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When Google first came out and we tried it there were two things we liked about it. The first: Good search results. Yeah everyone knows that right. But young p
by SubiculumCode 9y ago
When Google first came out and we tried it there were two things we liked about it.
The first: Good search results.
Yeah everyone knows that right. But young people today might have forgotten the second reason we liked Google search back then:
The Second: A clean page with a single logo and search field. It loaded quick. There were no banners everywhere, no bs.
HackerNews has that feel. It is clean, information dense, and does what it needs to do.
- SubiculumCode 9y agoI'd add that Google News used to have that clean feel too, many years ago. Each generation it gets worse. The latest generation using AMP is nearly unreadable on my Nexus 5 phone, it bogs it to a crawl.
- andrepd 9y agoAnd for no benefit it all (or even regression), that's what maddens me.
- CaptSpify 9y agoI couldn't find a better image but I remember this used to be the big argument why people liked Google's design over yahoo: http://aautar.digital-radiation.com/blog/uploaded_images/google_vs_yahoo.jpg http://aautar.digital-radiation.com/blog/uploaded_images/goo...
- yeukhon 9y agoWell, Yahoo was designed to be a web directory, which eventually evolved into portal (until mid of 2000, Yahoo search would still show "directory"). Google was all about search at the beginning. I still went to Yahoo and MSN for news and information. But I think some time after mid 2000, a lot of folks began to shift from going to portal to get information, to typing keywords "news" in Google search. Somehow we are hooked to typing keywords. When Google finally released news.google.com now users could have a quick navigation of current events. This behavior is manifested in the era of social media. So many people are now getting news from logging onto facebook / twitter. To verify, as a smart reader I would search on Google, hoping to find a full version from reputable news sites. In some countries/culture, portal is still preferred. e.g. Yahoo Japan being one. There are still some values of Yahoo.com; I still go there if I am looking up finance news or some pop-culture entertainment news (no other new sites do better than Yahoo on entertainment news broadcast).
- jackblack8989 9y agomisinformation dense.
- epigramx 9y agoThe second reason was the predominant reason. We already had a lot of options for search results with search engines like Altavista/aggregate sites. It's the simplicity of Google that made Google. PS. It's also the reason Google now is increasingly less special (but they do try to keep it simple when they can, subtly).
- zephyrfalcon 9y agoI'm not sure that was the predominant reason. The search results were also a hell of a lot better than AltaVista, Lycos, Yahoo and whatever else was around back then.
- scholia 9y agoYes. In particular, Google's search were much better for ordinary users who didn't do complex searches....
- fdej 9y agoGoogle was a huge improvement because if you searched for Foo Bar Baz it would only give you pages that had all the words Foo, Bar and Baz whereas AltaVista et al. would give you pages containing any of the words, if memory serves. But the speed was a huge deal too, especially on a 56k modem (and the thing had to be rendered in IE4 on a Pentium II too, let's not forget).
- kps 9y agoAltaVista had a full set of boolean operators, so you could search for [Foo AND (Bar OR Baz) AND NOT Quux], which I still miss. Google appeared just when AltaVista ‘graduated’ from a showpiece for the Alpha to trying to make money and therefore turned to crap.
- hollander 9y agoI don't know why, but many times Google just doesn't load here. I always open a private tab in Firefox to get rid of cookies easily, then load Google, and I don't know if this is the reason but after a while it just stops. Duckduckgo is (for me) the new google in terms of speed, but the search results are not the same quality.
- kalleboo 9y agoThe Swedish public broadcaster still keeps their Teletext[0] service running. One of the cleanest way to get your news (especially on a TV where load times are zero). You can access it on the web as well https://www.svt.se/svttext/web/pages/100.html https://www.svt.se/svttext/web/pages/100.html [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teletext https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teletext
- corgihamlet 9y agoSame thing for Germany! http://www.ard-text.de/ http://www.ard-text.de/
- germanier 9y agoIt even has a mobile app and it is the fastest loading news app I know of and it loads even with the slowest connection. Due to restrictions of the medium, the text is short and to the point. As there are no analytics with Teletext, clickbait has never arrived there. More sites should follow that model.
- cJ0th 9y agoThe mobile version is the homepage of my desktop browser :) http://www.ard-text.de/mobil/100 http://www.ard-text.de/mobil/100
- zephyrfalcon 9y agoSame for the Netherlands. I read this every day rather than the big newspapers or news channels... https://nos.nl/teletekst https://nos.nl/teletekst
- fphilipe 9y agoSame for Switzerland: http://www.teletext.ch/ http://www.teletext.ch/
- rollcat 9y agoSame thing in Poland & Croatia, probably many other EU countries
- us0r 9y agoGoogle seems to have forgotten this and now thinks its some kind of design company. Everything with the exception of adwords and analytics it has applied material to is now garbage. News use to be my default homepage but surprisingly MSN gives me a much better product with more then 4 stories on the page on 32" monitors.
- tosser350 9y agoGoogle seems to care more about manipulating the masses than they do performance/profit. The fact they admit to passing over objectively better candidates to hit quotas proves this. I'd say what you mention is probably a side effect of that.
- golfer 9y ago"admit to passing over objectively better candidates" I'd love to see your citation on that claim.
- quuquuquu 9y agoThe poster is maybe referring to James Damore's interview with Joe Rogan, where he claims that Google executives admit to diversity procedures in hiring. Disclaimer: I have no opinion on this topic. I am merely speculating the potential source of info.
- srean 9y agoFully agreed. I miss the Google of the “to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful” era. Google Plus could have been fine if it wasn't rammed down user's throats. But no, every product had to integrate with it, had to look like it .... because ... Steve Jobs said so ? Then came Vic Gundotra with all the high craftsmanship of political empire building maneuvering and little else. Probably broke the original internal culture if it had survived till then (not sure).
- luckydude 9y agoThe new google news page is awful. It's classic user interface designer making stuff pretty with no thought on how to display news. The old page was much better, it was denser. I friggin hate Google news now and am looking for a better news source. I'm not loving text only, I'd be happy with a text only top level and then text & pics for the stories. I'll check out MSN.
- morganvachon 9y agoA while back I did a comparison of the code behind the major search engines' landing pages, and found that DuckDuckGo is by far the cleanest, simplest, and most accessible, yet they still manage to make a living on text ads in their results. Another easy way to see the difference is to load each site up in a text-only browser like links. You'll find that DDG has the cleanest interface there, too. I still use Startpage most of the time due to the generally better search results, but DDG is my backup and sometimes finds things Startpage (i.e. Google) doesn't.
- SubiculumCode 9y agoDuckduck go is a pretty good engine for 90% of searches. I wonder however whether its (perhaps tenuous) connection with Yandex and Russia should give pause? I admit I have only read this in a headline several years back.
- morganvachon 9y agoI've never heard of anything like that; my understanding is that it's an American company that uses Bing as the back end.
- overcast 9y agoOnly thing I don't get on HN, is the number on the left of the title. What purpose does that serve?