba to quickly search Bulbapedia, a Pokémon fan wiki.) Of course I can add all those to Firefox, but DuckDuckGo already has them set up, and has many more that I can use without thinking about them. I think that still counts as a killer feature.
Firefox is a little lacking in that department. Chromium based browsers on the other hand, anytime a search is used on a page, that gets added to the list in your browser's options.
For example, just used HN's search bar, and there it showed up in the options ready to customise keywords to my liking (if I wanted to change it).
Before anybody claims it's an additional step, it's not. DDG requires you to know what the keyword is before you use it, which is the same as having to use the search on the site before. So I guess I agree it's a killer feature if you exclusively use Firefox for the time being.
The point of bang is that I don't have to setup anything. And it's pretty exhaustive I often use !gten, !gtfr or !gtes to specify the target language for Google translate.
I'm glad I don't have to setup all this by myself, every time I change browser.
I also do this with several other sites that I commonly use. In doing this, I've dramatically reduced the number of times I use a general purpose search engine in a day.
Just looked at my browser history and looks like I roughly performed 110 searches during past 24 hours and that's probably because I'm having bit slow day. Vast majority of searches were in fact work related (research papers, deep learning, coding, python, pytorch etc). I can't speak for others but I feel ultra-accelerated because of tools like Google. The knowledge hunting would be approximately 3-5 orders of magnitude slower otherwise.
Thank the heavens it's not. Imagine a company controlling the most accessed information aggregation website in the world and trying to make it return a profit.
Based off these dark patterns, the penny pinching at Google is real. A company that is penny pinching -- both by spending less on employees, and nickeling/diming customers -- is a sure sign they're struggling to grow. When you to get to be Google's size, how do you continue the growth trajectory of your past? It gets harder and harder to do so. Their offers to engineers are less competitive, YouTube serves tons of ads, and Chrome is going to ban uBlock It's obvious where Google is at: strict monetization. They don't see any further growth, or they wouldn't be degrading their services.
i presume he means the increase in the traffic acquisition costs like the $12billion (!!) they pay Apple to remain the default search engine in Safari.
i always found this baffling business logic from Google. i think Google is a strong enough brand that a lot of people would switch to it if it wasn't the default. maybe not everyone would switch but not worth $12 billion a year
The quarterly financial statements, and a knowledge of how Google accounting works[1]. Revenue from ads is correlated to CPC (cost per click), ad inventory is correlated to ads on Google sites vs ads on "other" sites, and margin pressure is correlated with operational expenses and traffic acquisition costs. The fuzziest number to model is the ad inventory and relies on estimates of search traffic, ads serviced, and reported revenue and CPC.
[1] I worked there and paid attention at their 'life of a dollar' class they used to give Nooglers. :-)
Google’s biggest opportunity is Cloud. They’re playing catch up but with the culture and staff they have, that’s where I’d be focussing my efforts. I think the 2020s will be the biggest decade for cloud adoption.
I don't think it is. Their hard-earned reputation for canceling services is really hurting them now. They never accounted for the effect of all the users they've been continually pissing off moving up in the ranks in companies and deciding never to use Google services. The leaked communication that suggests that they could actually cancel GCP doomed any chance that that would be a big player next to AWS and Azure.
>The leaked communication that suggests that they could actually cancel GCP...
People need to stop coupling their applications to cloud services for this very reason! It really bothers me that people architect their systems tightly coupled to AWS - Amazon LOVES it, of course, because this is the kind of vendor lock-in that Oracle could only dream about. (Amazon's vendor lock in is strictly superior because it is at runtime. I don't think Oracle ever had that power.)
Its incredible that so many companies have embraced AWS so completely, never giving thought to the the fact that they are giving Bezos total power over their technology investments. The sunk costs are only going to snowball, and AWS can and will raise prices almost arbitrarily, because opting out of AWS will mean a rewrite, which is some multiple of those sunk costs. That is, a company has to recapitulate ALL the money they paid to build software ALL AT ONCE. This is an existential threat to all small businesses, and an easy "just pay extra" grumble for medium and big businesses. Again, great for Amazon, bad for everyone else.
Google can and should get in cloud by pushing cross-cloud technology that lets companies have their cake and eat it too: cloud-hosted auto-scaling applications, AND the ability to pick a new cloud vendor without a rewrite. I suspect K8s is a good push in the direction. So, yeah, it's counter-intuitive but I think G could win big by pushing vendor-independent cloud tech, starting with K8s. The dream is that Google can cancel whatever it wants, and customers will just make an account at another cloud provider and keep rolling.
They don't typically complain, but when asked, it's common knowledge among all the programmers at work and all the ones I know. Google can't be counted on. Furthermore, it's tech types who make the decision to use GCP or not, not average Joes who use their other services, so you'd want to look more at places like this for the prevailing opinions.
There is the old "nobody is ever fired for choosing IBM", and I think Google actually succeeded in forging a "shouldn't we avoid Google ?" mentality.
I saw it real time with Maps changing its pricing model, where an international company reworked all their maps display. It was a lot of money, and it's not something you brush under the rug explaining the contracts are otherwise marvellous.
Then there was the whole google chat -> hangouts -> meets transitions with every variations in-between, and messaging applications are one of the most sensible tool to change in an enterprise environment. In particular the bigger it is the worse these changes will be perceived.
When came time to choose between AWS and GCP, the choice was clearly political, more than the technical merits.
Stadia, from what I've heard, appears to be near-dead on arrival, and a big part of that is skepticism of streaming video games and skepticism around Google killing the service (and rendering any purchased games totally unplayable).
Nah, Google has never been good at B2B enterprise sales. Microsoft has a massive enterprise sales network already and will find it easy to push Azure. AWS has first mover advantage.
Nope. Cloud is being commoditized as we speak which means there will be a race to the bottom when it comes to the margins. Bezos has already boasted that he is willing to turn down the dial for margins all the way down if it comes to that. Right now there still lot to eat for everyone but soon scarcity of finding new customers will take hold. THen you will find companies to cut down prices to get more customers and huge margins we see now evaporate very quickly. In that setting, only Amazon has good survival skills.
In my view, the biggest opportunity is AI. If I was CEO of Google, I would make a massive investment not just in research but engineering turn-key AI systems that can give businesses a massive boost.
you know why they re dying? because i have to add "reddit" or "stackoverflow" or "wiki" to my questions because google often gives shit results, and the mix of ads and results is hilariously confusing. If reddit and SO wake up and realize how well they can monetize their own search, google is gonna be panicking.
I searched the comments for FTC and yours was the only that popped up.
For the record, I don’t think this is FTC compliant. It also reeks of the kind of this that regulators would adjust their laws for. Google is playing with a situation where regulators may write very explicit rules that say exactly how much labeling their ads need. A 50%-75% chop in outgoing paid clicks would be material to their earnings. They’ve been in a situation for a decade where a large chunk of their most valuable demographic had no idea they’ve been clicking on ads. That isn’t a metric they should be getting more greedy on.
Regulators could just set up a test where, if a large enough percent of users don’t know they’ve clicked on an ad, paid disclosure has to be more explicit.
The low hanging revenue fruit for Google at this point is very sparse. Financially incentivized executives are scrambling to do questionable things to hit bonuses that probably shouldn’t be attainable. Kind of like Boeing.
It's been clear for a little while that Google no longer cares about giving the best experience with a lot of their tools and is just focused on maximizing revenue. More and more, Google is the modern equivalent of Microsoft in the early 00s, still good enough that most people use it, but each successive "version" piles on more frustrations than benefits. It's so ironic that Google has become that which they most despised when they started.
The dominance of Google and Facebook is turning the web into a toxic waste.
I watched this clip of Steve Jobs[0] recently, where was speaking about promoting/empowering Product vs Marketing people. Some of his comments seem especially applicable:
"[...] the companies forget what it means to make great products. The product sensibility and the product genius that brought them to that monopolistic position gets rotted out, by people running these companies who have no conception of a good product vs a bad product." ... "They really have no feeling in their hearts, usually, about wanting to really to help the customers."
This rings true in my experience. In fact I'd say that some companies that survive this trend tend to repeat it in cyclical manner. Good products, customer oriented then profit motivated short sighted decision making. Rinse and repeat.
It's not the fate. Google has more cash in the bank than any other company in the world (in tune of $130 billion). They could choose to use this cash to invest in creating new business, new products and the market would reward them handsomely. This is how Amazon's stock had meteoric rise despite of poor margins and a series of failures. Amazon has spent out a massive amount of cash in trying to build one business after another, everything from Fire phone to Alexa to kids tablet to Prime Video to grocery delivery to the pharmacy and so on. Many of these has failed and Bezos have pushed on with eyes on long horizon. People don't realize but Amazon is not its web site or AWS but a product factory, a sort of meta product. This keeps the market hopeful that they would have another big hit and the stock keeps going up on speculation. The majority of CFOs/CEOs of big tech haven't understood this and they keep twisting arm of existing cows to squeeze out more milk while a mountain of cash waiting to be utilized. It's also not that there is a dearth of new opportunity. Every sector from health to education to transportation to energy to finance is waiting for the next revolution. Its only gutsy leaders like Elon Musk who come in out of nowhere and start out things like Boring company or Tesla or Solar City. The market rewards them for taking a risk and being visionary (Tesla market cap is now more than GM and Ford combined despite selling 98% less vehicles!). So, the market is working fine and in fact doing exactly what it should do.
So don't blame fate. Don't blame market. Don't blame wall street. Don't confuse a lack of visionary CEOs or their willingness to take a risk with fate or dysfunctional market.
What would happen if they threw their hands up, declared that OK this is as much revenue we can squeeze out, and instead just coasted at current levels?
Prefer DuckDuckGo for searching, if possible. If you don't like DuckDuckGo's results and can't tolerate them, then prefer Startpage to Google, which will give you the same algorithm minus tracking/customization. Even post-acquisition, Startpage is still a more privacy-conscious engine than Google, and their ads are better labeled.
And while I'm sure I'm preaching to the choir here, quick reminder that unless you're running Lynx or some crap, literally everyone on this blog should have an adblocker installed (preferably uBlock Origin).
I appreciate there are multiple perspectives people have on whether adblocking should be a scorched-earth policy, or whether it's better to just target the worst actors. But disguising ads as native content is abusive enough behavior that you should be blocking those ads no matter where you fall on that spectrum -- and the UI changes here are very clearly, very obviously meant to make ads blend in with normal page results. The 'ad' indicator is meant to look like just another favicon.
I'm seeing people here suggest greaseMonkey scripts, and maybe there's something I'm missing, but I just really don't understand that. Don't restyle the ads, block them! Block advertisers that are abusive.
I like DDG, but have been using Ecosia for the past 6 months or so. I like that I've contributed to planting 25 trees (by the averages) just in my normal course of searching.
DDG also uses Bing. I've never used Ecosia before, but it's interesting to me that the experience would be so dramatically different when they're both using the same source. Must be some interesting factors involved in DDG's search to assist in pulling more relevant results out of Bing.
I do not know about Ecosia, but DDG does not use only Bing. According to Wikipedia, it uses over 400 different sources. So in theory, given they have a smart enough algorithm, DDG should be able to produce better results than Bing.
Pretty sure the search results are from Bing, while those other 399 sources are for other things, like quick answers, dictionaries, translations, currency conversion, flight search, etc.
It's Bing. I've noticed the slightly lower quality.
It's something of a conscious choice: unfettered tracking and advertising practices but good search results, or less tracking and OK results with profits used for a cause.
Startpage's parent company is (currently) less integrated with Startpage than Google's Advertising department is with Search. Their search results are also better formatted, and ads are more clearly marked. Startpage also doesn't do link wrapping if you turn off Javascript, which is such a huge privacy win over Google Search that I would still tell you to prefer Startpage even if I knew that they were slurping up other data.
On the marketing side, Startpage's parent company also doesn't own the vast majority of the online ecosystem, and distributing power among multiple advertisers is better than consolidating all of the power behind a single company who also owns a dominant web browser. System1, for all of its faults, isn't actively proposing web standards with the goal of deprecating URLs.
If you can't use DuckDuckGo, you should still prefer Startpage to Google. Google Search is also owned by an advertising company, one that openly mines literally every single data point of every single search they do. You can't get worse than that. I see people who are saying they want to break free of Google, but that they can't give up Google's results. I'm not going to tell them to stick with Google if an almost universally better alternative exists.
I really wish discussions would better distinguish between tracking, advertising, and camouflaged advertising.
I actually like advertising as one avenue of finding stuff.
I just hate when tracking is bundled with advertising. And I hate when advertising is camouflaged.
In practical terms:
When I’m searching for guitars, I like seeing both: third party results and ads that are not camouflaged.
I also like seeing guitar ads on a guitar related website.
But I hate seeing guitar ads on an unrelated website, just because I looked at a guitar website a few days ago. And I hate when a guitar ad is camouflaged as an independent review.
An advertising company that doesn’t track or camouflage gets my support. And I just hope that StartPage is and remains that kind of company.
> I just hate when tracking is bundled with advertising. And I hate when advertising is camouflaged.
AFAIK pretty much all customers that pay for internet advertising WANT tracking (a cookie or URL session ID that tracks you from the advertising platform to the advertised site destination) as a way to verify that their money is actually producing results, otherwise they have little way of knowing that.
I guess, but what would be the point? Are there really people who are fine blocking ads on Google, but are not OK just letting Gorhill/EasyList handle the implementation?
Bear in mind, there are a lot of other sites beyond just Google where you should probably be blocking ads. Do you really want to deal with the performance/maintenance costs of Greasemonkey on every one of them? Just install an adblocker already and be done with it.
I guess I would be one of those people - my reasoning being that I don't mind ads that much but in this case the google changes are pissing me off. Many media organizations are not doing to well, the do ads which is maybe not smart but that's how they pay for it. Google is doing very well, what they have already pays their bills and makes them rich, but they want to lessen the experience of their users to get richer.
So in this one case I'm the kind of guy who would like to block ads on Google and nowhere else currently. (Also if I install an ad-blocker I am at the mercy of the ad-blocker not reaching a deal with one of the richest companies in the world to let their content through because it's ok)
I like duckduck, but their ads are even more intrusive than the Google ones. Since Duckduckgo puts the (Ad) symbol at the end of the title rather than the beginning, they are not lined up and so much harder to quickly scan and ignore.
Others have mentioned that this is almost certainly the result of a long course of A/B testing.
The problem with this kind of aggressive A/B testing is that it's a game of "how far can we push the user?" So instead of having enthusiastic fans, they have people who begrudgingly use them. Sure, Google picks up an extra nickel here or there, and I'm sure some PMs got a raise. But I don't know any strong Google boosters any more, and there are hordes of people ready to switch over once something tolerable comes along.
(And from the comments, it seems like many of you have already found tolerable replacement search engines. I think I'm going to join you.)
Haha, I remember when they announced chrome like 15 years ago, hyper excited 13 year old me literally emailed ceo@google.com with how excited I was. I uninstalled Firefox and installed chrome.
These were brilliant ads. I remember installing Chrome not long prior to this period and it had its issues, but it was so fast that I couldn't not use it.
Not unheard of on enterprise distributed machines. Before I was an engineer all my jobs were like this - two dudes (the only ones not in suits) tucked away in a dark room, changing our passwords for us when we forgot, setting up our email accounts, tweaking an internal firewall (so we couldn't watch nba games at work lol), shit like that. Machines were locked down, we couldn't install anything at all, they had to install it for us.
"The problem with this kind of aggressive A/B testing is that it's a game of "how far can we push the user?""
Google also does this with Chrome. Users are subjected to "field trials". No explicit consent is requested. Most users are probably unaware. While it is possible to see which trials one is a part of, Google is not transparent about what exactly these trials entail.
Bing results still look like Google's used to, and although its index is smaller, that is slightly less important when Google seems to try its hardest to avoid showing you what you actually searched for. I've been using it more as a result, and also occasionally DDG and Yahoo; whereas for a long time my searches were exclusively on Google, now I find myself using other search engines because of the lack of quality of results and these other stupid changes that happened to Google within the past year or two.
With nearly every browser supporting multiple search engines, and keywords, there's just no reason to exclusively use a single search engine anymore. You can have your browser's address bar search duckduckgo just by using a keyword like "DDG:" (or something even shorter D:) and then typing in your query. Same goes for other engines, or even super niche searches on any website. Makes workflow much easier too, instead of going from Bing/Google/DDG -> StackOverflow, set up a keyword for SO directly. Of course, if the website's search method is mediocre then you're SOL but that's more and more rare these days.
If Bing's results aren't good, head back to the address bar and use another engine, if that's not good try another. So easy nowadays that it's kind of insane to me that there's still so many people who aggressively will ONLY use Google Search.
I'm convinced that most A/B testing is harmful in the long run. It moves metrics that makes investors look good but often at the cost of long-term brand likability and, for the lack of a better word, the company's "soul"
I wish there was a way to directly help Bing/DuckDuckGo/Yandex improve their search results. I've tried both, and it's just not the same.
Google I can bang in cryptic queries like
> centos 7 tuned no daemon
and get the 3rd link about how to run tuned in a no daemon mode. Bing/DuckDuckGo have the article at around 7th or 8th place, but prefaced by a lot of "while technically not wrong, not what I'm looking for" links. It's even worse for more niche errors or code snippets.
We cannot, as a healthy internet, let Google control so much of the web.
I felt the same about Google alternatives up until about 3 months ago. Google's results have been declining in quality for a decade, with much more rapid decline over the past year or three.
Google's results are uglier and blatantly revenue based. They have now lapsed behind DuckDuckGo in usefulness for me. I fall back to Google a few times per week, with inconsistent results when I need a "second opinion."
I'd suggest giving DDG another try.
I plan to remove Google from my life this year, at least as a central dependency. Search is already behind me. Mail, calendars, docs, and drive will be taken care of throughout the year. And my Android phone will be replaced with an iPhone.
Do you (or anyone else) have any recommendations for an email service? I've cut pretty much everything Google out of my life, minus Gmail, mostly due to not wanting to go through all the trouble of transferring everything over to a service that I end up not liking. I've heard ProtonMail is good, but other than that, I'm not sure.
I've used Fastmail for many years now, and I have nothing but good things to say about the service. In particular, it's insane how well notifications work in Fastmail, especially compared to Gmail (which I use at work). (Honestly, you'd think Fastmail was the giant multi-billion-dollar super-advanced tech company, if you look at the quality of their email experience vs. Gmail.)
However, some folks are a little spooked by the privacy implications of it being ran out of Australia, so be sure to research that if you're interested in Fastmail.
I'm leaning toward Tutanota, but I can't claim to have experience with them yet.
Proton has appeared somewhat bumpy to me -- I can't say for sure why, but they give me some spidey tingles.
Migrating / transferring is indeed a problem. I would suggest using Google Takeout, their data export tool, and permanently archiving your data with a third party service and / or physical backups. See https://takeout.google.com/. You probably won't be able to import into your new provider.
If you own a domain through Gandi (possibly others) you get email included for free. This is what I use. I don’t know why I don’t see this recommended more often?
I would do this through bluehost but it just straight up doesn't work. No matter the tutorials followed or time spent with support, I can't receive emails at my domain.
I used to work at Bing. If you really want Bing to improve, the best thing you can do is just use it: clicks on search results, plus backs and dwell times, are vital training data.
Ideally you could use Bing as your default engine, then fall back to Google whenever there's a search that doesn't yield good results. If you have the time, you can also use the Feedback link on the bottom-right of the page to report bad search results; people do actually triage and read those.
>Ideally you could use Bing as your default engine, then fall back to Google whenever there's a search that doesn't yield good results.
This is what I do with DDG. Unless I have a pretty specific search, or want Google's really nice live sports scores widgets, DDG is usually pretty good.
DDG doesn't track what you click on, so unfortunately you are not contributing much to improving its and Bing's search quality by using it instead of Bing.
Thanks for posting, it's nice to hear from someone on the inside!
Downvoters: why on earth are you downvoting Analemma's post? It's constructive, on point and overall the kind of post which makes HN comments valuable.
What I'm about to say will probably get downvoted as well, but I've noticed HN getting more polarized in terms of votes in the last maybe 2 years.
Because of the way that downvoting works on HN, the few times I use it, my thought is "nobody should see this comment". Because enough downvotes delegitemize and hide a comment, it's effectively telling other people that it's not worth being read.
I don't know if that's actually going through people's minds when they downvote, but that's what I think which is exactly why I rarely use it. But too many people now are simply using it on posts they don't like, even if a post deserves to be there. For some reason, it's an unpopular opinion to believe that an idea or opinion you think is wrong deserves to be seen and rebutted rather than silenced.
Downvotes for dislike is supported by HN/pg. Their choice of fading out comments, when combined with downvotes-for-opposition is really terrible for a high quality discussion site. Just goes to show the community around a site makes all the difference.
> I used to work at Bing. If you really want Bing to improve, the best thing you can do is just use it: clicks on search results, plus backs and dwell times, are vital training data.
A million flies are attracted to shit. I don't believe this sort of training data will ever become useful if it's in the same pool with the rest of the world. See also: voting with your wallet against the tyranny of the majority of uninformed consumers who buy whatever is most marketed. Those pennies don't matter.
In fact, I believe this sort of training and optimization for the mainstream plays a role in allowing bad results to proliferate.
This is before we even consider the fact that clicking on many results can indicate that they're bad (I click another result because the previous wasn't good), or because they're good (I'm browsing choices). Dwelling long can be bad (crappy & slow site, it takes me long to find the information I want or turn away) or it can be good (I found good stuff and I'm spending a while on it). Whatever conclusion your training system draws might be completely wrong. And probably prone to being gamed.
Clicks are noisy and have their problems (especially clickbait), but as far as ranking goes they still blow out of water everything else you can use. Analemma_ is right on the money. We need more Lemon Pledge^W^W clicks!
Speaking as someone who worked for another big web search engine in the past (not G, not B)
And counting good/bad clicks for a given (query, url) pair is just the tip of the iceberg. There's a lot of other interesting stuff you can do with them _if_ you have the data. Deep learning/NLP with clicks as training signal is probably the most exciting area to me, to name one. Unfortunately almost all of the data currently gets nabbed by google, other search engines are just getting by with the scraps. And it's very hard to bootstrap a competitor from scratch - for example Cliqz had to resort to some shady deals with Mozilla just to get any data to start with.
The above heuristic arguments seem inherently weaker than the direct experience of someone who used to be on the team that improves the results. They are well-funded and should be able to back out the effects you mention.
How are they ever going to know whether they improved results for me or not? You might as well train AI to play a game without ever checking their score. Oh, it's spending 20% more time in each room now and firing fewer bullets than before. Surely it is a better AI now.
Sorry, appeal to authority is no argument. Direct experience is valuable if there's an argument or some real scenario we can dissect, otherwise it's nothing more than a baseless claim. Without concrete examples, it's not even an anecdote. And there are plenty of anecdotes about search results for in-depth content becoming harder and harder to find.
The person I was responding to posted that they're using this training data to order the top 10 results or so. That's already an indication that it's not very helpful for me. I don't get frustrated if the top few results are in suboptimal order, I get frustrated when I get pages and pages of garbage and irrelevant results and can't seem to get anything useful out of it.
A lot of this does, in fact, get solved through machine learning. If one search query is conducted a hundred times by different people with otherwise similar profiles, the machine learning can constantly modify the results until the hundredth person sees the best results first. For example, if the first 25 people all click on the 2nd, 4th, 5th, and 8th result and then stop, it can modify the order of the results for the next 25 people, and randomize the order, so that some see 8-4-2-5 first, and others see 2-5-8-4, etc. The it re-assesses the results and gets smarter.
The gaming part is where there's a lot of importance, since it forces the machine to learn which users are acting nefariously.
Shuffling the top 10 results is not fixing the big problem in search for me. I don't care too much whether the company I search for is in first or fourth place. But I'm really irritated when I get pages upon pages of useless results and nothing remotely relevant.
See the replies elsewhere. The metrics go beyond simple, naive "click counting."
Specifically they also measure metrics like "regret" - if you went back to the search results and chose something else this indicates it wasn't a useful search result for the query and this counts against it.
In theory this is quite a nice defense against clickbaity, content free results.
> Specifically they also measure metrics like "regret"
I explicitly addressed this:
> clicking on many results can indicate that they're bad (I click another result because the previous wasn't good), or because they're good (I'm browsing choices).
You don't know the reason why I clicked back. Maybe I got what I needed at a glance, and I'm browsing to the next thing to see if there's more of what I need.
You don't know that the Average Joe (and a million other Average Joes) wasted 15 minutes on clickbaity content free crap despite not getting anything useful out of it. You know, those same SEO spam sites are trying to find ways to make the user stay as long as possible; they are in the game. And I'm
sure there are plenty of gullible users who will stay. Who knows, maybe SEO spam is working and that's precisely why we see SEO spam sites in results?
Again, I think training like this is pretending the problem is much simpler than it is. And I think that there is a real danger that training like this just optimizes for 1) average users 2) sites that managed to game the system with their SEO. Neither is optimizing for quality results.
I just think you're assuming these search engines are using way fewer factors than they actually use. It's probably exceptionally easy to tie your search behavior to someone else who's much more like you than "the average", unless you're using a search engine like DDG, Qwant, etc.
Maybe the best bet is for a search engine to try to include a simple, non-intrusive method of getting user input to determine the usefulness of a search result. Like, if it determines you came back as a "regret", maybe a ThumbsUp/ThumbsDown icon next to the last link you clicked to get you to say whether that link was useful in any way, or maybe a "block" option as well to say that you never want sites like that again.
> I just think you're assuming these search engines are using way fewer factors than they actually use. It's probably exceptionally easy to tie your search behavior to someone else who's much more like you than "the average", unless you're using a search engine like DDG, Qwant, etc.
I should, then, expect dramatically different results when I use someone else's PC or a public computer. I have not witnessed dramatic differences.
It's just you pretending search engines are simpler then they are. Noone's just ranking most clicked sites first - that's too naive and encourages clickbait. Clicks are an ingredient in the overall ranking system, which is generally also trained on relevancy labels by human annotators/raters/assessors. These human labels are far more reliable and can penalize all the bad clickbaity stuff which clicks can't, but unfortunately also very expensive to obtain and thus low volume.
We may not know exactly why you clicked back, or why Joe wasted 15 minutes on a site, but from all clicks in aggregate and from the human-labelled data, we can tell how that correlates with the clicked site's relevancy and quality and utilize your clicks accordingly to improve the ranking.
Finding such correlations is still by far and large what all search engines do, rather than trying to truly understand the query. It's only now starting to change with recent advances in deep learning and NLP.
(Disclaimer: as I said, I don't work at Bing anymore. Things may have changed in the intervening period and I could be mistaken or plain wrong about things)
Obviously ranking search results is immensely complicated with lots of accumulated insider wisdom, but the short answer is that "static" page features (PageRank, how well the query matches text on the page, etc.) are good for pruning down zillions of pages to generate a candidate list of 10 or so results to show the user, but not great at ordering those results, and serving the results in the best order is really important for user satisfaction. For generating the final top-10 ordering, "dynamic" features like how many people clicked that link, how long did they spend on the page, etc. are the most useful.
Regarding what is tracked, obviously Bing can only track what you're doing on Bing itself, so clicks on blue links and backs are tracked, but they can't see what you do on the destination page. This data is used to train models/NNs/etc. but the raw click data isn't kept for very long: it's too large and it has to be removed for GDPR compliance.
> For generating the final top-10 ordering, "dynamic" features like how many people clicked that link, how long did they spend on the page, etc. are the most useful.
I've never worked there and can't say for sure, but I have to assume that the broad strokes of their search engine are the same as Bing's. Bear in mind my response above was a very very high-level description of a really complex system with tens of thousands of person-years of accumulated knowledge and experience inside it.
Yandex does that. At the bottom of search results page there are links to other search engines. So if you aren't satisfied with results, you're one click away from Google. I believe they track these clicks and know which results are bad.
> We cannot, as a healthy internet, let Google control so much of the web.
It's getting worse too.
Back in the day, you could Google something for a manufacturer and include the name of the manufacturer like, "Pioneer 10" Subwoofer" and automatically the first result would be a like to Pioneer's subwoofer page or their main ecommerce site.
You type that into Google today? You will get 15 results for AMAZON pages with Pioneer speakers. No, I want to buy it from Pioneer, not Amazon. Oh yeah? The actual link to the actual company, who actually makes those speakers? They're on Page 2.
When you have the actual manufacturer being buried in the results, we have a major problem.
IMO Google is doing the best they can to serve you relevant results, just that everyone and their uncle is spamming internet to get up in the ranking game.
Think of modern google as a question answering machine not a serch engine. And do "Show me Pioneer 10 subwoofer manufacturer specs" instead of just jamming keywords and hoping for the best.
What you really mean in a google search is you want to buy something. You only think you don't want to buy. It doesn't matter that you've lost the leaflet for your Pioneer 10 Subwoofer and want to remember which wire goes where in your new house. Or just want to remember some detail of something you had years ago. Google is there to assure you that you really want to buy a shiny new set.
Not buying stuff you already own again serves neither the economy nor Google's advertising profit. Go on, buy another set. Infinite growth depends on it.
That really is their attitude to every product and service.
I'm genuinely asking: can you share an example where the Google results are worse in your opinion than DDG or Bing? Ideally with a screenshot in case there is some personalization going on. I just want to see a very clear example of it so I can try it out for myself.
I work at Google (not Search though sorry), opinions are my own.
> When you have the actual manufacturer being buried in the results, we have a major problem.
How do you know though? What if the majority users actually do what you describe in hopes of buying something and thus the shopping results are more relevant for them?
I imagine either there is a bug or this is the case, because I'm sure the links people actually click feed back into the algorithms and the results are modified accordingly.
This being said, it seems like the fact that your results aren't personalized enough to your liking is a shortcoming, assuming you were signed in.
It's a self-fulfilling prophecy. Third-party shopping results are shown on page one and the manufacturer's store is on page two, and people rarely go beyond page one so naturally they will click the Amazon results. This in turn feeds the algorithm and reinforces its original assumption.
> Bing/DuckDuckGo have the article at around 7th or 8th place,
You should take a closer look at DDG, it has the answer from serverfault.com in an instant answers box for your query and it highlights the required setting in a perfectly chosen excerpt from the correct answer:
As of CentOS 7.2 tuned now has a no-daemon mode which
can be turned on by setting daemon = 0 in
/etc/tuned/tuned-main.conf. This is mentioned in the
RedHat Performance Tuning Guide.
> I wish there was a way to directly help Bing/DuckDuckGo/Yandex improve their search results.
I am amazed that no search engine gives me easy way to blacklist domains from my results. That would make the usefulness of any of them to increase by orders of magnitude. (and if they are careful, they might be even able to use the blacklisted data to adjust their general results , not only my personal results as well)
And I can't help to add qwant.com to the list of alternative search engines. No affiliation whatsoever, but I am pretty happy to use that as my daily search engine here in Europe.
> Google used to have that, but of course they stopped it. There are browser addons that have he same effect though.
Yep. Ironically enough, that was killed soon after I found about that. And anyways, it was implemented far from easy to use. It should be just behind the green arrow that gives the options to see cached version etc. And obviously with cross-platform effect on all my devices as long as I am logged in.
I would pay a subscription fee to my search engine to implement this feature. Currently use duckduckgo with a add-on to filter blacklisted sites but would love for this to be integrated.
In my opinion, the results on DDG et al are a matter of users being trained by Google knowing too much about them. If you search "Django" on Google and get relevant results, it's because Google knows you. On DDG you need to search "Django framework".
To me it is not so much result quality as integration. Currently, with Google no matter what I am searching for, I just type it into my location bar and hit enter. Whether I am looking for a new bar to check out on a Friday night or what does a specific compile error mean in Haskell. So in the first case, I will get a map with bars around me and in the second case I will get a link to stackoverflow. With DDG these become functionally separate. To do the Haskell error search I do the same thing, but to do a local bar search I have to open a separate tab, go to Google and do a search there. Same goes for looking for things like theater plays (Google will give me reviews, showtimes and a link to buy tickets all right there at the top of my search page), address or place name searches (map, directions, open hours and website link all come up right away) etc. The only thing I can do with DDG is the old fashioned "find me links relevant to these keywords" searches.
Feels like a perfect opportunity for you to try out search engine keywords. On Chrome, it's under Search Engine > Manage Search Engines. This allows you to type (keyword) -tab- (query). For example, my work computer (on which I can only use Chrome or Edge) is force-defaulted to Google, but I have Bing set to keyword "b" and DDG keyworded to "d", so I just type:
b(tab) Whatever I want to search for
and it goes to Bing with that query. It's a great example of what you're looking for. On my personal devices, I try to use Bing for as much as I can to see whether its personalized results will ever marry up to Google (it's gotten extremely close, lately), but I often prefer searching Google Maps, so I have gMaps added as a search engine with keyword "m", so I can search for anything with "m (tab) place" and immediately see gMaps results.
> Google I can bang in cryptic queries like > centos 7 tuned no daemon
Not only can you bang in whatever query you want to DDG, you can bang it in via Google, using bangs (https://duckduckgo.com/bang). I think that "!g <query>" is the second stop for many DDG'ers, when DDG itself disappoints. (My understanding is that it still offers some anonymisation over searching directly through Google, but I'm not sure.)
I have noticed that when trying to find the most recent solution Google shows me an answer that is 10 years old.
ex. Adobe updates come faster than I can update, so I run into issues, so finding the most recent answer is what I am looking for and not a similar issue from Adobe pre CC.
I find that a lot too. Trying to search for anything Rails related always shows Rails 3/4 results before Rails 5/6. If Google really knew that much about me, they should notice I always end my searching by clicking on a Rails 5/6 result (because those are the versions I use) and every time I land on a Rails 3 or 4 result I almost always click back and try again. Same with Python when I get 2.x results, with all their data they should know I've used 3.x for years.
If companies want to track me and build profiles on me, I accept that I can't stop that without refusing to use their products and every site that's integrated with it (Google Analytics, Adwords, etc). But if they're going to do it, at least use that information to help me. What's the point otherwise?
or at least filter out results that are irrelevant. They are lacking the ability to remove dated results when you are looking for the most recent.
I know you can manually filter results, but why show 10 year old answers to software that gets updated so frequent! I am sure there are other areas where this exists, dated results should be pushed back a few pages.
My latest annoyance, nevermind them showing pages that don't have "quoted" keywords. They rewrite the search query in the textbox and remove the quotes. Just when you thought it couldn't get more annoying.
Oh yeah that kills me I often have one word that is the important one and instead they show me the low-value responses that do not contain that one differentiating word that is the reason I'm doing a search in the first place
I switch to DDG precisely because I stopped being able to quickly distinguish ads from results in Google. Even the "results" felt like ads. Now when I have to fallback onto Google, the results just feel so spammy compared to DDG.
edit: For example, I just needed to look up the current version of Scala. DDG correctly has scala-lang.org as the top result. Google has a snippet from sourabhbajaj.com (incorrectly) stating 2.10 is the current version taking up the top 1/3 of the page.
This thread is so enlightening. I too switched to DDG a while ago and occasionally I have to use Google for a search and your description is exactly how I felt: the Google results felt “spammy”.
I had assumed I had simply adjusted to DDG and just forgot what Google had always looked like, but this post confirms that the Google results have in fact changed.
Heck yeah! DDG results have gotten noticeably better in the past ~2 years.
Side note - most browsers offer 'search shortcut' customization options, so you can start an address-bar search with !g or !b or whatever to seamlessly swap to your fallback(s).
> Side note - most browsers offer 'search shortcut' customization options, so you can start an address-bar search with !g or !b or whatever to seamlessly swap to your fallback(s).
While you indeed can configure browsers to do this, I think you may be erroneously attributing a DDG feature to -- or duplicating a DDG feature in -- your browser, because those are built in DDG bang commands.
They used to have some default keywords, "g", "w", etc. (you enter "g key words" to search Google for the keywords. If they're not default anymore they're very easy to do.
I like the way Chrome shows it has recognised the keyword after you press space though, neat feedback, good design IMO.
Konqueror was even further ahead. After you searched for something via search engine and then opened a page, it offered you buttons which could be used to search for those same terms on the result page. Very useful, but never saw it elsewhere.
Maybe once a month I use Google as a fallback, and then am utterly disappointed. DDG is just plain better at my programming and random factoid searches than Google.
Which is I assume because Google is allowing their search results to be of a poorer quality in the pursuit of higher ad revenue.
I've used DDG for many years now, and I'm admittedly one of those weirdos for whom political statements about freedom and privacy matter, so I'm a "loyal customer" in a sense.
However, 10 years ago I honestly felt DDG is not really worse compared to Google. And here's the problem: DDG hardly changed over last I-don't-know-how-many years, while Google surely did. And while it seems primary Google users are constantly upset about the nature of the changes, I, on the contrary, quite often appreciate how it behaves, especially on the mobile. In fact, when I bought a new phone this autumn, I, for the first time didn't change Chrome+Google Search as my default search engine.
I'm still mostly content with DDG on PC, but Google is actually better at answering questions I mostly want to ask on the go: to look up badly misheard brand or person's name, find some local shop and show me the time it closes, or — the thing DDG is most useless for — brief me on the real-time news everybody is talking about for the last couple of hours.
Because some search terms get interpreted by the browser as trying to hit a specific site. If you prepend the browser probably won't make that mistake. I tend to use !g on the end of my search terms and hit this every now and then; I feel like I've hit this issue in Chrome more than Firefox.
Yea, but in my scenario I’m driving and need the right result right now. I’m not in any sense pro-google, so it pains me they are still the best at this.
I can’t append or prepend, I had time for one search and need a result now before I miss a turn.
Needlessly endangering other people's lives. (And hopefully breaking the law, depending on where you live.)
Seriously, which parts of adulthood and 'the real world' make this seem necessary and okay to you? It really is super dangerous. (Google the statistics if that might convince you, or news stories to make the risk emotionally real.)
I switched a couple months back because Google started messing around with image search. If you click on an image it now displays a small version of it on the side, instead of enlarging it. It's so useless.
There are some things I miss about Google (I feel like I got better results when searching for programming questions), but I don't miss it too much.
I don't currently have an alternative I use daily, but programming questions seem to me to be the most annoying use case for Google search. I frequently use 4 or 5 keywords to try to find information on a topic, and it gets a cluster of results which ignores one or more of the words that is absolutely essential, because what I want has few if any hits. But things that are everywhere on the internet, I don't need to search for, dammit!
I am most frustrated with how almost any url from search or Gmail shows as the url, but actually routes you through a Google url first (so they can track it, of course). That extra hop sometimes takes a second or more.
I don't understand why they don't just track my click with JavaScript. I suspect this new hiding the url thing might have to do with circumventing scripts like I have used before that rewrite the url so that when you click, you go directly to what you clicked on.
Currently, the real URL is url encoded into the Google link. But if they stopped displaying the URL and started encrypting the URL or using a DB pointer instead, which is what I am thinking they might be moving toward, then you wouldn't be able to do that.
DDG uses an aggregate of results from various search engines. I really do hope that at some point (if they haven't already) they build out a native search team. I know its hard computer science, but they really need to start rolling their own search engine
My biggest beef with DDG is that they do not do worldwide results very well. Their results are overwhelmingly US centric.
As an example.... I search on DDG, "buy cricket equipment near me". I am not behind a VPN and whatsmyip correctly identifies my hostname with the correct European country suffix. However, the top results on DDG for this query is "Dick's Sporting Goods". Click on that and I get a nasty "GDPR DSG Sorry. Can't help you message." Second result is "Cricket Best Buy," who help "to connect North American cricket fans with the best possible cricket equipment." Next, AA Sports. Fourth, First Choice Cricket, "#1 USA Cricket Retailer".
If instead I try to be more precise with the query, "buy cricket equipment "austria"". First result is US Sports Direct.
Nothing here is relevant to my query. At least try to give me some UK results in the first few.
I use DDG, but I have the same exasperation. Even appending 'Melbourne' to a search, I'm liable to get results from a tiny town in Florida rather a metropolis in Australia.
It's frustrating, because for geographical based results, I'm forced to drop back to Google consistently, and Google's getting worse and more user hostile/advertiser friendly.
Yeah, but it's just not very good. Set the UK tick box and it will still throw a lot of US results into the mix. Adding "UK" and "manchester" or whatever in the search does a much better job than DDG's country specific tick box. Of course even that isn't great as it'll often give a business in manchester NH, pop 100k over the city of 3m just down the motorway. Even with keywords and DDG's tick box set.
It's a minor annoyance that I've got used to, and hasn't persuaded me to go back to Google (I've used DDG as first choice for probably a little over 5 years now).
If DDG can't deliver the goods, !b (bing) is second choice, !mill (Million Short) probably third, then as appropriate, a mix of !azuk (amazon UK), !w, !ox (oxford dictionary) and a mix of others including !g as last resort. !g is so rarely better or helpful that I wonder why I still sometimes bother.
Edit: I think the real problem is with ICANN. .com should have been kept for global or multinational sites, and the USA used .co.us and .us generally for sites of national interest, as France uses .fr, Germany .de and UK .uk etc.
I like the configuration options you are being offered with DuckDuckGo. So, for example, you can use your own custom font on that page.
I use the Google !g fallback for about 5% of my searches. Sometimes the google results are simply better, but the appearance just seems chaotic nowadays.
DDG and Bing are so bad, there is nothing on the market right now that can replace Google search for accurate results. The auto complete for instance in Google is no match.
What does DDG use for an algorithm? Originally Google was just using pagerank but that was too easy to game by SEO. This means DDG needed to address this, and apparently they have (e.g, search for 'favicon' like the post). How long can we rely on DDG staying neutral in their algorithm?
"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."
It's remarkable, BTW, that most people at the same time believe that Bing sucks, and DDG is "just as good as Google". For me that hasn't been my experience at all: Google is far, far ahead of Bing (and by extension DDG) in terms of relevance.
It seems possible without bias, DDG went full on with instant results. I guess Bing does those now too, I don't know, but the choice of scope and resources to use can be enough distinction to colour people's perceptions.
If they're doing that, sure. I'm not sure it's that sophisticated. Last I heard they sourced different engines for different types of things/geographies not necessarily mixing results from multiple sources for a single query. But this is all based on things I've read in passing rather than any serious research/insider knowledge.
I believe nearly all the search engines are still guilty of this one.
I also think firms should be able to buy "blank space." For example facebook or amazon could pay NOT to have an ad above their result. Maybe they already do, I dont see an ad when I search facebook, however I do see an ad for amazon above the top amazon result. Google should just be smart enough to see the top result and the ad are the same link, and handle the situation more appropriately, like tucking the ad text underneath the result, or signifying that the top result owner has paid to hide ads. I have to say, I dont find these results differentiated ENOUGH from the ad. https://i.imgur.com/8Dhr1mj.png
>I also think firms should be able to buy "blank space." For example facebook or amazon could pay NOT to have an ad above their result. Maybe they already do, I dont see an ad when I search facebook, however I do see an ad for amazon above the top amazon result.
Backblaze had a competitor who bought ads for the search term "backblaze". The CEO successfully contacted the competitor CEO and they agreed they'd be in a pissing match throwing money at Google if the practice and retaliation (backblaze buying on their search term) occurred. The competitor promptly stopped the ad campaign.
If the competitor was smaller with more money to spend or let's say had higher margins, it was stupid of them to agree to this type of (possible?) collusion.
I get what you're saying. It does have an anticompetitive/colluding feel to it.
I don't know exactly where my opinion lies in this case. I think the cloud backup space currently has many players and that even if all players agreed to this - the net result would be Google earning less, each of those companies having less ad spend, and therefore greater profitability.
Heck, imagine if a 3rd party existed to "bypass" the Google ad auction through collusion on generic terms like 'computer backup'. (I'm not in this space, so some of the feasibility is speculative). Each company puts in their bid parameters for search terms. 3rd party evaluate the bids, submit 2 slightly different bids to minimize ad spend, and since the whole market coluded, Google made less money.
It's fragile, it's collusion. It's easily by passable by anyone going to Google directly. Was anyone harmed?
Their current behavior is no different in that regard AND is more confusing for internet users and business AND is based on the twisted "market price" of the search keywords
Basically yes. It does appear a bit like a "pay us this much to keep top result, or we will resell it to competitor" but realistically, thats already the case (the ad being the "top result".)
I worry about the implications of the blank space idea. For example, if I owned coolstuff.com, when should I expect for my standard search result to be shown below the "blank space". Today, if someone searched "cool stuff", my site shows up as the top search result, but my arch-nemesis, the owner of neatstuff.com, has an ad tailored to that query. Would his ad go away since mine is the top search result for "cool stuff"? Similarly, if my site is preferable to Google enough that my site shows up every time someone searches for something like "cool shit" or "awesome things", would I also benefit from this "blank space" program, at the expense of the owners of coolshit.com and awesomethings.com?
if you BUY the entire whitespace above the first organic result (could cost north of 1-3 ads) then the first organic result would be the top of the list. It wouldnt matter if you are the top organic result or not, youve just paid not to have ads above that result.
If at some point you slipped down the organic list, you would have the option to buy a normal ad again.
> Google should just be smart enough to see the top result and the ad are the same link
They are smart enough, but they don't get any money from people clicking on search results, only ads, so of course they're going to show the ad - some people will click it.
I really hate AMP. To the point where I started making an iOS browser that’s sole purpose was to bounce me from AMP links to the original link and delete the history step in between. I wish Apple would offer this in Safari - a simple ‘ignore AMP pages’ check box.
AMP is google worst attempt yet at taking over the web. It’s so user hostile. It breaks lots of sites with its fake scroll and fake back button at the top of google news. I hate it soo bad!
There is a feature to do this in Safari already, but it's not automatic. If you force press or long press on a link so the preview window pops up, then tap on the preview to load the link, it will skip the AMP page.
Many don't like Google's new design. Rather than resort to hacks, try an alternative search engine. There are many and you might even find one you like.
Qwant, Ecosia, and (to an extent) DDG share the same Bing backend for web results, so if you're particularly interested in trying out alternatives, here are some others. All of these have their own search indexes.
https://yippy.com - ugly, but probably the best independent search engine outside the "big ones" and DDG
https://private.sh/ - Run by PIA as a proxy for Gigablast, small index but rapidly getting better
https://beta.cliqz.com - German based, their technical blog has been posted frequently on HN. Will eventually require a browser extension or their own browser to search.
https://yandex.com - Ought to be mentioned, but certainly not privacy focused.
https://beta.cliqz.com/ is currently available as any other webpage, and will continue to be available in the same way in the future. I think what's being referred to is another search product (search as you type) we have in the Cliqz Browser. I work on these.
I'd love to see a write up about the differences between all these. "Find one you like" makes it seem like a good search engine is more subjective than it is. It would be cool if these companies collaborate and shared their indexing strategies, algorithms, etc to make the whole alternate search engine space better in general.
I've been wondering what it is about Google Search results recently, in that they seem _substantially worse_ than ever before. I hadn't quite noticed what the difference was, but I was really surprised, remembering how Google Search results used to be the very best. Now I know what the difference is: making normal results look the same as Ad results.
I've been stuck with this for two weeks now, and it's bad enough that for the first time ever I've considered using something other than Google. It's just so much harder for my eyes to read, I feel I can't glaze through the results like I used to (and I believe the old search would often give date for things like stack exchange and Reddit, which helps with a wide variety of issues).
I'm pretty sure for the layout itself I'll eventually just get a tampermonkey script to make it look like the old, but this is the first thing that has truly made me look for a Google alternative. They have severely damaged their main product, in my opinion.
It is strangely stressful to even read through the results, let alone find the right one anymore. Switching to DDG is pleasant, it even seems to respect a dark mode setting.
I remember when Google made a point of being ethical by putting ads on the right rail with a light blue background so it was clear which results were ads and which were organic.
I noticed this on a co-workers screen recently and my immediate thought was "what dodgy search extensions have they been installing?". Now that it's on my results as well I can't help but strongly dislike the change for some reason. The icons are both very small and very distracting at the same time and don't aid in adding authority or any important meta information about the site.
The changes seem to have added enough noise to make parsing the page annoying, but maybe it's one of those things you brain learns to ignore after a while.
Yes, I think Google reached "peak search" awhile back, and we're now on a downward trend. The search results are increasingly degraded by commercial intervention, by Google and its paying customers. There has always been a conflict of interest between Google and its public consumers, and Google is now leveraging its near-monopoly market position to shift the balance of that conflict to its financial advantage.
I wonder what the tipping point will be? At what point Google Search revenue will have peaked, pushing Google to accelerate the pace of experiments and new solutions to make more out of fewer users.
Like many around here, I have (re)started using alternatives to Google products last year. We're early adopters, so it will take a while for Google to be affected by a mass exodus, but what will happen when it will start? What medium will they use to fill the gap. The only (currently) untapped options matching Search's reach to display ads are: Gmail, Android, Google Photos. Probably nothing else. What happens for advertisers targeting specifically users like me who end up stopping using Google Search (e.g., how do you reach a high earner from Bay Area if they have completely stopped using Search? Because this, will happen first, and these users are valuable).
The required scale of any alternative is critical. Compensating for Search revenue decline is no easy feat. So much that, until now, nothing else generates anything even close to Search's revenue. If you talk profit, it's even worse as YouTube is probably not as profitable as Google would like (YouTube Premium anyone?) it to be.
So, the future will probably come from outside of Google's own properties, and that is why they are slowly killing competition in the ad tech space (3rd party cookies & Chrome). That is why they have been trying to diversify and are wisely enough pushing very hard with GCP and other proven revenue streams like subscriptions (YouTube Music, YouTube Premium, gSuite).
Anyone here have a pro-Google stance? Because at this point I'm vehemently against the company and most of its products.
There's no good replacement for Calendar or Docs/Sheets as of now, that I'm aware of. Microsoft's suite as mentioned by therealdrag0 is an obvious alternative, and perhaps less advertiser-oriented, but still not a great in-browser option IMO.
Especially when considering the interoperability of the "platform," it's clear Google is streets ahead of the competition.
It's a shame that the best featured tools in this space are also not open-source, and used (probably) to mine massive amounts of data.
I'd be ok if you mined my data while I'm on your servers, but only if you allow me to host my own version of your software for when I don't want to be on your servers.
I have a pro-Google stance, but I usually wouldn't talk about it on HN because people just love to assume the worst about Google and anyone defending them just gets attacked. Personally, I think that Google's pushing websites to use HTTPS has done more to improve privacy than anything else I can think of in the last decade.
This is part of Google's attempt to de-prioritise the URL. Their destructive AMP service confusingly shows you Google's domain instead of the website's — and as they can't fix that without losing out on tracking, they're trying to change what the URL means.
Thanks for ruining the Web, Google.