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Ask HN: Will you stop Googling now, that it removed URLs and added favicons?
I am seriously considering moving away from Google (or writing a browser addon) which will revert search results back to clean and readable form.
It seems "ad blending" made a final step towards morphing into organic results. It was distinct background first, ads count limited, then it went further and further and now it's just a favicon saying 'Ad' which distinguish sponsored content from the organic.
- JohnFen 7y agoI would, yes, if I hadn't given up on Google already.
- aosaigh 7y agoUgh, I only noticed the favicons today. It's such a clear attempt to blur the lines between the regular results (now with favicons) and the ads (now with something that looks very like a favicon, particularly when scrolling). I've also noticed recently that the first search result page is absolutely filled with nonsense: "People also ask" "Refined by Brand" Map results, Sponsered banner etc. I did a search recently where there were only 3 actual results on the first page, the rest were peripheral items. It's such a mess. Unfortunately no matter how many times I try to switch to DDG, the results just don't hold up. Particularly for localised results.
- x2f10 7y agoDon't forget the ugliness that is AMP. I understand the pursuit of answers rather than links, but for a variety of reasons, it's not working. DDG is nice, but the results are often lackluster (especially local results, as you say). The sad reality is, I am having trouble discovering new content online even if I have a fairly specific search query. I am fed a list of the same websites ad nauseam. I can't find much in regards to in-depth discussions, interesting blogs, or thought-provoking material. The worst part is, for communities that do provide this content, secrecy is a feature not a bug.
- danShumway 7y agoStartpage recently got acquired, and is now (at least partially) owned by an advertising company. As a privacy advocate, I don't trust them. I use DuckDuckGo, I don't use Startpage. However, you have to think of privacy and consumer hostile behavior as a continuum. Even though I don't trust Startpage as a private search engine, I also don't trust Google as a private search engine. The question is, "is Startpage still better than Google?" I think it is. I think if you're in the position of saying, "I can't use DDG, I get the privacy issues, I get the monopoly issues, but I just don't like their results", then Startpage is still going to be a pretty big step up in privacy over Google search. Startpage is still going to be a good way to fragment your data so one company doesn't know everything about you. It's still going to be a good way of getting around the worst user-hostile UI changes to blend ads into search results. If you disable Javascript and run a Google search, every single link you click on gets wrapped in a Google URL to record that click -- there is no way around that without some kind of browser extension. If you disable Javascript and run a Startpage search, you get direct links to the website. So I heavily encourage people in your position to use Startpage if the alternative is continuing to use Google Search directly.
- freediver 7y ago> Startpage recently got acquired, and is now (at least partially) owned by an advertising company. As a privacy advocate, I don't trust them. I use DuckDuckGo, I don't use Startpage. Not following the logic there. How is DuckDuckGo not an (entirely) advertising company? Do they make money off anything else other than ads and injecting affiliate links?
- danShumway 7y agoYeah, I should have clarified more. DuckDuckGo and Startpage always made money with advertising. The problem with Startpage's acquisition is the introduction of System1/Privacy One, which is not just focused on advertising, but on advertising based on consumer intent/interested, calculated by large-scale collection of consumer data.[0] > “In our business,” Blend adds, “if we can gather as much data as possible, give it off to our engineers and data scientists, and then manage the two effectively, the business can quickly scale.” Again, even though I don't trust System 1/Privacy One as much as I trust DuckDuckGo, I do still trust them more than Google. [0]: https://csq.com/2018/01/system-1-silicon-beach-sleeping-giant/ https://csq.com/2018/01/system-1-silicon-beach-sleeping-gian...
- PikachuEXE 7y agoI won't I stopped using Chrome / Google long time ago (> 1 year) I started to dislike Google since AMP introduced
- Kihashi 7y agoI looked at it, was confused, then downloaded the duckduckgo search for Firefox.
- is_true 7y agoWhat is worse is that most of the advanced queries aren't working anymore
- blueadept111 7y agoI noticed that the query "foo" AND "bar" does not give the same result as "foo" + "bar". So what's going on, is "AND" just treated as another keyword now? Lame.
- unlinked_dll 7y agoYup. Putting things in quotes is no longer "find this exact term" but a best match for most things. And on top of that you can't find specific information on actual data if it anyway correlates to businesses that advertise. It's gotten painfully difficult to research markets that I'm casually interested in (e.g. tonight I wanted to compare a few cities by how many hotels they had - this is impossible on google and duck duck go with simple queries). They really aren't doing a great job of cataloging data and making it useful to anyone but advertisers.
- mrr54 7y agoIt just looks awful. It's incredibly unaesthetically pleasing that they've replaced the green URLs with the black breadcrumb things.
- johnnycab 7y agoYou can make some of the pain go away, for now at least.. https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/395257-better-google https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/395257-better-google
- Snetry 7y agoThe more shady stuff Google pulls the less inclined I am to even consider using them.
- rasz 7y agonah, I just whipped 10 line userscript to fix it back
- SturgeonsLaw 7y agoI don't suppose you'd be so kind as to share it?
- rasz 7y agoa part of a bigger script: let resultLinks = e ? e.querySelectorAll('.r>a:not([class])') : document.querySelectorAll('div#search .r>a:not([class])'); for (let link of resultLinks) { //LC20lb yWc32e iUh30 B6fmyf link.removeAttribute("ping"); link.querySelector('a>div>cite.iUh30').innerText = link.querySelector('a>.LC20lb').innerText; let div = document.createElement('span'); div.innerText = link.href; div.className = 'LC20lb'; link.querySelector('a>.LC20lb').parentNode.insertBefore(div, link.querySelector('a>.LC20lb').nextSibling); link.querySelector('a>.LC20lb').parentNode.removeChild(link.querySelector('a>.LC20lb')); } It was just a quick fix to get urls back, still needs fixing the cache/translation links etc, havent gotten around to making it look 100% like the old search page http://i.imgur.com/RoTJ5vG.png http://i.imgur.com/RoTJ5vG.png
- PixelPaul 7y agoAs a business owner that relies on organic traffic, this is a huge hit
- rococode 7y agoIf you don't mind my asking, why?
- dfghfhgf 7y agoWhat do you mean? I don't see difference, can any1 take a screenshoot?
- Gustomaximus 7y agoAt the risk your joking; http://prntscr.com/qp1cs6 http://prntscr.com/qp1cs6 Note: I scrolled past the top result and twitter to show you the listed results.
- NullPrefix 7y agoPartial rollout. They started doing these fugly icons months ago for selected users.
- manbearpiggy 7y agoGoogle search has become less user unfriendly, turned their back on their old business model. It seems they've deliberately blurred the lines between ads and relevance. Bing is now easier to use.
- EnderMB 7y agoIt makes me wonder whether Google is now "too big to fall" in regards to search. I switched to DDG a few months ago, and quite frankly I can probably count the number of times I've needed to switch to Google on one hand, and nearly every time it's been related to looking up directions via web search and expecting Google Maps to open up. DDG and Bing are largely good enough already for standard web search. The standard has probably been there for a while, so I would argue that web search is largely down to experience right now - and DDG/Bing have Google beat here. With that being said, I doubt the average person has even heard of DDG, and probably never uses Bing unless it's set up by default. If there was ever a time to market Bing and DDG as viable Google alternatives to the public, it's now.
- Jemm 7y agoYou can pretend !g to your search and DDG will forward you to Google search. Just FYI
- mortivore 7y agoNo. The favicons are cool. The ads are no worse for content than the other links so it's not a big deal. Often it just makes something that is already in the top 3 have a duplicate.
- MilnerRoute 7y agoGah. That new design is horribly ugly. One other thing I've always hated about Google: if you just want the URL for a page, you can't right-click on it in the search results and copy the URL -- because Google will instead give you some Google-riffic hybrid URL that first refers you through a Google address so they can capture your clickthrough. I've tried to steer most of my searching away from Google. (Of course, that's easy if you're already using a search keyword to skip the part where you go to the search engine's home page first.)
- rasz 7y ago>copy the URL -- because Google will instead give you some Google-riffic hybrid URL Google no longer does that! because they switched to dedicated feature for just this very purpose :D https://www.w3schools.com/tags/att_a_ping.asp https://www.w3schools.com/tags/att_a_ping.asp "When the user clicks on the hyperlink, the ping attribute will send a short HTTP POST request to the specified URL. This attribute is useful for monitoring/tracking." Was introduced into HTML5 drafts as early as 2005, removed by 2010 due to obvious user spying connotations. Chrome and Safari fully support it, uBlock Origin strips it automatically (but wont be able to after manifest v3 goes thru).
- smarri 7y agoMe too. The recent change is really disappointing.
- Mockapapella 7y agonot at all. Every search engine I've tried has paled in comparison to Google's results.
- Narretz 7y agoThe biggest issue for me is that github issues in the results don't have the issue title as title anymore but the name of the project. Makes it much harder to find an issue in all that noise.