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Google are removing URLs entirely from search results?
- retpirato 7y agois there a greasemonkey/tampermonkey script to fix this?
- kd3 7y agoAnyone know of a good replacement for Google recaptcha?
- RodgerTheGreat 7y agoAnother small change that diminishes the utility of the site, and makes it harder for me to sift through the junk content that increasingly makes it to the top of the pile. I think this has convinced me to start using Duck Duck Go as my search provider.
- bobsoap 7y agoRemember AOL, anyone? And so, we've come full circle.
- t34543 7y agoKeywords are back. Everything old is new again.
- Frost1x 7y agoComputing technology goes in circles it seems. We're also back to the mainframe era where we push all our computing to remote resources. I recall an infamous Apple ad shunning IBM as big brother near the beginning of the PC revolution. Now we have the illusion of generalized computing tied to all sorts of external services.
- fortran77 7y agoBetween google and facebook, we have AOL. You can stay in their silos all day and never "really" be on the World Wide Web as it was originally envisioned.
- bsdubernerd 7y agoIn my tech circle, almost everyone has switched to another search engine (ddg mostly, startpage, bing), which is quite telling. I noticed as I spot them in a search result page while together, not because they told me. This was an eye opener. I initially _had_ to because the search itself became unreliable for me (finding technical terms is now a frustration in quoting and checking for "missing from the page: term"), but other search engines (like ddg) are not better in this area. Issues with AMP links though made me permanently switch the default search engine entirely. I now use google as a backup, reluctantly and in combination with others, exactly how I was using altavista and yahoo eons ago. I would have never imagined this would happen. But if I ask _any_ other non-tech person, google is still the only search engine they know (or even don't know) about.
- filesystem 7y agoI have tried to switch to DDG as my primary a few times now. It works great for basic searches, but I still go to google when I’m troubleshooting something and need answers fast. DDG just isn’t there yet in terms of time-to-answer.
- bsdubernerd 7y agoI'm not 100% happy with DDG either, it just needs to be less frustrating than google on the average, which lowers the bar to competition a lot.
- udkyo 7y agoDDG is fine when you need help with a problem a lot of people bump up against frequently, but its helpfulness nosedives when your journey takes you off the beaten track.
- tiborsaas 7y agoWhere do you live? In my tech circle, pretty much everybody uses Google I haven't seen anyone DDG-ing or even mentioning switching away from google. I've seen some FF users though :)
- throwaway122378 7y agoThey also do open most links in their own google.com wrapper. Time to break them up
- Sharlin 7y agoWhich is extremely annoying when it’s a pdf or other document that’s set to immediately download; it’s rather tricky to get the actual URL if you want to share it as it won’t ever show up in the address bar.
- jacquesm 7y agoPet peeve of mine, see comment above.
- zeitg3ist 7y agoYou can usually right-click the file in the downloads panel of the browser and copy its url.
- Sharlin 7y agoThanks, somehow hadn't discovered that!
- einr 7y agoI use the extension "Don't track me Google" to circumvent this. Converts all links to the direct URL on Google search pages. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/dont-track-me-google1/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/dont-track-me...
- ryandrake 7y agoIt's getting harder and harder in general to get the raw source document for everything. Look at image search. You search for an image, and the search results are [not the original] thumbnails. Then you click a thumbnail and it takes you to a larger scaled down [not the original] image. Then when you click that it takes you to some image sharing site slathered with ads and chrome all over the page and another scaled down [not the original] image. If you're lucky, you can use some incantation of right-click and/or View Page Source to get the actual high-resolution original image that you're looking for. Total madness! When I'm looking for an image, I expect my search engine to return me a URL with .png or .jpg at the end of it.
- ChrisCinelli 7y agoMaybe an A/B test?
- treebornfrog 7y agoI don't see how this is relevant. Even if it was an ab test, we know that Google is looking to remove url structures from search results.
- josteink 7y agoProbably also the url bar from Chrome, soon to be replaced by a Google keywords-bar.
- jefftk 7y agoIt doesn't tell you that. For example, it could be an experiment to learn how much weight users put on the URL in choosing between results. (Disclosure: I work at Google, but I don't work in Search and don't know anything specific here)
- jacquesm 7y agoIt could be. But I would put my money on this being what it actually looks like: a way to test the waters on what kind of effect dropping visible URLs in results would have. And if you work at Google, wouldn't you want to know? Maybe ask the search team and report back what you find, I'm really curious.
- tomohawk 7y agoSo, no longer a search service, but a proxy service with built in search?
- jacquesm 7y agoOn top of a CAN. "Content Appropriation Network", something a bit like a CDN only you get to lose your audience.
- buboard 7y agoBetween amp results, and google masquerading as other domains, the url field was dishonest anyway. Welcome to google s walled garden. Please verify your site so we know who we are banning. Google. It’s got electrolytes (tm)
- mantap 7y agoThis is so dangerous, imagine how it will be abused for phishing. Now even an expert user can't tell the difference.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- daolf 7y agoThe title seems a bit misleading, Google do experiments like this all the time. Of course, should this change be permanent, we would have to be worried, but stating that it is already the case is not true. PS: here is one example: https://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2018/03/23/google-zero-search-results https://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2018/03/23/google-zero-se...
- jacquesm 7y agoEven as an experiment it is terribly misguided and that something like this would make it into the production environment as an experiment is a clear sign that they are actually considering rolling something like this out to the GP.
- daolf 7y agoI totally agree, I just think that "Google is currently experimenting removing URLs entirely from the search" would have been a more honest title.
- jacquesm 7y agoIt's probably that for that user that's what it looks like and then you combine that with HN's original title policy. It's not 100% perfect but it works most of the time.
- Finnucane 7y agoEven if it just a test, then they are doing it to gauge the result of the test. That result should be as negative as possible.
- jacquesm 7y agoIt's still regular for me but if true this will probably be the last straw for me. It's already absolutely impossible to send someone a link to a pdf you've found through google, this would make it impossible to send any link. That bloody wrapper is also a fine piece of shit. Search engines should link to content, not appropriate that content, hide who supplies it or mess with the links.
- amoron 7y agoHave been experiencing the new Google search for several weeks now. It is absolutely horrible and severely confusing. For me too this is the last straw so I started migrating away from all Google products.
- Sendotsh 7y agoGoogle isn’t really a search engine anymore. They’re a data harvesting company who then try find ways to profit off sharing that data with you. Google penalises other websites for stealing content or re-hosting stuff without adding value, then goes ahead and does exactly that all the time.
- andai 7y agoGoogle is an organism and uses attack and defense against its perceived enemies.
- Razengan 7y agoA more appropriate analogy would be cancer.
- 9HZZRfNlpR 7y agoIt makes perfectly sense if you read how Google was originally funded. Culture runs from the birth.
- iKevinShah 7y agoAny link for that please?
- asar 7y agoI think it's a little too early to come to a full conclusion here. Google is constantly testing layout changes in SERPs and it seems like OP ended up in a test. The thread is 4 weeks old and I haven't seen or read anything on these changes anywhere but on this thread. I still think Google's general direction is clear with more webmaster incentives for structured data, amp and also Google just straight up answering questions (nutrition, sports etc.). But this example doesn't prove that Google is removing URLs from SERPs, it is one version of many that are tested constantly to improve CTR and other metrics.
- mc32 7y agoI’ve seen this new presentation too. At first I didn’t think much of it. The version I saw was slightly different. It was using carets to divide the URL, both for domain as well as for directories. (So carets were substituting for ford and slashes; this goes further).
- dooglius 7y agoI just tested and I see it as well
- jacquesm 7y agoIt's out in the wild. It never should have passed the first level of internal discussion.
- ddingus 7y agoHit me today. I hate it. I get URLs all the time for research, writing and my own database of info. Honestly, I was willing to put up with BS so long as I actually got the data I was looking for. Now that I do not get it, and am forced into every result being turned into "I'm feeling lucky", I now have to abandon Google search. This is a bigger deal than they want it to be. Forced trust scenarios never go well. Abuse = profit = abuse.
- spinningslate 7y agoIt's less the specifics and more the trend. Google's direction is, as stated elsewhere, to be seen as the source of information - not a route to it. As you note, they're incentivising structured content - which means they can appropriate it and present directly rather than providing a link to the originator. No doubt some will find it helpful (as with AMP). Some will find it unacceptable appropriation. I'm most definitely in the latter camp. I don't use Google search anymore, having transitioned to DDG 2+ years ago. I rarely find situations where reverting to Google is necessary, and when I do, a `g!` in DDG is as close as I get. I realise I may be in a minority, but as far as I'm concerned both Google and Facebook have jumped the shark. They're become corporate behemoths, a malaise that seems to come to all companies of a certain age and scale. They've lost focus on providing useful, innovative services for real people. Instead, they're all about "shareholder value". Both are ripe for disruption.
- johnchristopher 7y agoA year or two ago I noticed that Youtube links were messed up in the search result so maybe the writing has been on the wall for a real long time. For instance, if you google https://www.google.com/search?q=jimmy+eat+world+555 https://www.google.com/search?q=jimmy+eat+world+555 you get a thumbnail with a Youtube URL linking to the actual video but as soon as you right or left click the link it's changed to a google.com link with a lot of parameters. Makes it super frustrating if you want to share a link to the youtube video from the SERP.
- djmips 7y agoI tested that and when I right clicked the link was just the raw YouTube link. Also tried in incognito and same result. Interesting.
- johnchristopher 7y agoHere's a video of what it looks like on my end https://streamable.com/rdppj https://streamable.com/rdppj (ff, incognito, can't remember if I ever checked it out in Chrome). The status bar shows the updated link as I right or left click on it. I then copy paste the new URL to show it leads to the Youtube link. Well: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XU-TZiVVaTE" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XU-TZiVVaTE" onmousedown="return rwt(this,'','','','1','AOvVaw3lnl6zJ37POHhefQnIow95','','2ahUKEwiZ0PDWzMvlAhVDaFAKHQGODhYQyCkwAHoECAkQBQ','','',event)">
- RenRav 7y agoThis is how the mobile version of Google behaves, is it not?
- buboard 7y agoI see an icon and address above the title on mobile
- gniv 7y agoAre you sure? Sometimes the title of a page is the url (or they use the url when the title is missing?). I see titles mostly.
- buboard 7y agoThis is the style of results i m seeing in mobile: https://i.imgur.com/eDZjQlW.png https://i.imgur.com/eDZjQlW.png I guess it s different for everyone
- RenRav 7y agoI can't remember the last time mobile searches displayed the URL, it has looked like this for me: https://i.imgur.com/mPQk9wf.png https://i.imgur.com/mPQk9wf.png
- Angostura 7y agoJust waiting for iOS to include a ‘bypass AMP’ setting.
- nyuszika7h 7y agoYou can use 3D Touch / Haptic Touch for that in Safari.
- quantumwoke 7y agoWhen I noticed this happen to my account, I thought 'this is it'. We survived (sort of) the adpocalypse - time for the urlpocalypse?
- war1025 7y agoI've used Yahoo for search since basically forever. My understanding is its backed by Bing these days. It's really not bad. Don't understand why everyone sticks to google other than marketing and momentum.
- rapnie 7y agoYou'll probably hand over your search data to Verizon then. Why not use e.g. DDG (or Searx as mentioned elsewhere in this thread): > 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. > DuckDuckGo positions itself as a search engine that puts privacy first and as such it does not store IP addresses, does not log user information, and uses cookies only when required. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DuckDuckGo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DuckDuckGo
- war1025 7y agoNot something I'm particularly concerned about to be honest. My main point is that there are several completely adequate replacements for google, DuckDuckGo being one of them.
- F00bart 7y agoLack of privacy is google‘s business model. So an alternative would require a different business model, or they‘d end up at the same place eventually.
- jjohansson 7y agoGoogle just last week announced a drop in profit, so expect more of these types of “optimizations” over the coming months. Over the past 6 months they’ve already increased the font size of SERPs, made their ads look even more similar to organic results, and started showing multiple results from the same site in the top 5 results for highly competitive terms. All of these “optimizations” are designed to encourage more ad revenue. Plus their Google Ads account managers have become hyper aggressive in pushing their keyword and bidding AI, which according to our tests increase costs per conversions.
- MayeulC 7y agoBut isn't Google going to realize that there isn't such a thing as infinite growth? I get that they got used to tremendous growth in the early days. But it has to stop at some point. Same is true for the economy (we "fix" that with inflation). And they're probably going to be split up before they reach the theoritical maximum. Couldn't they just be nice neighbors and not squeeze the last drop of milk out of us. I'd wager that the drop in productivity caused by Google, Facebook and the advertisement-based business model that they encourage dwarfs their revenue by several orders of magnitude.
- izacus 7y ago> But isn't Google going to realize that there isn't such a thing as infinite growth? Google (and other corps) will realize that when stock market will stop demanding infinite growh and not a cent sooner. Leaderships don't get paid in user happiness, they get rewarded by stock value. And stock market demands infinite unbounded growth for all eternity.
- jjohansson 7y agoGoogle is getting hammered by Amazon for product-centric searches, while Facebook/Twitter/LinkedIn are eating into their ad share. Bing is also surprisingly resilient, taking big steps with their search targeting capabilities. There is significant resentment towards Google in the SEM community (and by people overall). Subjectively, their results have gotten significantly worse over the past 1.5 years. Search is ripe for disruption.
- knorker 7y agoGood thing Bing is no longer shit.
- foxes 7y agoTime to remind everyone about searx [0]. It can use google results and you can run your own instance. [0] https://searx.me/ https://searx.me/ [1] https://github.com/asciimoo/searx https://github.com/asciimoo/searx
- McDev 7y agoJust tried this, saw the following error: google (unexpected crash: CAPTCHA required) I like the idea though
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- DavideNL 7y agoI get this error when i try to search in https://searx.me/ https://searx.me/ : Error! Engines cannot retrieve results. google (unexpected crash: CAPTCHA required) Please, try again later or find another searx instance. EDIT: https://github.com/asciimoo/searx/issues/729 https://github.com/asciimoo/searx/issues/729
- foxes 7y agoYep that seems to happen sometimes. Here is a list of other public instances. https://github.com/asciimoo/searx/wiki/Searx-instances https://github.com/asciimoo/searx/wiki/Searx-instances
- ahbyb 7y agoI don't care. Usually URLs are long and don't appear in their entirety. They are also links, so it's hard (or almost impossible) to copy them using a computer and impossible to copy them using a mobile.
- yyyk 7y agoThis is a purely anti-user move. No user gains anything by it, this actually helps phishing sites. Oh, and it happens to help Google's AMP effort, which can now pretend to be the original site even more effectively. Time to get everyone to use Duck Duck Go, and to get rid of those Google CAPTCHAs which are an even bigger data harvesting operation than search.
- backtoyoujim 7y agoDoes Duck Duck Go use google ?
- ddingus 7y agoWith the URLs missing, that just got harder.
- themodelplumber 7y agoI thought they used Bing and some other services sprinkled in here and there, like weather. BTW DDG was very nice during the PSPS recently, as our cell data was extremely slow and DDG was nice and fast on that connection. Relatively speaking.
- jsilence 7y agoWould love to switch to DDG, but it consistently gives me search results that do not contain s search term at all, even when I wrap it in double quotes. So they give me thousands of non relevant search results.
- marcosdumay 7y agoIt's actually weird to see that in a DDG x Google comparison... But yes, DDG has started giving me results with entire terms removed from the search since recently, and I have to add quotes all the time to get them back. But at least with DDG we have to option of quoting the terms. Google is much worse at this in any way you care to measure.
- 7y ago
- z3t4 7y agoProbably ads. On some search words the entire first page will be filled with ads.
- prennert 7y agoI have tweeted about this a couple of weeks ago. No answer from Google, but then again I don't have much of a following. I hope this attention turns their decision around. I noticed this particularly badly when I tried to Google a product. I was after reviews but without the links it is impossible to tell whether a result leads to a review, a shop, a forum or whatever. It was surprising to me how much information is encoded in a URL. I analyzed it subconsciously all the time. It only became obvious once it was missing.
- CriticalCathed 7y agoHow are computer scientists and software engineers at Google okay with this? This type of change, on top of the very sketchy AMP stuff, seriously makes me question the ethics of those who work at Google. This seems like an obvious "no, that's a bad idea" to anyone who isn't malicious.
- SquareWheel 7y agoGoogle run hundreds of A/B tests. The chances of this ever being rolled more widely out are slim to none. Terribly misleading headline.
- yyyk 7y agoThis was sent to production. Obviously someone thinks about deploying this change. This is precisely the time for pushback - before Google does this - to tell Google their A/B result is a very big fail. Also, to get some people to try alternatives, because even if this isn't deployed, Google's anti-user direction seems clear enough.
- SquareWheel 7y ago>Obviously someone thinks about deploying this change. They could be testing this for any number of reasons. Maybe they're trying to learn something specific rather than change how the product works long-term. The linked post is from a month ago and there's been no evidence of this test being scaled up. Besides, it's still a misleading title.
- yyyk 7y ago"They could be testing this for any number of reasons." Are they testing how to get maximum outrage from HN!? I kid. I think the suspicious attitude is justified given Google's recent history; and it's better to make our opinion clear before Google does something stupid. As for "a month ago", some other people in the thread also see this, so I guess Google is still "testing" it.
- prennert 7y agoI saw this a couple of weeks ago. I think chances are high that it is being pushed into product if it has not happened yet.
- onetimemanytime 7y agoif they keep the url, users might remember it and go there directly next time, skipping Google.
- bhartzer 7y agoOne of the issues that many don’t realize is that if google removes the domain it opens it up for more phishing attempts. If users don’t see the domain then they may see a similar site and click on it. But it’s not the official site.
- davidy123 7y agoFirst of all, I hope this is just an tiny experiment or better a hoax, and won't be widely adopted. Google deserves constant critique, but they also deserve credit as a company that often promotes the open way first (for example, schema.org as a way anyone can describe their information, which can be ready by anyone). But if it's not an experiment, I'd start putting my energy into moving away from Google. In the AltaVista era, just before Google, there was a company called Real Names, which wanted to bypass intentional DNS and use searches as direct keywords to domains. Since many people use Google to go to everyday sites, just taking the top result each time, this is in effect what Google would be doing with this change, since one would have to actually go to the site to verify it. Which would be great for ad impressions, but terrible for the consumer experience, IMO way too random for Google to seriously consider it. The next step would be to remove URLs from browsers. But that would be quite a change in direction from good intentions.
- judge2020 7y agoI think it's more "test with users but keep programmers/power users happy". Old accounts (or maybe accounts they deem to be 'power users'?) still see the green http/s links, and my search for "mortgages" doesn't show the favicons like the reddit suggests. https://i.judge.sh/rare/Spoon/chrome_EVGYE1pF7H.png https://i.judge.sh/rare/Spoon/chrome_EVGYE1pF7H.png This happened with the little icons next to the "all/news/images" tabs at the top a few months ago, I didn't see them in my G search but incognito showed them.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- anchpop 7y agoI tried the same search in both and got the same results (links displayed in both). Maybe you just happened to get into a different A/B bucket when you opened incognito
- bhartzer 7y agoThis is not a tiny experiment. They have been testing the removal of domains like this for YEARS.
- Santosh83 7y agoURLs are one of the basic building blocks of the WWW. Again Google is abusing it's practical monopoly as the gateway to the WWW to consolidate the lock-in. Again, as always, the tech aware crowd will make a huge noise, perhaps delay the inevitable, but sooner or later this WILL be implemented all across Google (right now seems specific to Google UK), and again, as always, the billions of ordinary Internet users are going to be slightly surprised, but shrug and get used to the change and move on. And that will help consolidate the change and the tech aware crowd will either grudgingly follow or just stay holed up elsewhere and in either case Google doesn't care. This is just another manifestation of the corporate/state control and Balkanisation of the Internet that has slowly been taking place. The Internet will pretty soon be entirely subsumed into various the structure of various countries and corporations and there'll be no such thing as the "free web", at least for most users not willing to go through several hoops.
- modzu 7y agoreminds me of when google made their ads match the formatting of the actual search results. fu google.
- austhrow743 7y agoLeft gmail just over a year ago which was the biggest anchor holding me to Google. Appears this was what was needed to get me over to duckduckgo on search. Results have been fine for everything I've searched in the last hour.
- bharam 7y agoWhat was your process for leaving Google? I'm on Android, have a GMail account and so on. If you want to leave where do you start?
- MayeulC 7y agoNot the parent, and you might consider me biased/extremist, but it might give you ideas: I've been moving to a self-hosted (yunohost for now) solution on a re-purposed computer. Unfortunately, this isn't for everyone. This covers mail, cloud (with nextcloud: calendar, contacts, pictures), and many others. On Android, I mostly use F-droid, as I find apps there are of better quality anyways. The only other apps left on my phone are for banking and transportation, plus maybe a few select services. I will likely move over to a pinephone when they are available. I can't wait to have a serviceable phone, both hardware and software. The self-hosted way maybe isn't for everyone, but if every person that does it offers access to family and friends, it wouldn't take that many hosts... and there are commercial/nonprofit orgs that provide some hosting options. I do not self-host a search engine, though (searx didn't work well, and isn't really a search engine). It took me a few weeks to get used to ddg, but I find it very hard to use Google nowadays, as I got used to bangs, instant answers, the way to enter search terms, etc. I actually use my old (ca. 2010) Google-fu, which works well, but not on Google anymore.
- austhrow743 7y agoI signed up for a personal domain so I wouldn't have to move addresses ever again and then went with fastmail for email hosting. Added new email to email clients, set it as the default to send from, then went down my account list in my password manager and swapped the registered email for all of the accounts I care about. Then it was just a year of replying back to people when they emailed me at gmail saying "ps. New email address as you can see" Nothing complex, just takes time to get the message out there.
- known 7y agoReminds me "Companies ruined or almost ruined by Indians" https://archive.is/UpV1Y https://archive.is/UpV1Y
- thinkingemote 7y agoI'm also seeing no URLs. Here is the same Google search in Firefox and Chromium as a logged in user. With firefox it shows the URLs and with Chromium it doesn't : https://i.imgur.com/Ko8niRF.png https://i.imgur.com/Ko8niRF.png
- amursft 7y agoI'm very curious what (if any) user testing resulted in this change, because I really don't like the sound of it. Domain is a lot of how I try to judge the quality of a result.
- qwerty456127 7y agoPhishers gonna love this. Now you see a search result and can't even know what site that actually is.
- fraaaam 7y agoI switched to Ecosia a while ago and most of my searches return relatively solid results. For the ones that don't, you can type a #g at the end of your search term to continue to use google. They claim to not maintain search history profiles, they still have URLs, and they implement more search features regularly from what Ive seen. Not as private as DDG, but its definitely a step in the right direction. Oh and they plant a tree for every 40 searches or so.
- beardog 7y agoEcosia is nice, but I find their privacy claims to be a little misleading. They forward searches to Bing alongside your IP address and are not in control of what Bing stores. DDG uses Bing as well, but does not send your IP there. "For example, when you do a search on Ecosia we forward the following information to our partner, Bing: IP address, user agent string, search term, and some settings like your country and language setting." Although it does claim that bing anonymizes the data after 4 days.
- tambourine_man 7y agoThis maybe the straw that’ll break the camel’s back. I’m each day more pissed off with AMP. It’s taken over the web to such degree that it became essentially a first barrier to whatever content I’m accessing. The experience is so terrible that I refuse to use it, so there goes another tap reload to access the real thing. And sometimes the site refuses me. For whatever reason, I get stuck on a poorly implemented Google paywall even though I’m a paying customer of the site. And now this. Wrapping the original URL on search results wasn’t enough it seems. Add that to Gmail’s general suckiness and I can see them bleeding the advanced users that got them where they are pretty fast.
- mirimir 7y agoI just checked Google search with Chrome and Firefox in Debian, and both still show URLs for actual search results. But not for ads. So I wonder if Google plans to drop URLs from actual search results. And if they do, whether using Startpage, or DDG with the Google option, would still show them.
- beardog 7y agoI am seeing this on Google Chrome on my phone, but not on firefox on my desktop (both incognito and not)
- amiga-workbench 7y agoAre they going to try and pull a bait and switch on the web with AMP and hope that the normies are too dumb to notice?
- emrehan 7y agoWhether this claim is true nor not, Google is able to pull such a move due to its monopoly. Most of us are against monopolies but don’t care about Google’s central position on our precious Internet. We should act up though. One day, it could be too late. I’ve been using DDG for around a year now after numerous failed attempts in the past. I, too, had been frustrated with some search results, but I don’t miss Google anymore at all thanks to the bangs feature. It is not obvious but DDG has a learning curve. You should re-learn the practice of “Googling skill” that we had to have years ago. I could even guess which queries DDG would fail to bring meaningful results before hitting enter now. In these cases I add a “!s” bang for https://startpage.com https://startpage.com — a privacy conscious Google proxy. DDG bangs are especially useful on iOS, where you could type a query from any page and only have 3 options: Search in the Web/App Store/Maps. If the search engine is DDG though, you could search your query in any website you know its bang with just a single step.
- jacquesm 7y agoWhy on earth is this comment downvoted?
- reaperducer 7y agoA fair number of HN users work for said monopoly.
- jacquesm 7y agoWould be nice if they participated but refrained from voting.
- marcoseliziario 7y agoNot sure if is that the case. HN sometimes likes to downvote things randomly, for no discernible reason at all.
- fbonetti 7y agoThere’s a difference between being the dominant player in an industry and having a monopoly. Consumers overwhelmingly prefer Google because it’s the best search engine, period. The second that changes, users will switch to something else. Remember that AOL, Yahoo, and MySpace “monopolized” the internet not that long ago. There were hysterical articles in the mid 2000s speculating on whether or not these companies had a “cyber monopoly”. I doubt you think those companies are still the dominant players on the internet...
- einpoklum 7y agoWell, this isn't happening when I use Google, but: 1. I use ad-blocking (e.g. uBlock Origin + EFF Privacy Badger), so all those ads go away. Maybe the actual search results are simply under a pile of commercial junk? 2. I try to use DuckDuckGo rather than Google.
- pharrington 7y agoAgreeing with this redditor—this is almost certainly an automated A/B test - https://www.reddit.com/r/bigseo/comments/def9gg/google_are_removing_urls_entirely_from_the_search/f2z65py/ https://www.reddit.com/r/bigseo/comments/def9gg/google_are_r...
- alperakgun 7y agoGooogle quarterly earnings follow each other: - Ads look like valid search results - Ads are on top, right, bottom in desktop, on maps too - URLs disappear - The address bar shortens the history, and search is the only way out - Less advanced search options Rife for disruption.
- zxcvbn4038 7y agoI’m not sure what Google is thinking here, this is an easy win for phishing sites - not just a lifeline but they are going to flourish. It’s also a huge win for all the sites that are just mirrors of other sites, and low quality sites like Pinterest that flood google with links that only work in their app (which I thought was against Google’s TOS but they have condoned Pinterest for years). the only possible upside I see is that it could deal a bow to domain name speculation - what good is a domain if nobody sees it or has to type it? It’s just an dumb indirection mechanism at that point. Though if domains stop being meaningful to humans then that leads right back to phishing and scams. Going to be bad if this isn’t a means to an end we’re not aware of yet.
- danShumway 7y agoI don't think it's a secret. Google's been pretty open for a while about the fact that they want to get rid of URLs entirely on the web.[0] De-emphasizing the URL in search is a necessary step on the path to that end. The less of a role the URL plays in ordinary people's lives, the less that people will understand it, and the more evidence Google will see that it can be de-emphasized in other places, and eventually removed or replaced entirely. And to a certain extent, I get it. I myself would like to move away from URLs to a DAT-adjacent system. I'm not fond of DNS as it works today. I just think Google's approach to all of this is naive and user-hostile. I think their solution will be worse than the problem. Proponents of DAT systems are advocating that URLs as we use them today aren't great for a lot of stuff, including protecting against phishing, and we should be more up-front about that and stop aiming for readability in domain names -- in short, don't promise something that we can't guarantee. On the other hand, Google is advocating that there should be centralized authorities that tell you Walmart is Walmart and everything should be highly tied to trademarks and brands. Their position is, "phishing won't be a problem because we'll just get good at blocking phishers." When you search on Google for Walmart, it'll be the first result and you'll click on it and trust Google. It's a very centralized, brand-first, Capitalist approach to the web, where reliability is tied to being big enough that you can tell potential customers or users to just Google your name. Sometimes Google does bad things and we theorize that maybe they're trying to change the web; but in this case we don't have to theorize. They're just openly trying to change the web. Google doesn't like URLs. [0]: https://www.wired.com/story/google-wants-to-kill-the-url/ https://www.wired.com/story/google-wants-to-kill-the-url/
- meh206 7y agoIt's a move that even sheeple won't like
- docuru 7y agoI remember reading a thread about this move a while ago
- exikyut 7y agoI observed this with amused, scornful yet despondent cynicism when it rolled out for me a couple of months ago. (I'm in AU.) It doesn't work. At all. (TL;DR click the links at the bottom, or keep reading and be prepared to reattach your jaw.) In an age of technical illiteracy from both young people and old, Google has made phishing campaigns a million times easier. I have no contacts inside Google, but I would (still) put decent money on the chances being 1000% that a very large security stink was raised about this internally... to apparently no avail. So I'm fascinated to see where this goes, security debacle, bathwater and all. YouTube universally shows "https://www.youtube.com https://www.youtube.com › watch". This site consists entirely of the One True Path™ "https://news.ycombinator.com https://news.ycombinator.com › item". Google Books, similarly, stocks hundreds of millions of one particular title, "https://books.google.com https://books.google.com › books". GitHub often shows up as "https://github.com https://github.com › ..." or "https://github.com https://github.com › projectname" (yes, I'm not kidding, the repo author is elided from the URL). Looking forward to seeing how spammers take advantage of this. Best of all was the one time I clicked something that _downloaded a file_ (it had Content-Disposition: attachment set). Oh, because it was an .mbox file; that makes sense... except the filename and extension were completely elided from the URL, so the random download was quite the violation of the principle of least surprise. Shortly after the file download event, I decided to get in touch with Google to politely sort of go "what gives" in case anything interesting or insightful came of the resulting conversation. The Product Forums is basically "cat /dev/pitchforks > /dev/null" so I didn't want to get stampeded to death in there, and the various feedback options on the site feel like a surreal merging of /dev/urandom and /dev/zero so I was distinctly uncertain about pursuing those options either. So I decided to try https://issuetracker.google.com/ https://issuetracker.google.com/. Well, I can report that this little-known corner of Google, mostly used to track Android issues, is very topically focused and simply doesn't have the forwarding infrastructure (ahem, or policy) to handle anything else. At least the human at the other end was nice about it. I took a screenshot of the thread I created (which only I can view), and put it up at https://imgur.com/a/K443Tkp https://imgur.com/a/K443Tkp. While writing this post, I also decided to properly memorialize this insanity and added screenshots of all the examples in the bugreport to the above album. (Besides the small screenshot of LWN, all were taken today.) Since PNGs aren't very clipboard-friendly, here's a copy-paste (expires: never) of my submission: https://pastebin.com/ksBEEG91 https://pastebin.com/ksBEEG91 NB. Don't thrash against the New Way. It ensures your job security as a security consultant. And earmarks you as Elite, And To Be Watched Out For, or something. I don't know. (Oh, and I took all the screenshots using super-sized Xvnc. Chrome's devtools' full-page screenshot function doesn't work at all with the issue tracker UI.) (And I don't live anywhere near Hurstville. May GeoIP forever remain hand-wavily inaccurate!)
- hartator 7y agoAt SerpApi.com, we've noticed this new format for a while. And the bad news is the trend seems to accelerate. :/
- userbinator 7y agoI've noticed that if you change your user-agent to something really old and turn off JS, you can still get more "normal" looking results, complete with the option to view the cached page right there, but I'm not sure how long that will last... Also don't forget that not too long ago, Google decided to start hiding pieces of URLs and convincing the web standards groups to make that a standard: https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/google/google-chrome-hides-www-and-https-in-the-address-bar-again/ https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/google/google-chrome-h... (In that article there's a very visible email address of a product manager at Google responsible for this, be sure to let her know your thoughts...) I think that's just more proof that "web standards" aren't necessarily good for the user, especially if they're controlled by anti-user corporations. It's not unlike what's happening with open-source too: "we can do all these horrible things to oppress you, but it's open-source so you can see exactly what we do to you."
- skybrian 7y agoThat's a little different. You often don't see the full URL on a phone because the text box isn't big enough, so it gets cut off. When the browser doesn't have space to show the whole thing, displaying the most security-relevant part (the domain name) makes more sense than blindly truncating the end off it, even though doing it the dumb way is how we're used to text fields working. Designing for small screens is tricky. You can still get the whole URL easily. You could send email but it's just going to come off as badly informed, unless you show that you understand what they're trying to do and still disagree.
- userbinator 7y agoThe article talks about the desktop version specifically. A phone is a little different, I agree.
- freediver 7y agoFrom the standpoint of Google this is passing the 'grandma test'. They are catering to billions of users, of whom only tiny minority care about the full URL displayed; for most it's unnecessary information. The results look cleaner this way. It also slightly compresses the results so they can probably fit one more above the fold. The Google way is to reduce complexity for the user as much as possible. This may be in contrast to what most HN users expect from a search engine (transparency and control). Google has been ignoring this segment as most use adblocker anyway so the cost/benefit appears bad, for now.
- anchpop 7y agoIt also shows the favicons, which help people recognize what site they're looking at if they're familiar with them much more quickly than a url can.
- syphilis2 7y agoSometimes when using Google News it looks like the news site has loaded, but the browser still displays the Google URL. Does anyone know what is going on? It's obnoxious when I want to send the link to someone but I only have access to the Google URL. Example URL: https://news.google.com/articles/CAIiEMVJWO7QqMIc4YUoEkX9LZMqFwgEKg8IACoHCAowjuuKAzCWrzww9oEY?hl=en-US&gl=US&ceid=US%3Aen https://news.google.com/articles/CAIiEMVJWO7QqMIc4YUoEkX9LZM...
- ddingus 7y agoWell, that $17k to give up Google question just got devalued. Nobody needs URLs removed, except Google.
- ddingus 7y agoQuery: Good search tools in addition to ddg.gg I really hate no URL results. I search and obtain URLs all the time. Google is ruined for me.
- zepearl 7y agoToday I used a couple of times "Qwant" (no clue what it means and no clue why "lite"): https://lite.qwant.com https://lite.qwant.com They were always technical searches. In all cases the first result was perfect, but the highlighting of the searched keywords in the result never worked too well so far)
- ddingus 7y agoThanks
- nullc 7y agoThe fact that google rewrites the displayed URLs as you click on them to intercept the traffic (and that firefox continues to allow them to do it: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=229050 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=229050) is bad enough. Google's current behavior makes it so you can't copy URLs from search results so your only option is to copy the displayed URL (if it's short enough) ... so of course, they're going to remove the displayed URL. Copying the search results URLs is something that I need to do almost every day to copy scientific paper urls to people in chat ... usually I can't click the url to get it, because clicking it just launches a PDF viewer. This single obnoxious bit of user spying behavior that Mozilla continues to facilitate has probably already wasted a full working week of my life. On the plus (?) side, now that google is removing the one remaining work around I'll likely get stuck using a non-google search regardless of the worse results.
- firexcy 7y agoYes, and this behavior is also annoying because it prevents you from copying the real URL directly from the result page. Instead you’re getting a rewrited URL that is neither readable or shareable.
- Jagat 7y agoIt's not a haox folks. It just so happens that my Chrome user is not in the A/B test, but my firefox user is. Here are the two versions I see on two different browsers. Chrome shows URLs while firefox doesn't https://imgur.com/a/TX49AZu https://imgur.com/a/TX49AZu
- seganddr 7y agoI am upset every time I see that interface. It makes it so much more difficult to identify fake/spam websites.
- FpUser 7y agoThat was then: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/google/7503641/Sergey-Brin-My-upbringing-in-USSR-helped-shape-Googles-views-on-China.html https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/google/7503641/Sergey... And this is now. Do no evil my a$$ Mr. Sergey Brin. Hypocrite is your middle name. Yeah, yeah I know, it is all big bad shareholders
- Animats 7y agoIs this only being done for some users, or what? Do you have to have a Google account and be logged in? Not seeing this. (I have an old Firefox and Chrome add-on, "Ad Limiter", which puts ratings on links based on finding the business behind the site and looking it up. As a side effect, if you mouse over its colored checkmarks, you get a "dog tag" with info about the site, including the domain. So that's an available workaround, if needed.)
- Rebelgecko 7y agoIt's been happening to me for a few months. It's what prompted me to finally move over to DDG
- 14 7y agoCan I ask HN for help. Almost have my dad switched off chrome but he keeps heading back to use the built in voice search. Last I checked it wasn't built into Firefox. Is there a privacy minded voice search assistance he can use. We don't even mind paying for a program. Just insure what to use that will also be better then google in terms of privacy. Thanks
- antpls 7y agoWhat I find more worrying are all the anecdotes of people trying to blacklist Google and then not being able to browse the Web because of Captcha, login, and other weird tracking.
- ibrimstone 7y agoSo, $AAPL AND RE-Branded $YHOO IS USING $IBM’s WATSON FOR M2M2BM2M and you’re letting them drink down on your suction-economies data every minute of the day if you run any app I.WEATHER.
- drpixie 7y agoDon't like it but there is an up side - the main links now seem to point directly to the destination, instead of google's tracking servers. So you can see the real address in your browser's hint, at least until lets-be-evil point the link to their trackers.
- jrahmy 7y agoThe links have _ostensibly_ pointed to the destination for quite some time, at least for me. The current techniques they use for tracking clicks do not require otherwise. They just use pings[1] where supported, and a JS mouse-down event to switch the destination when clicking elsewhere. [1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/a#ping https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/a#...
- corford 7y agoEchoing everyone else: this is the shove I needed to finally swap to DDG full time. Bonus I just discovered: by setting DDG as my search provider in Firefox, I can now go directly to wikipedia articles or google images from FF's search toolbar - just have to prepend the appropriate bang... quite handy!