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Google’s top search result is Google

385 points by danso 6y ago

pen2l 6y ago
Falls within the purview of their job of being an information-search tool I’d say. There are times when I want a specific piece of information as quickly as possible and with as few clicks as possible, and other times I’m doing more exploratory searches, it seems google lets me do both pretty well.
- uniqueid 6y ago
  Google doesn't bother showing the user results for his/her actual search terms anymore, and stuffs most of the page with AMP links and paid results... but it's not them, it's you. But if Google AI were really as bad at replacing simple grep they wouldn't be popular, etc etc.
  - rightbyte 6y ago
    Ye. It is really annoying that verbatim querries still are not quite verbatim. I get a feeling Google search index is just really an aggregate of a couple of 1000s big sites.
- tweetle_beetle 6y ago
  I think the issue is that Google did not launch as an "information-search tool". It slowly transitioned into one in line with advertising becoming its business model. Weirdly we are back where we started and I find the portal analogy actually very apt. Yes the technology has improved, but the Google of today is much closer to 2000 Yahoo![1] than 2000 Google[2] - trying to curate and own as much of the internet browsing experience as possible. Taken to the extreme, Google would be very happy to keep a copy of every website and only let you browse the internet on its terms in its walled garden. We're already heading there with AMP. Do we want to sacrifice a couple of seconds of our time for that? [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20000229042533/http://search.yahoo.com/bin/search?p=YANKEES https://web.archive.org/web/20000229042533/http://search.yah... [2] https://web.archive.org/web/20130122200020/http://www.google.com/search?q=yankees https://web.archive.org/web/20130122200020/http://www.google...
mrgreenfur 6y ago
This reminds me of the recent news about Amazon, spying on partners products and then offering them. This is the end game for all platforms that control demand, slowly take more and more vertical integration to capture segments of larger value. This includes 'pure information' that they steal from publishers (and thus remove visits from the publisher) and normal verticals, like travel/shopping/tools/etc. I'm not sure that these marketplaces / demand owners should be able to as they wield unfair power vs other vertical specific offerings.
chdaniel 6y ago
I know there's the sentiment of fear/hate/etc about Google taking over but... 1) Doesn't it make sense for them to do that? After offering the search engine for free for ages (not that paid search engines are a thing) and playing an important role in building the internet? For most, all the internet they know is thanks to Google 2) Wouldn't you do the same? Keep in mind they're a public company and we know how incentives are aligned when you're a public company
- gberger 6y ago
  > not that paid search engines are a thing They are in enterprise, but I digress
  - Jaruzel 6y ago
    Interestingly, they couldn't break into Enterprise Search (their Google-in-a-box product failed).
- onetimemanytime 6y ago
  1) Doesn't it make sense for them to do that? After offering the search engine for free for ages (not that paid search engines are a thing) They've made a fortune so instead of saying they've "offered it for free" let's point out that they are not a charity. Google became famous for saying that they will list the best SE when ranking, not Google properties or ads. >>and playing an important role in building the internet? For most, all the internet they know is thanks to Google Even if you said is true, another one would have done what Google did. By the way, internet as we know it today, would have happened without Google. In fact, MS and Apple did a LOT more for the internet...a computer in every home and all.
- badrabbit 6y ago
  No, I wouldn't do the same. Maximize profits? Yes, sacrifice core values and even social stability to acheive the goal? Nope. Be deceptive, do things against people's will? Nope.
  - 6y ago
martinskou 6y ago
Search is essential infrastructure for the internet and should not be monopolized. It should be free, uncluttered, distributed and transparent. The problem is not Google, its the lack of good alternatives, only DDG really.
- bilal4hmed 6y ago
  Im guessing the alternatives get better the more you use them. Otherwise there are a lot of alternatives like : Bing Duck Duck Go ( as you mentioned ) Startpage Yandex
  - stOneskull 6y ago
    an image search for 'lemon party' is a good test.
- ZinniaZirconium 6y ago
  Duck is a front-end for Bing. Why not use Bing?
  - dredmorbius 6y ago
    That's both tired and inaccurate. DuckDuckGo gets its results from over four hundred sources. These include hundreds of vertical sources delivering niche Instant Answers, DuckDuckBot (our crawler) and crowd-sourced sites (like Wikipedia, stored in our answer indexes). We also of course have more traditional links in the search results, which we also source from multiple partners, though most commonly from Bing (and none from Google). https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/sources/v https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/so...
    - ZinniaZirconium 6y ago
      See they admit your search results are most commonly from Bing. It’s really obvious when Bing, Duck, Ecosia all return the same results.
ZinniaZirconium 6y ago
Not really though. My top search result on most topics is usually Wikipedia. Maybe if you're searching for Google you find Google.
- danso 6y ago
  FTA > How a search for “Linux” has changed. In 2000, Google only returned “organic” results, ads, and a category header. Now the top of the page is full of Google products and “answers.” Source: 2000 screenshot/Archive.org 2000 screenshot: https://mrkp-static-production.themarkup.org/graphics/google-search-before/1595892300303/assets/linux--2000.jpg https://mrkp-static-production.themarkup.org/graphics/google... 2020 screenshot: https://mrkp-static-production.themarkup.org/graphics/google-search-before/1595892300303/assets/linux--2020.jpg https://mrkp-static-production.themarkup.org/graphics/google...
  - ZinniaZirconium 6y ago
    I find Linux.org and Wikipedia. I must be in a helpful search bubble for people who want actual information instead of ads and news.
  - c8g 6y ago
    2020: https://i.imgur.com/kq1AxqY.png https://i.imgur.com/kq1AxqY.png
tehabe 6y ago
Maybe, Google should be forced to create a separate tab for the knowledge graph and other tools. like they are doing it for images, the news, or videos. when I want to search the web, I want to search the web. Because I see the issues with this. I also think those information have a value for users.
- throw_m239339 6y ago
  Maybe Google's search business and ad business should be broken up...
Havoc 6y ago
Tricky. It does feel anti-competitive but at the same time their info is usually also the best. So a strong argument can be made that it’s 1 based on merit
- kevingadd 6y ago
  Everything's "based on merit" until merit doesn't line up with the company's interests anymore. I use google translate and maps and images all the time, so them showing up at the top of the results page isn't inconvenient for me, but sometimes when I use them I get results that are actively bad and I have to go seek out other services. There are probably many cases where I get bad results and am not informed enough to recognize that the results were bad!
- vlkr 6y ago
  You don't know if it's the best because there is no competition to discover better info. All other websites are presented with only 2 or 3 lines of text (search results) and have no free access to presentation forms that googles own content has.
topicseed 6y ago
Google Search is an information-search tool — and results often come as websites (the usual search result links), but also as widgets. Google can absolutely be the curator and a provider of information.
rydre 6y ago
The problem is that website are commodities. The future for original high quality websites is that they should not allow search engines to crawl their content and slowly become a brand which people trust. Stop relying on search for traffic. Be an app, websites for marketing only. Alternative new search engines are needed that allow for embedding/iframe/integration of global web search results in any 3rd party website free of cost. Then the new search engine should share ad revenue with the website that embeds their results+ads. Google does not allow that, but there is a real opportunity here. Embeddable global search engine that websites would like to integrate with. A search engine that website would love to integrate. A search engine that websites would advertise themselves because they win too. Unlike the current scenario where only Google wins.
- mrkramer 6y ago
  I never understood why websites are not personal property and why US gov. decided that anybody can crawl and scrape them at will and free of charge. That would be similar to someone crawling your house and making it fully visible and searchable to the global public . I guess Google Maps already did that. My understanding is that .com (commerce) prevailed and people who have websites want to be fully public, visible and searchable. On the other hand deep web and dark web exist but most of the people who use it and operate there do it because of shady business. I don't entirely understand your search engine idea but if internet would start all over again I think the right model for search engine would be to have website owners submit their websites to the search engines along with metadata so searching experience becomes rich. Metadata would be similar to something like Resource Description Framework https://www.dlib.org/dlib/may98/miller/05miller.html https://www.dlib.org/dlib/may98/miller/05miller.html
  - rydre 6y ago
    > *I don't entirely understand your search engine idea Does google allow for iframeing or customizing it's search results? No. A new search engine that has a API/plugin for 3rd party websites so that websites can integrate a global search engine into the website like google integrates websites' content into its instant answers. There is room for innovation here when 3rd party websites get creative in displaying global search results in different ways simple or complicated ways. If there are Ads in results, the website gets paid a % of the ad revenue that the search engine made due to the website embedding it's results. Search engine's are high margin business, so they should be able to share 50% revenue with websites.
chimen 6y ago
Many of them save me extra clicks which is convenient. Google translate, maps and search has no competitors that even come close in terms of quality. I will get mad when those products have better alternatives but it's not the case. Build better alternatives and I'm on board. In the end, Google is a business - I would promote my own shit on the first vertical as well. One thing that pisses me off is the AMP ordeal but, other than that, I extract value from Google. I am on Google to find results to my questions - I want the quickest exit and that's what they provide. If they fail to do that they back down trust me, these guys watch "the numbers" carefully.
- kevingadd 6y ago
  "I will get mad when those products have better alternatives but it's not the case. Build better alternatives and I'm on board." How will you find out about the better alternatives? Are you certain there aren't good alternatives to translate, maps, flights, shopping etc? For any language? I know for a fact that google translate is bad for some ideographic languages and as a result there are competing services that companies have started to use instead (DeepL, etc). If the competition is better, how will you know? Are you going to dedicate time to hunting down alternatives and testing them out when the Google product is the only thing on screen and it works?
  - sidibe 6y ago
    Someone will mention better alternatives here, after all I've been hearing about how ddg blows Google out of the water a couple times every week here for years.
    - kevingadd 6y ago
      Generally speaking, HN posters are not the people who are going to be harmed by anti-competitive behavior or Google filling the first screen of results with their own products. It's ordinary people who use the web. You could probably argue that ordinary people don't care about quality and they're best served by using the vertically-integrated Google product, though...
    - 6y ago
maxwellito 6y ago
It even leads to funny situations sometimes : https://twitter.com/mxwllt/status/1225783057917063169 https://twitter.com/mxwllt/status/1225783057917063169
- kevingadd 6y ago
  To be fair, I think pagerank would naturally end up putting those results on top, since gmaps is the mapping service lots of people are linking to - especially if you're linking to a saved route or location, it's going to be a url to the google maps service as a whole that probably boosts its pagerank. It's definitely not a clear-cut "they decided to do this" scenario like the infoboxes and such that the article is complaining about.
  - wolco 6y ago
    PageRank wasn't natural. Google properities started with a score of 10. Google friends 5-9. Your site 0.
    - harshitaneja 6y ago
      Source?
      - wolco 6y ago
        Lived through it. Microsoft had a 9. Anything list on the dmoz had a 4. Page Rank doesn't work if the seeded values are all set to 0. If everyone started at 0 they pass on nothing. Google needed a way to seed. They assigned the highest value to themselves scaling down to other giants, universities, dmoz sites, etc. Pagerank is a reputation calculator. You still need to define at least one cool person. Much better with thousands to varying degrees.
fractionalhare 6y ago
> A trending search in our data for “myocardial infarction” shows how Google has piled up its products at the top. It returned: - Google’s dictionary definition. - A “people also ask” box that expanded to answer related questions without leaving the search results page. - A “knowledge panel,” which is an abridged encyclopedia entry with various links. - And a “related conditions” carousel leading to various new Google searches for other diseases. I don't know, I'm conflicted on examples like this. I see the point the article is going for, but I think it's better exemplified by the fact that there's a lot of advertising space taken up at the premium, top of the page on search results. This example is not Google advertising itself so much as Google changing the features of the search engine itself. It's not emphasizing its own search results over "organic" search results, it's deemphasizing search results altogether in favor of quick, curated answers. Most of the time I can quickly tell what the "organic" source of the direct answer is. I like that. Is there a way we could get quick curated answers like this without deemphasizing search results? Is that something most people would actually want? I feel a better point of contention is the number of ads, which I care more about.
- Angostura 6y ago
  > This example is not Google advertising itself so much as Google changing the features of the search engine itself. What it is an example of in my view is Google increasingly attemnpting to keep you on its site by scraping the information from other sites and displaying it. Originally Google scraped the sites solely to build a better search index.
- kevingadd 6y ago
  The definition of "search" or what it means to type something into the google search input field has changed over time, and that's probably the root of this. It used to mean "show me web pages related to this input string", and some of those search results were sponsored (ads). Now it's interpreted more as "inform me about this input string" or "please help me with this", like a Siri or Google Assistant (though not necessarily in natural language). When you view it as a "please assist me" query it makes sense to introduce things like answerboxes, related queries, embedded images or translations, etc. But that is VERY MUCH not "search" anymore. It's quite possible that most people using a search engine actually want an Assistant, so google's new behavior is ideal for them. But where do you go when you actually want a search engine? You see people complain that over time Google has become worse as a search engine - using it to search for programming topics is definitely worse than it used to be, and its search results in general are often full of astroturfed pinterest or stackoverflow pages.
emptyparadise 6y ago
I love that "How Far Down Are the Traditional Search Results?" graphic.
jforman 6y ago
When I worked at Bing almost 20 years ago, the #1 search term was "Google". So maybe this is reasonable :) (#2 was "Gogle")
- wolco 6y ago
  Bing was launched in 2009. Where were you working in the year 2000?
  - Madzen__ 6y ago
    Creating bing.
  - jforman 6y ago
    I was at Microsoft, in MSN Search (which was later re-branded Bing). This was 2003.
    - cheez 6y ago
      The MSN brand had some good stuff. MSN messenger, the MSN browser (I loved it). Great work by that team.
  - WrtCdEvrydy 6y ago
    poor guy worked for Bing, it probably felt like decades.
- josefresco 6y ago
  I wonder that the numbers look like now. I could see someone searching "MSN" for "Google" because MSN was set to their home page, or the default search. I wonder if those practices are still widespread enough to create this same effect. Given that Chrome is the new IE, I wonder how long (or ever) until they see competitors' brands in their popular search terms.
  - segfaultbuserr 6y ago
    Don't underestimate the technical illiteracy here. A significant number of people don't really understand how the address bar or an URL works in a web browser. Use web searching as a substitute of typing an URL is common, and some can't distinguish the "search" function of an address bar and the "enter an URL" function of an address bar. Searching "Google" in the address bar to access Google in Google Chrome is not unusual (sometimes you'll get a search result of 'Google' at Google, sometimes you'll be autocompleted and get a Google homepage, users don't notice the difference). This is also the underlying basis of Google's idea of abolishing the address bar - some users don't understand it, a Walled Garden is "better". I'm not saying that I support Google's idea, just to point out a phenomenon that exists.
mrkramer 6y ago
This is somewhat similar to the thread that I shared yesterday but nobody looked at it. Here is the link https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23964461 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23964461
dredmorbius 6y ago
Separating search from content from services from advertising is starting to sound very appealing.
moron4hire 6y ago
If anything I am searching can even remotely be considered a product or paid service, I get an entire page, minus one link of links that have the [ad] box on them. And they're all shady 3rd party retailers. And when I want to find a product, to get the manufacturers website and product details, it's nowhere to be found. Just page upon page of [ad] links.
ricardo81 6y ago
My own personal observations - The "rich results" do indeed save people a click - Some of them are excerpts from sites crawled by Google (that will tend to now be the 2nd result) that the user will no longer click on - Google's query disambiguation is the best in the business - They'd had a history of piggy backing on external resources and then turning them into their own, e.g. DMOZ, now wikipedia. I'm sure their knowledge ontology will soon render Wiki obsolete and push them down a result also. - They've taken some verticals and halved the number of clicks competitors or "price comparison" sites previously got, albeit it's their search engine, they lay it out as they see fit. It's changed a lot since the "10 blue links". Most of us probably used to think of search engines as an agnostic finder of information on the web, with ads on top. Now with "query intent" and monetisation - the temptation is too much and it's not so much about finding information "out there", on the web. Because of the position that Google is now in wrt their dominance in search markets and to the extent they can monetise a query, no one else can match their revenue per user or find alterative avenues of traffic that are comparable to their portal (i.e. Google in the UK commands 95% of searches, 80% of ad spend is between them and Facebook). If Google decides they want to enter a vertical, it's hugely detrimental to others in that market. Someone who ranked #1 10 years ago would get 50% of clicks, IIRC it's closer to 20% now, because of all the other media on the page. But in the end, there are other choices. The problem is that due to the monetisation Google is capable of (based on a lot of data acquisition about their users), it's hard for anyone to carve out an alternative. Particularly so when Google pay phone vendors and browsers for them to be the default engine, it's a perpetuating cycle. My personal ideal would be 5 or 6 independent search engines, with a number of meta engines built on top of those independent data sources;algos. Purely for the sake of getting alternative points of view and perhaps past any filters or bias.
deleted 6y ago
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umaar 6y ago
Generally, I like the 'rich snippets' feature, but I think they've gotten worse. For example here's a reddit post I made from 6 years ago showcasing a search for 'mac shortcut screenshot' https://www.reddit.com/r/google/comments/1ou4i0/a_search_for_mac_screenshot_shortcut_displays_the/ https://www.reddit.com/r/google/comments/1ou4i0/a_search_for... It's extremely clear, and results in minimal cognitive effort in parsing the result. Here's the result now: https://i.imgur.com/A726Dhw.png https://i.imgur.com/A726Dhw.png There's so much more cruft: - 4x low resolution screenshots which I initially thought were related to ads - An extra URL - Multi-step instructions - Lots of extra words - Bold formatting has been applied inconsistently Seeing the text: "Command + Shift + 3" in big bold letters was great, but it's now changed into something else.
- umaar 6y ago
  Turns out Google has been doing this for my own site on certain pages. If I search for: devtools capture element screenshot It has listed the exact instructions on the search results page: https://i.imgur.com/NTdDjZY.png https://i.imgur.com/NTdDjZY.png Can I get an outsider perspective, are those 4 list items shown in the rich snippet too many? Is it too wordy? I'm wondering if a single item which said: Search for screenshot in the Command Menu (Cmd + Shift + P) Would be better?
  - alickz 6y ago
    I think it's fine. I'm not a webdev but I could follow your current instructions easily. I would definitely consider your instructions a good result if I was looking for the answer. Although I prefer the second (wordier) example in OPs case anyway.
- NoodleIncident 6y ago
  I can think of two reasons that they might think the new version is better: - The new snippet might be more useful to a majority of the people searching. It shows you the keys on the keyboard, it explains how to input it instead of relying on knowing the shortened notation, and it tells you where the screenshot will go. Since I don't use a mac myself, I feel like I've learned more from the latter than from the former. - As you can see in the other reply to this comment, the new info box can pull info from any page with a numbered list of instructions. I don't know how the earlier info was extracted, but if you're going to pull out instructions like this for more queries about more complicated tasks, then it's better to be consistent, even if it could be expressed in a single bullet point. I also find it funny that the source link is far more prominent in the newer rich snippet, even though a lot of people in this thread are saying they've made it harder to find.
pradn 6y ago
The problem here is that something that's useful for users (saving time with knowledge panels, question/answer lists, and suggested searches) also takes away clicks from other websites. Something can be both good for the user in the short-term (quicker answers) and bad for the user in the long term (fewer websites survive if clicks are diverted). We have the same issue with "ecosystems". It's great for the user that the Google Assistant can ring the Pixel phone if you don't know where it is. But it's one more feature that locks our smaller/independent competitors.
slantaclaus 6y ago
I just want to say that the “Linux” search results now seem more relevant than they were in the past. Internet.com? Lol
lorec0re 6y ago
Amazon top search results? Surprise, Amazon-made products!
- JadeNB 6y ago
  Not defending Amazon, but that's far from the default experience in my experience. Maybe I just search for a lot of specific thing Amazon doesn't sell themselves.
JackPoach 6y ago
That's what happens when you have a monopoly.
auganov 6y ago
I would gladly pay for a search engine that actually did some things better than Google. Like say being better at finding [semi]exact phrases, especially longer ones. Something that focused on the long tail of search queries. Also, yes, I do feel like Google has gotten pretty bad for some normal queries. But this might as well be a function of the Internet/Web changing overall. But I find this focus on Google's supposed moral infractions ridiculous. And then competitors popup that have a strictly worse products user-wise, but want to win by claiming higher moral ground. They don't fix any of the issues. I just don't see any of that taking off. To date, I have not seen a single search engine that actually does something significant better. Not only that, pretty much all of them fail miserably for anything more specific. This tells me Google is still absolutely on top of their game. I like these widgets. Sometimes I even get annoyed when I WAS expecting it to popup but it wouldn't.
- tristan957 6y ago
  Privacy is a major feature. Morality is most definitely something a business can be better at. You can't just hand wave it away like it doesn't matter. DuckDuckGo might not give the best results, but I would trade that for privacy 10 times out of 10.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
markosaric 6y ago
Great study and presentation! And an impressive website for a publisher. The average publisher is full of advertising, calls-to-action and several MBs weight of external scripts. This one is so simple, fast to load and clean. Congrats!
rondennis 6y ago
I feel Google has turned on its pledge of doing no evil. It is not shamelessly stealing publishers content and displaying it in the featured snippets. So the searcher has really no incentive of clicking on the search result anymore. He is getting all the information on Google itself.
- wasdfff 6y ago
  Usually the snippets are outright crap. But this is the end result of SEO noise overwhelming signal.
pwinnski 6y ago
Search engines seem like they're subject to quantum mechanics, in that they're the observer that affects the state of the internet. An internet without search engines was an internet without SEO, and without vast fortunes being spent on manipulating content to sell garbage. Launching "Backrub" in that environment must have seemed like an unalloyed good, but the very act of launching it turned out to have a profoundly negative impact on the web as a whole.
- pwinnski 6y ago
  I guess I mean this as a semi-defense of Google, even though I don't like them and use DDG personally. When doing a search on travel, what are the odds you get not-garbage in your results? Compare, say, 2000 to 2020. I can see a scenario in which Google was committed to providing open results, but those open results slowly became garbage, and they felt compelled to launch their own tool to ensure good results. And sure, it puts profit in their pocket too, of course.
gundmc 6y ago
> How a search for “Linux” has changed. In 2000, Google only returned “organic” results, ads, and a category header. Now the top of the page is full of Google products and “answers.” Source: 2000 screenshot/Archive.org Weird example to use in a screenshot since everything they show is a link to an external site.
lokar 6y ago
I don't recall Google ever promising to be a "pure" web search engine, just indexing all the pages. Quite the opposite, they said the goal was to organize and present information. The goal has always been the most relevant information given the query. Early on, that pretty much always meant a web page. More and more, they already know the answer and can present it with a better UX for the user. Why should they be required to be a "pure" index of web pages?
- gukov 6y ago
  Similarly to Amazon replacing popular products with their own, Google is doing the same with search results.
  - lokar 6y ago
    I'm not sure it's really the same. Someone asks Google "how far is it from Portland to Austin", and before they got 10 blue links, and now they get a number. That's not the same as "amazon, send me some Coke" and them sending Amazon brand cola drink.
jb775 6y ago
Probably because a lot of boomers open browsers and initially type "google" into the top bar (which does a google search for "google") just to get to the actual google website...then search for w/e they actually want to search for.
personjerry 6y ago
Some of the answers in this thread actually allude to the bias in this study: People actively change their behaviors to accommodate Google's knowledge panels, meaning some portion of the "15000 top search queries" they studied are actually people seeking Google's results, not general search results.
ss7pro 6y ago
Sorry but google flights have no competition. There is no better or more flexible and fast flight search than Google. No wonder why they won. Expedia should invest more in their flight search if they want to win.
- swagatkonchada 6y ago
  "no competition" i guess you meant this figuratively. But in fact there is a ton of competition and the point of the article is that G is suppressing that competition by unfairly giving themselves the space which needs the least number of clicks to reach.
baby-yoda 6y ago
Google (as well as Facebook) are becoming AOL 2.0 - users only know the service and not the mechanism or source. All info comes from G (or F). Syndicated or outright copied from all over the web but appearing with the “friendly, familiar and welcoming Logo our users know, love and trust” /s
drusepth 6y ago
Makes sense to me. Google Flights is amazing, Google Stocks is better than my broker (and way easier/faster), Translate doesn't even have a decent competitor, and Restaurants isn't perfect but just makes it easier to get to Google Maps. As a consumer, this is great. As a small business owner, I'm not very concerned about Google usurping pieces of my site into a widget. If the entirety of a business/site can be replaced with a free single-action widget, it's probably better for the consumer to do so. If I were a big business (Expedia, Yelp, etc) affected by this, I would be more concerned about improving my product than a competitor simply copying functionality.
- eggsnbacon1 6y ago
  Competitors have a hard time getting off the ground because the dominant player is promoting its own products. Classic monopoly. Competition won't be good if nobody uses them. Google maps might be a good example, MapQuest and Terraserver used to be better for navigation and satellite photos. Did they fail because of business reasons or self promotion? Hard to know, but Google pulled the same shit as MS got antitrust for. Bundling their own maps app pre-installed on their dominant mobile OS
  - acituan 6y ago
    > ...promoting its own products. Classic monopoly How is promoting equivalent to classic monopoly? They are not removing competitors from search results. They are ranking based on relevance and apparently users are happy with their own widgets coming up on top.
    - dbuder 6y ago
      >>They are ranking based on relevance But they aren't! That's what we are talking about! They're putting themselves at the top.
    - eggsnbacon1 6y ago
      they're promoting their own products when they have over 80% of search eyeballs
aftbit 6y ago
A bit OT: can anyone recommend a good web-based OpenStreetMaps viewer with support for toggling multiple layers (e.g. topo, streets, satellite, political boundaries) and decent measuring tools?
- rmc 6y ago
  There's a few MapCompare instances for showing many different maps: https://mc.bbbike.org/mc/ https://mc.bbbike.org/mc/
coronadisaster 6y ago
I'm surprised Google doesnt get sued for copyright infringement for large snippets that they include at the top of search results...
Yhippa 6y ago
Because of the things cited in the article I spend less time in the Google search results page. I typically find the answer I'm looking for and get on with my day. Because I'm spending less time I actually use it more now. Sometimes when I'm looking up stuff on how to do things physically like how to install a part in a car or fix something in my house I'll get a YouTube widget at the top which will take me to the exact moment in a video where what I'm looking for is being performed. This is magic to me. However Google is definitely promoting themselves in this case and I might not go anywhere past the very top of the search results page. Is this a bad thing?
aidenn0 6y ago
Anyone have a recommendation for replacing hipmunk? I haven't found anything that shows as much information so visually and intuitively.
slmjkdbtl 6y ago
Good read! Also impressed by how the article page is designed/engineered. I wonder for a site like this how much of the content is hard coded and how much is made by tools / frameworks (the interactive scrolling box really looks like a hard-coded component for this article specifically)
james305 6y ago
Who cares? Are they a non-profit? People who are offended by this have never run a business.
sjreese 6y ago
Google continues to abuse its market power, and the industry has not rebounded, despite the remedy.
musicale 6y ago
This has been the case for a while and should not be surprising to anyone. It's not terrible (Google's and Bing's promoted and internal modular results "above the fold" are often useful and relevant) but it does make it harder to use modern search portals to actually search the general web outside promoted results.
t0ughcritic 6y ago
Googles next five results? Surprise... Ads, pay to play
t0ughcritic 6y ago
Google is removing the concept of urls and domains. Apps do this but so does not showing part of the URL in the URL bar and not showing the URL as it is in the result pages without the breadcrumb type redesign. They also realized they make more money when they show a favicon of websites to obfuscate the fact that they have to legally label Ads as ads. The ads txt is directly proportional to the size of the fav icon in serps. Google is evil. Let’s not forget how google reader and blogger were killed. The greater idea is to not remember anything and to go directly to google each time, making them the sole source of content.

385 points by danso 6y ago

Falls within the purview of their job of being an information-search tool I’d say. There are times when I want a specific piece of information as quickly as possible and with as few clicks as possible, and other times I’m doing more exploratory searches, it seems google lets me do both pretty well.

uniqueid 6y ago
Google doesn't bother showing the user results for his/her actual search terms anymore, and stuffs most of the page with AMP links and paid results... but it's not them, it's you. But if Google AI were really as bad at replacing simple grep they wouldn't be popular, etc etc.
- rightbyte 6y ago
  Ye. It is really annoying that verbatim querries still are not quite verbatim. I get a feeling Google search index is just really an aggregate of a couple of 1000s big sites.
tweetle_beetle 6y ago
I think the issue is that Google did not launch as an "information-search tool". It slowly transitioned into one in line with advertising becoming its business model. Weirdly we are back where we started and I find the portal analogy actually very apt. Yes the technology has improved, but the Google of today is much closer to 2000 Yahoo![1] than 2000 Google[2] - trying to curate and own as much of the internet browsing experience as possible. Taken to the extreme, Google would be very happy to keep a copy of every website and only let you browse the internet on its terms in its walled garden. We're already heading there with AMP. Do we want to sacrifice a couple of seconds of our time for that? [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20000229042533/http://search.yahoo.com/bin/search?p=YANKEES https://web.archive.org/web/20000229042533/http://search.yah... [2] https://web.archive.org/web/20130122200020/http://www.google.com/search?q=yankees https://web.archive.org/web/20130122200020/http://www.google...

mrgreenfur 6y ago

This reminds me of the recent news about Amazon, spying on partners products and then offering them. This is the end game for all platforms that control demand, slowly take more and more vertical integration to capture segments of larger value. This includes 'pure information' that they steal from publishers (and thus remove visits from the publisher) and normal verticals, like travel/shopping/tools/etc. I'm not sure that these marketplaces / demand owners should be able to as they wield unfair power vs other vertical specific offerings.

chdaniel 6y ago

I know there's the sentiment of fear/hate/etc about Google taking over but... 1) Doesn't it make sense for them to do that? After offering the search engine for free for ages (not that paid search engines are a thing) and playing an important role in building the internet? For most, all the internet they know is thanks to Google 2) Wouldn't you do the same? Keep in mind they're a public company and we know how incentives are aligned when you're a public company

gberger 6y ago
> not that paid search engines are a thing They are in enterprise, but I digress
- Jaruzel 6y ago
  Interestingly, they couldn't break into Enterprise Search (their Google-in-a-box product failed).
onetimemanytime 6y ago
1) Doesn't it make sense for them to do that? After offering the search engine for free for ages (not that paid search engines are a thing) They've made a fortune so instead of saying they've "offered it for free" let's point out that they are not a charity. Google became famous for saying that they will list the best SE when ranking, not Google properties or ads. >>and playing an important role in building the internet? For most, all the internet they know is thanks to Google Even if you said is true, another one would have done what Google did. By the way, internet as we know it today, would have happened without Google. In fact, MS and Apple did a LOT more for the internet...a computer in every home and all.
badrabbit 6y ago
No, I wouldn't do the same. Maximize profits? Yes, sacrifice core values and even social stability to acheive the goal? Nope. Be deceptive, do things against people's will? Nope.
- 6y ago

martinskou 6y ago

Search is essential infrastructure for the internet and should not be monopolized. It should be free, uncluttered, distributed and transparent. The problem is not Google, its the lack of good alternatives, only DDG really.

bilal4hmed 6y ago
Im guessing the alternatives get better the more you use them. Otherwise there are a lot of alternatives like : Bing Duck Duck Go ( as you mentioned ) Startpage Yandex
- stOneskull 6y ago
  an image search for 'lemon party' is a good test.
ZinniaZirconium 6y ago
Duck is a front-end for Bing. Why not use Bing?
- dredmorbius 6y ago
  That's both tired and inaccurate. DuckDuckGo gets its results from over four hundred sources. These include hundreds of vertical sources delivering niche Instant Answers, DuckDuckBot (our crawler) and crowd-sourced sites (like Wikipedia, stored in our answer indexes). We also of course have more traditional links in the search results, which we also source from multiple partners, though most commonly from Bing (and none from Google). https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/sources/v https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/so...
  - ZinniaZirconium 6y ago
    See they admit your search results are most commonly from Bing. It’s really obvious when Bing, Duck, Ecosia all return the same results.

ZinniaZirconium 6y ago

Not really though. My top search result on most topics is usually Wikipedia. Maybe if you're searching for Google you find Google.

danso 6y ago
FTA > How a search for “Linux” has changed. In 2000, Google only returned “organic” results, ads, and a category header. Now the top of the page is full of Google products and “answers.” Source: 2000 screenshot/Archive.org 2000 screenshot: https://mrkp-static-production.themarkup.org/graphics/google-search-before/1595892300303/assets/linux--2000.jpg https://mrkp-static-production.themarkup.org/graphics/google... 2020 screenshot: https://mrkp-static-production.themarkup.org/graphics/google-search-before/1595892300303/assets/linux--2020.jpg https://mrkp-static-production.themarkup.org/graphics/google...
- ZinniaZirconium 6y ago
  I find Linux.org and Wikipedia. I must be in a helpful search bubble for people who want actual information instead of ads and news.
- c8g 6y ago
  2020: https://i.imgur.com/kq1AxqY.png https://i.imgur.com/kq1AxqY.png

tehabe 6y ago

Maybe, Google should be forced to create a separate tab for the knowledge graph and other tools. like they are doing it for images, the news, or videos. when I want to search the web, I want to search the web. Because I see the issues with this. I also think those information have a value for users.

throw_m239339 6y ago
Maybe Google's search business and ad business should be broken up...

Havoc 6y ago

Tricky. It does feel anti-competitive but at the same time their info is usually also the best. So a strong argument can be made that it’s 1 based on merit

kevingadd 6y ago
Everything's "based on merit" until merit doesn't line up with the company's interests anymore. I use google translate and maps and images all the time, so them showing up at the top of the results page isn't inconvenient for me, but sometimes when I use them I get results that are actively bad and I have to go seek out other services. There are probably many cases where I get bad results and am not informed enough to recognize that the results were bad!
vlkr 6y ago
You don't know if it's the best because there is no competition to discover better info. All other websites are presented with only 2 or 3 lines of text (search results) and have no free access to presentation forms that googles own content has.

topicseed 6y ago

Google Search is an information-search tool — and results often come as websites (the usual search result links), but also as widgets. Google can absolutely be the curator and a provider of information.

rydre 6y ago

The problem is that website are commodities. The future for original high quality websites is that they should not allow search engines to crawl their content and slowly become a brand which people trust. Stop relying on search for traffic. Be an app, websites for marketing only. Alternative new search engines are needed that allow for embedding/iframe/integration of global web search results in any 3rd party website free of cost. Then the new search engine should share ad revenue with the website that embeds their results+ads. Google does not allow that, but there is a real opportunity here. Embeddable global search engine that websites would like to integrate with. A search engine that website would love to integrate. A search engine that websites would advertise themselves because they win too. Unlike the current scenario where only Google wins.

mrkramer 6y ago
I never understood why websites are not personal property and why US gov. decided that anybody can crawl and scrape them at will and free of charge. That would be similar to someone crawling your house and making it fully visible and searchable to the global public . I guess Google Maps already did that. My understanding is that .com (commerce) prevailed and people who have websites want to be fully public, visible and searchable. On the other hand deep web and dark web exist but most of the people who use it and operate there do it because of shady business. I don't entirely understand your search engine idea but if internet would start all over again I think the right model for search engine would be to have website owners submit their websites to the search engines along with metadata so searching experience becomes rich. Metadata would be similar to something like Resource Description Framework https://www.dlib.org/dlib/may98/miller/05miller.html https://www.dlib.org/dlib/may98/miller/05miller.html
- rydre 6y ago
  > *I don't entirely understand your search engine idea Does google allow for iframeing or customizing it's search results? No. A new search engine that has a API/plugin for 3rd party websites so that websites can integrate a global search engine into the website like google integrates websites' content into its instant answers. There is room for innovation here when 3rd party websites get creative in displaying global search results in different ways simple or complicated ways. If there are Ads in results, the website gets paid a % of the ad revenue that the search engine made due to the website embedding it's results. Search engine's are high margin business, so they should be able to share 50% revenue with websites.

chimen 6y ago

Many of them save me extra clicks which is convenient. Google translate, maps and search has no competitors that even come close in terms of quality. I will get mad when those products have better alternatives but it's not the case. Build better alternatives and I'm on board. In the end, Google is a business - I would promote my own shit on the first vertical as well. One thing that pisses me off is the AMP ordeal but, other than that, I extract value from Google. I am on Google to find results to my questions - I want the quickest exit and that's what they provide. If they fail to do that they back down trust me, these guys watch "the numbers" carefully.

kevingadd 6y ago
"I will get mad when those products have better alternatives but it's not the case. Build better alternatives and I'm on board." How will you find out about the better alternatives? Are you certain there aren't good alternatives to translate, maps, flights, shopping etc? For any language? I know for a fact that google translate is bad for some ideographic languages and as a result there are competing services that companies have started to use instead (DeepL, etc). If the competition is better, how will you know? Are you going to dedicate time to hunting down alternatives and testing them out when the Google product is the only thing on screen and it works?
- sidibe 6y ago
  Someone will mention better alternatives here, after all I've been hearing about how ddg blows Google out of the water a couple times every week here for years.
  - kevingadd 6y ago
    Generally speaking, HN posters are not the people who are going to be harmed by anti-competitive behavior or Google filling the first screen of results with their own products. It's ordinary people who use the web. You could probably argue that ordinary people don't care about quality and they're best served by using the vertically-integrated Google product, though...
  - 6y ago

maxwellito 6y ago

It even leads to funny situations sometimes : https://twitter.com/mxwllt/status/1225783057917063169 https://twitter.com/mxwllt/status/1225783057917063169

kevingadd 6y ago
To be fair, I think pagerank would naturally end up putting those results on top, since gmaps is the mapping service lots of people are linking to - especially if you're linking to a saved route or location, it's going to be a url to the google maps service as a whole that probably boosts its pagerank. It's definitely not a clear-cut "they decided to do this" scenario like the infoboxes and such that the article is complaining about.
- wolco 6y ago
  PageRank wasn't natural. Google properities started with a score of 10. Google friends 5-9. Your site 0.
  - harshitaneja 6y ago
    Source?
    - wolco 6y ago
      Lived through it. Microsoft had a 9. Anything list on the dmoz had a 4. Page Rank doesn't work if the seeded values are all set to 0. If everyone started at 0 they pass on nothing. Google needed a way to seed. They assigned the highest value to themselves scaling down to other giants, universities, dmoz sites, etc. Pagerank is a reputation calculator. You still need to define at least one cool person. Much better with thousands to varying degrees.

fractionalhare 6y ago

> A trending search in our data for “myocardial infarction” shows how Google has piled up its products at the top. It returned: - Google’s dictionary definition. - A “people also ask” box that expanded to answer related questions without leaving the search results page. - A “knowledge panel,” which is an abridged encyclopedia entry with various links. - And a “related conditions” carousel leading to various new Google searches for other diseases. I don't know, I'm conflicted on examples like this. I see the point the article is going for, but I think it's better exemplified by the fact that there's a lot of advertising space taken up at the premium, top of the page on search results. This example is not Google advertising itself so much as Google changing the features of the search engine itself. It's not emphasizing its own search results over "organic" search results, it's deemphasizing search results altogether in favor of quick, curated answers. Most of the time I can quickly tell what the "organic" source of the direct answer is. I like that. Is there a way we could get quick curated answers like this without deemphasizing search results? Is that something most people would actually want? I feel a better point of contention is the number of ads, which I care more about.

Angostura 6y ago
> This example is not Google advertising itself so much as Google changing the features of the search engine itself. What it is an example of in my view is Google increasingly attemnpting to keep you on its site by scraping the information from other sites and displaying it. Originally Google scraped the sites solely to build a better search index.
kevingadd 6y ago
The definition of "search" or what it means to type something into the google search input field has changed over time, and that's probably the root of this. It used to mean "show me web pages related to this input string", and some of those search results were sponsored (ads). Now it's interpreted more as "inform me about this input string" or "please help me with this", like a Siri or Google Assistant (though not necessarily in natural language). When you view it as a "please assist me" query it makes sense to introduce things like answerboxes, related queries, embedded images or translations, etc. But that is VERY MUCH not "search" anymore. It's quite possible that most people using a search engine actually want an Assistant, so google's new behavior is ideal for them. But where do you go when you actually want a search engine? You see people complain that over time Google has become worse as a search engine - using it to search for programming topics is definitely worse than it used to be, and its search results in general are often full of astroturfed pinterest or stackoverflow pages.

emptyparadise 6y ago

I love that "How Far Down Are the Traditional Search Results?" graphic.

jforman 6y ago

When I worked at Bing almost 20 years ago, the #1 search term was "Google". So maybe this is reasonable :) (#2 was "Gogle")

wolco 6y ago
Bing was launched in 2009. Where were you working in the year 2000?
- Madzen__ 6y ago
  Creating bing.
- jforman 6y ago
  I was at Microsoft, in MSN Search (which was later re-branded Bing). This was 2003.
  - cheez 6y ago
    The MSN brand had some good stuff. MSN messenger, the MSN browser (I loved it). Great work by that team.
- WrtCdEvrydy 6y ago
  poor guy worked for Bing, it probably felt like decades.
josefresco 6y ago
I wonder that the numbers look like now. I could see someone searching "MSN" for "Google" because MSN was set to their home page, or the default search. I wonder if those practices are still widespread enough to create this same effect. Given that Chrome is the new IE, I wonder how long (or ever) until they see competitors' brands in their popular search terms.
- segfaultbuserr 6y ago
  Don't underestimate the technical illiteracy here. A significant number of people don't really understand how the address bar or an URL works in a web browser. Use web searching as a substitute of typing an URL is common, and some can't distinguish the "search" function of an address bar and the "enter an URL" function of an address bar. Searching "Google" in the address bar to access Google in Google Chrome is not unusual (sometimes you'll get a search result of 'Google' at Google, sometimes you'll be autocompleted and get a Google homepage, users don't notice the difference). This is also the underlying basis of Google's idea of abolishing the address bar - some users don't understand it, a Walled Garden is "better". I'm not saying that I support Google's idea, just to point out a phenomenon that exists.

mrkramer 6y ago

This is somewhat similar to the thread that I shared yesterday but nobody looked at it. Here is the link https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23964461 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23964461

dredmorbius 6y ago

Separating search from content from services from advertising is starting to sound very appealing.

moron4hire 6y ago

If anything I am searching can even remotely be considered a product or paid service, I get an entire page, minus one link of links that have the [ad] box on them. And they're all shady 3rd party retailers. And when I want to find a product, to get the manufacturers website and product details, it's nowhere to be found. Just page upon page of [ad] links.

ricardo81 6y ago

My own personal observations - The "rich results" do indeed save people a click - Some of them are excerpts from sites crawled by Google (that will tend to now be the 2nd result) that the user will no longer click on - Google's query disambiguation is the best in the business - They'd had a history of piggy backing on external resources and then turning them into their own, e.g. DMOZ, now wikipedia. I'm sure their knowledge ontology will soon render Wiki obsolete and push them down a result also. - They've taken some verticals and halved the number of clicks competitors or "price comparison" sites previously got, albeit it's their search engine, they lay it out as they see fit. It's changed a lot since the "10 blue links". Most of us probably used to think of search engines as an agnostic finder of information on the web, with ads on top. Now with "query intent" and monetisation - the temptation is too much and it's not so much about finding information "out there", on the web. Because of the position that Google is now in wrt their dominance in search markets and to the extent they can monetise a query, no one else can match their revenue per user or find alterative avenues of traffic that are comparable to their portal (i.e. Google in the UK commands 95% of searches, 80% of ad spend is between them and Facebook). If Google decides they want to enter a vertical, it's hugely detrimental to others in that market. Someone who ranked #1 10 years ago would get 50% of clicks, IIRC it's closer to 20% now, because of all the other media on the page. But in the end, there are other choices. The problem is that due to the monetisation Google is capable of (based on a lot of data acquisition about their users), it's hard for anyone to carve out an alternative. Particularly so when Google pay phone vendors and browsers for them to be the default engine, it's a perpetuating cycle. My personal ideal would be 5 or 6 independent search engines, with a number of meta engines built on top of those independent data sources;algos. Purely for the sake of getting alternative points of view and perhaps past any filters or bias.

deleted 6y ago

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umaar 6y ago

Generally, I like the 'rich snippets' feature, but I think they've gotten worse. For example here's a reddit post I made from 6 years ago showcasing a search for 'mac shortcut screenshot' https://www.reddit.com/r/google/comments/1ou4i0/a_search_for_mac_screenshot_shortcut_displays_the/ https://www.reddit.com/r/google/comments/1ou4i0/a_search_for... It's extremely clear, and results in minimal cognitive effort in parsing the result. Here's the result now: https://i.imgur.com/A726Dhw.png https://i.imgur.com/A726Dhw.png There's so much more cruft: - 4x low resolution screenshots which I initially thought were related to ads - An extra URL - Multi-step instructions - Lots of extra words - Bold formatting has been applied inconsistently Seeing the text: "Command + Shift + 3" in big bold letters was great, but it's now changed into something else.

umaar 6y ago
Turns out Google has been doing this for my own site on certain pages. If I search for: devtools capture element screenshot It has listed the exact instructions on the search results page: https://i.imgur.com/NTdDjZY.png https://i.imgur.com/NTdDjZY.png Can I get an outsider perspective, are those 4 list items shown in the rich snippet too many? Is it too wordy? I'm wondering if a single item which said: Search for screenshot in the Command Menu (Cmd + Shift + P) Would be better?
- alickz 6y ago
  I think it's fine. I'm not a webdev but I could follow your current instructions easily. I would definitely consider your instructions a good result if I was looking for the answer. Although I prefer the second (wordier) example in OPs case anyway.
NoodleIncident 6y ago
I can think of two reasons that they might think the new version is better: - The new snippet might be more useful to a majority of the people searching. It shows you the keys on the keyboard, it explains how to input it instead of relying on knowing the shortened notation, and it tells you where the screenshot will go. Since I don't use a mac myself, I feel like I've learned more from the latter than from the former. - As you can see in the other reply to this comment, the new info box can pull info from any page with a numbered list of instructions. I don't know how the earlier info was extracted, but if you're going to pull out instructions like this for more queries about more complicated tasks, then it's better to be consistent, even if it could be expressed in a single bullet point. I also find it funny that the source link is far more prominent in the newer rich snippet, even though a lot of people in this thread are saying they've made it harder to find.

pradn 6y ago

The problem here is that something that's useful for users (saving time with knowledge panels, question/answer lists, and suggested searches) also takes away clicks from other websites. Something can be both good for the user in the short-term (quicker answers) and bad for the user in the long term (fewer websites survive if clicks are diverted). We have the same issue with "ecosystems". It's great for the user that the Google Assistant can ring the Pixel phone if you don't know where it is. But it's one more feature that locks our smaller/independent competitors.

slantaclaus 6y ago

I just want to say that the “Linux” search results now seem more relevant than they were in the past. Internet.com? Lol

lorec0re 6y ago

Amazon top search results? Surprise, Amazon-made products!

JadeNB 6y ago
Not defending Amazon, but that's far from the default experience in my experience. Maybe I just search for a lot of specific thing Amazon doesn't sell themselves.

JackPoach 6y ago

That's what happens when you have a monopoly.

auganov 6y ago

I would gladly pay for a search engine that actually did some things better than Google. Like say being better at finding [semi]exact phrases, especially longer ones. Something that focused on the long tail of search queries. Also, yes, I do feel like Google has gotten pretty bad for some normal queries. But this might as well be a function of the Internet/Web changing overall. But I find this focus on Google's supposed moral infractions ridiculous. And then competitors popup that have a strictly worse products user-wise, but want to win by claiming higher moral ground. They don't fix any of the issues. I just don't see any of that taking off. To date, I have not seen a single search engine that actually does something significant better. Not only that, pretty much all of them fail miserably for anything more specific. This tells me Google is still absolutely on top of their game. I like these widgets. Sometimes I even get annoyed when I WAS expecting it to popup but it wouldn't.

tristan957 6y ago
Privacy is a major feature. Morality is most definitely something a business can be better at. You can't just hand wave it away like it doesn't matter. DuckDuckGo might not give the best results, but I would trade that for privacy 10 times out of 10.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

markosaric 6y ago

Great study and presentation! And an impressive website for a publisher. The average publisher is full of advertising, calls-to-action and several MBs weight of external scripts. This one is so simple, fast to load and clean. Congrats!

rondennis 6y ago

I feel Google has turned on its pledge of doing no evil. It is not shamelessly stealing publishers content and displaying it in the featured snippets. So the searcher has really no incentive of clicking on the search result anymore. He is getting all the information on Google itself.

wasdfff 6y ago
Usually the snippets are outright crap. But this is the end result of SEO noise overwhelming signal.

pwinnski 6y ago

Search engines seem like they're subject to quantum mechanics, in that they're the observer that affects the state of the internet. An internet without search engines was an internet without SEO, and without vast fortunes being spent on manipulating content to sell garbage. Launching "Backrub" in that environment must have seemed like an unalloyed good, but the very act of launching it turned out to have a profoundly negative impact on the web as a whole.

pwinnski 6y ago
I guess I mean this as a semi-defense of Google, even though I don't like them and use DDG personally. When doing a search on travel, what are the odds you get not-garbage in your results? Compare, say, 2000 to 2020. I can see a scenario in which Google was committed to providing open results, but those open results slowly became garbage, and they felt compelled to launch their own tool to ensure good results. And sure, it puts profit in their pocket too, of course.

gundmc 6y ago

> How a search for “Linux” has changed. In 2000, Google only returned “organic” results, ads, and a category header. Now the top of the page is full of Google products and “answers.” Source: 2000 screenshot/Archive.org Weird example to use in a screenshot since everything they show is a link to an external site.

lokar 6y ago

I don't recall Google ever promising to be a "pure" web search engine, just indexing all the pages. Quite the opposite, they said the goal was to organize and present information. The goal has always been the most relevant information given the query. Early on, that pretty much always meant a web page. More and more, they already know the answer and can present it with a better UX for the user. Why should they be required to be a "pure" index of web pages?

gukov 6y ago
Similarly to Amazon replacing popular products with their own, Google is doing the same with search results.
- lokar 6y ago
  I'm not sure it's really the same. Someone asks Google "how far is it from Portland to Austin", and before they got 10 blue links, and now they get a number. That's not the same as "amazon, send me some Coke" and them sending Amazon brand cola drink.

jb775 6y ago

Probably because a lot of boomers open browsers and initially type "google" into the top bar (which does a google search for "google") just to get to the actual google website...then search for w/e they actually want to search for.

personjerry 6y ago

Some of the answers in this thread actually allude to the bias in this study: People actively change their behaviors to accommodate Google's knowledge panels, meaning some portion of the "15000 top search queries" they studied are actually people seeking Google's results, not general search results.

ss7pro 6y ago

Sorry but google flights have no competition. There is no better or more flexible and fast flight search than Google. No wonder why they won. Expedia should invest more in their flight search if they want to win.

swagatkonchada 6y ago
"no competition" i guess you meant this figuratively. But in fact there is a ton of competition and the point of the article is that G is suppressing that competition by unfairly giving themselves the space which needs the least number of clicks to reach.

baby-yoda 6y ago

Google (as well as Facebook) are becoming AOL 2.0 - users only know the service and not the mechanism or source. All info comes from G (or F). Syndicated or outright copied from all over the web but appearing with the “friendly, familiar and welcoming Logo our users know, love and trust” /s

drusepth 6y ago

Makes sense to me. Google Flights is amazing, Google Stocks is better than my broker (and way easier/faster), Translate doesn't even have a decent competitor, and Restaurants isn't perfect but just makes it easier to get to Google Maps. As a consumer, this is great. As a small business owner, I'm not very concerned about Google usurping pieces of my site into a widget. If the entirety of a business/site can be replaced with a free single-action widget, it's probably better for the consumer to do so. If I were a big business (Expedia, Yelp, etc) affected by this, I would be more concerned about improving my product than a competitor simply copying functionality.

eggsnbacon1 6y ago
Competitors have a hard time getting off the ground because the dominant player is promoting its own products. Classic monopoly. Competition won't be good if nobody uses them. Google maps might be a good example, MapQuest and Terraserver used to be better for navigation and satellite photos. Did they fail because of business reasons or self promotion? Hard to know, but Google pulled the same shit as MS got antitrust for. Bundling their own maps app pre-installed on their dominant mobile OS
- acituan 6y ago
  > ...promoting its own products. Classic monopoly How is promoting equivalent to classic monopoly? They are not removing competitors from search results. They are ranking based on relevance and apparently users are happy with their own widgets coming up on top.
  - dbuder 6y ago
    >>They are ranking based on relevance But they aren't! That's what we are talking about! They're putting themselves at the top.
  - eggsnbacon1 6y ago
    they're promoting their own products when they have over 80% of search eyeballs

aftbit 6y ago

A bit OT: can anyone recommend a good web-based OpenStreetMaps viewer with support for toggling multiple layers (e.g. topo, streets, satellite, political boundaries) and decent measuring tools?

rmc 6y ago
There's a few MapCompare instances for showing many different maps: https://mc.bbbike.org/mc/ https://mc.bbbike.org/mc/

coronadisaster 6y ago

I'm surprised Google doesnt get sued for copyright infringement for large snippets that they include at the top of search results...

Yhippa 6y ago

Because of the things cited in the article I spend less time in the Google search results page. I typically find the answer I'm looking for and get on with my day. Because I'm spending less time I actually use it more now. Sometimes when I'm looking up stuff on how to do things physically like how to install a part in a car or fix something in my house I'll get a YouTube widget at the top which will take me to the exact moment in a video where what I'm looking for is being performed. This is magic to me. However Google is definitely promoting themselves in this case and I might not go anywhere past the very top of the search results page. Is this a bad thing?

aidenn0 6y ago

Anyone have a recommendation for replacing hipmunk? I haven't found anything that shows as much information so visually and intuitively.

slmjkdbtl 6y ago

Good read! Also impressed by how the article page is designed/engineered. I wonder for a site like this how much of the content is hard coded and how much is made by tools / frameworks (the interactive scrolling box really looks like a hard-coded component for this article specifically)

james305 6y ago

Who cares? Are they a non-profit? People who are offended by this have never run a business.

sjreese 6y ago

Google continues to abuse its market power, and the industry has not rebounded, despite the remedy.

musicale 6y ago

This has been the case for a while and should not be surprising to anyone. It's not terrible (Google's and Bing's promoted and internal modular results "above the fold" are often useful and relevant) but it does make it harder to use modern search portals to actually search the general web outside promoted results.

t0ughcritic 6y ago

Googles next five results? Surprise... Ads, pay to play

t0ughcritic 6y ago

Google is removing the concept of urls and domains. Apps do this but so does not showing part of the URL in the URL bar and not showing the URL as it is in the result pages without the breadcrumb type redesign. They also realized they make more money when they show a favicon of websites to obfuscate the fact that they have to legally label Ads as ads. The ads txt is directly proportional to the size of the fav icon in serps. Google is evil. Let’s not forget how google reader and blogger were killed. The greater idea is to not remember anything and to go directly to google each time, making them the sole source of content.