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It's important to note that this is strategically incredibly important for Google because this forms the backbone of their voice AI. The better at answering que

It's important to note that this is strategically incredibly important for Google because this forms the backbone of their voice AI. The better at answering questions directly, the better their voice AI becomes and that leads to a lot of future products.

soup10 7y ago
AdWords is and always has been the goose that lays the golden eggs, none of Google's other initiatives have ever rivaled that revenue. That's why they put so much effort into bolstering and optimizing their search results pages.
- HenryBemis 7y ago
  Another reason is the use of add-ons such as: "Google search link fix - Prevents Google and Yandex search pages from modifying search result links when you click them." I have stopped using Google a few years ago, but just in case I keep this (or similar) add-ons of my Firefox. I have no idea of the popularity of such addons, but they would also impact the tracking that Google does.
  - TheArcane 7y ago
    I consider myself privacy conscious and have add-ons like muli-account containers, cookie auto-delete, UB Origin and Privacy Badger working in tandem. It's embarrassing that I wasn't aware of this extension, given how useful it seems - thanks!
    - IGotThroughIt 7y ago
      How safe are all these plugins we install to escape tracking? Are we trying to escape big tech tracking only to hand our information over to extension developers? Looking at network traffic often shows a ton of extensions sending data to some aws server almost perpetually. Asking because I'm not sure of the answer to this question and lately I've become even warier so I decided to uninstall everything except things I absolutely must have like colorzilla, grammarly and full-page screen capture. For adblocking I use brave and never ever touch firefox, opera or chrome. There's an extension that appends a share=1 parameter to all quora links to prevent them from forcing you to sign in in order to view a post. I like it but I'm trying to minimize my extensions footprint and I'd rather write my own script to perform the same script. The question is, how do you get to be sure that an extension is safe?
  - igravious 7y ago
    Oh my God! This is so useful! I hate that I can't right-click on a search result to copy a URL. We definitely used to be able to do this, didn't we?
    - propogandist 7y ago
      It's been this way for ages, although for chrome (iirc) this is managed via hyperlink auditing [1] which allows google to track what you're clicking even though the link appears 'clean'. The click through google redirect also allows them to track things like relevancy of the content and time on site (if you return to google SERP by clicking the back button), in-case the target site isn't using google analytics (unfortunately most sites do). [1] https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage /links.html#hyperlink-auditing Hyperlink auditing can be blocked with uBlock Origin / uMatrix
    - wbl 7y ago
      Don't like the product? Switch. While you still can.
      - jefftk 7y ago
        Any search engine is going to want to know what people click on so they can make their product better. For example, I just searched for [test] on DuckDuckGo and when clicking on the first result I see DDG sending a ping back: https://improving.duckduckgo.com/t/lc?... which contains which URL I clicked. (Disclosure: I work for Google, speaking only for myself)
        deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
        Hitton 7y ago
        That's not true, for instance Startpage doesn't do that.
        jefftk 7y ago
mtgx 7y ago
Can you even imagine what will be the end result of this strategy? Basically 1 site getting 99% of the traffic when everyone does voice searches and Google only gives them the "top answer" (which may or not may be correct). From a UX perspective, once they've already committed to this, it will be difficult for Google to change this to giving users "more alternatives" even if they wanted to (which they won't, unless there' a lot of backlash about it). It will also be worse than what we have now, as far as "giving alternatives" goes, as those will be limited
majani 7y ago
Then the snippet should just be used for voice search. And websites should opt in to the program.

soup10 7y ago

AdWords is and always has been the goose that lays the golden eggs, none of Google's other initiatives have ever rivaled that revenue. That's why they put so much effort into bolstering and optimizing their search results pages.

HenryBemis 7y ago
Another reason is the use of add-ons such as: "Google search link fix - Prevents Google and Yandex search pages from modifying search result links when you click them." I have stopped using Google a few years ago, but just in case I keep this (or similar) add-ons of my Firefox. I have no idea of the popularity of such addons, but they would also impact the tracking that Google does.
- TheArcane 7y ago
  I consider myself privacy conscious and have add-ons like muli-account containers, cookie auto-delete, UB Origin and Privacy Badger working in tandem. It's embarrassing that I wasn't aware of this extension, given how useful it seems - thanks!
  - IGotThroughIt 7y ago
    How safe are all these plugins we install to escape tracking? Are we trying to escape big tech tracking only to hand our information over to extension developers? Looking at network traffic often shows a ton of extensions sending data to some aws server almost perpetually. Asking because I'm not sure of the answer to this question and lately I've become even warier so I decided to uninstall everything except things I absolutely must have like colorzilla, grammarly and full-page screen capture. For adblocking I use brave and never ever touch firefox, opera or chrome. There's an extension that appends a share=1 parameter to all quora links to prevent them from forcing you to sign in in order to view a post. I like it but I'm trying to minimize my extensions footprint and I'd rather write my own script to perform the same script. The question is, how do you get to be sure that an extension is safe?
- igravious 7y ago
  Oh my God! This is so useful! I hate that I can't right-click on a search result to copy a URL. We definitely used to be able to do this, didn't we?
  - propogandist 7y ago
    It's been this way for ages, although for chrome (iirc) this is managed via hyperlink auditing [1] which allows google to track what you're clicking even though the link appears 'clean'. The click through google redirect also allows them to track things like relevancy of the content and time on site (if you return to google SERP by clicking the back button), in-case the target site isn't using google analytics (unfortunately most sites do). [1] https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage /links.html#hyperlink-auditing Hyperlink auditing can be blocked with uBlock Origin / uMatrix
  - wbl 7y ago
    Don't like the product? Switch. While you still can.
    - jefftk 7y ago
      Any search engine is going to want to know what people click on so they can make their product better. For example, I just searched for [test] on DuckDuckGo and when clicking on the first result I see DDG sending a ping back: https://improving.duckduckgo.com/t/lc?... which contains which URL I clicked. (Disclosure: I work for Google, speaking only for myself)
      - deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
      - Hitton 7y ago
        That's not true, for instance Startpage doesn't do that.
        jefftk 7y ago

mtgx 7y ago

Can you even imagine what will be the end result of this strategy? Basically 1 site getting 99% of the traffic when everyone does voice searches and Google only gives them the "top answer" (which may or not may be correct). From a UX perspective, once they've already committed to this, it will be difficult for Google to change this to giving users "more alternatives" even if they wanted to (which they won't, unless there' a lot of backlash about it). It will also be worse than what we have now, as far as "giving alternatives" goes, as those will be limited

majani 7y ago

Then the snippet should just be used for voice search. And websites should opt in to the program.