7 ms·

Google is like an abusive partner: it may be gifting you something nice, but in the end we all know he's doing it only to soften you and hurt you later. It star

Google is like an abusive partner: it may be gifting you something nice, but in the end we all know he's doing it only to soften you and hurt you later. It started like a beautiful love story about knowledge and freedom, but now Google arrives drunk and hits us with a keyboard every night.

disantlor 4y ago
i get your point but this is really pretty dramatic. it’s a website. not everything needs to be found, let alone searched for
- gverrilla 4y ago
  "Currently, the predominant business model for commercial search engines is advertising. The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users. […]. For this type of reason and historical experience with other media, we expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers." The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine, Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page
  - ShamelessC 4y ago
    Great quote (given the context) - gonna go give this a read now, thanks.
- Gigachad 4y ago
  Almost everything posted on this site is blown way out of proportion. Google is a tool you can use if you want. The vast majority of people think it works great. But from the comments that get posted here you'd think the government is sending police forces to bust down your door if you don't endure an hour of google waterboarding.
  - BuyMyBitcoins 4y ago
    My increasing dissatisfaction with Google’s core product, what made it a company in the first place, it’s prime product, it’s raison d’être, Internet search, is because it now seems to fixate on the most generic terms in my query and returns answers for a question it assumes I have - rather than just being a powerful keyword search like it was two decades ago. You can still use something while lamenting that the product is not as good as it used to be.
  - frostwarrior 4y ago
    Early google represented "the good guys" against the bully Microsoft. Back then, they created Google Talk which rivaled MSN. Android started as a "open source mobile Linux" which rivaled Windows Phone. People trusted Google as the good guys open source powered company and, when it got big enough, it screwed everyone over. And that disappointment and outrage is still there
    - tourist2d 4y ago
      > when it got big enough, it screwed everyone over How did it screw everyone over? Almost all my non tech friends adore most Google products.
    - dymk 4y ago
      You may feel screwed over, meanwhile a billion people happily chug away on Google, GMail, and YouTube.
      - trasz 4y ago
        Inferior products can still be popular, how surprising. Seriously though, the only actually valuable thing Google has at this point is its market share.
        dymk 4y ago
        Given it's an inferior product, weird how nobody's come and made something better and eaten Google's lunch, isn't it?
- eyelidlessness 4y ago
  But I can’t search for things I know exist and very much want to find. I could previously do this with the same search syntax, really hoping this announcement means I can again. And if that seems dramatic, in the intervening period do you want to know what Google served me for very specific search terms? Malicious content and very little else.
  - disantlor 4y ago
    that sounds frustrating but it’s not the same as being with an abusive partner
    - Anyway0161 4y ago
    - catach 4y ago
      Consider that the analogy is intended to illustrate the mechanisms at play, and not the import.
      - dymk 4y ago
        A bad analogy is a bad analogy. If you want to illustrate the mechanism at play, come up with an analogy that fits the situation.
        catach 4y ago
        I'd agree that it's an overall failed analogy because people here are being distracted by the intensity signal, but I still see it as a good analogy for the purposes of illustrating the mechanism.
    - eyelidlessness 4y ago
      I’m sensitive to the distinction you’re making, I have had abusive partners. One of whom is a routine and often daily reminder of things I’d like to leave behind but haven’t yet been able to. I didn’t take the figurative way the other comment was phrased to mean literally that. Because you’re right, it’s not the same.
hericium 4y ago
> Google is like an abusive partner: it may be gifting you something nice, but in the end we all know he's doing it only to soften you and hurt you later. Wasn't this something nice just a normal, granted thing at the start of this relationship? I'm not using their services for few years now but I remember the search engine working well with quotes in the past - before they started bubbling people in personalized results.
- autoexec 4y ago
  Google seems to periodically disregard pretty much everything they said they supported in terms of search options. Whenever I try something else to actually get the results I want (or remove the ones I don't) they throw up a captcha and treat me like I'm some criminal hacker warning me that my IP address has been logged. Sadly, even duckduckgo can't seem to figure out what the '-' operator means anymore. Here I was hoping that by now we'd have a decent search engine with full regex support, but instead I'm longing for features we already had 20 years ago.
  - shreyshnaccount 4y ago
    full regex support sounds incredible, but is probably pretty damn hard to do now with the scale to which the internet has grown.
    - autoexec 4y ago
      You're probably right, but our servers have greater capacity and capabilities than ever and in a lot of ways, the web is a whole lot smaller than it used to be. Most people have a handful of sites they regularly visit and they only occasionally stray outside the confines of social media. Reddit alone caused the death of countless forums and online communities. Most of the search results we see today are just useless spam. Once you strip out the ads, the massive amounts of JS and the CSS the text you're left with should be easily compressible and quick to parse. The actual content people care about is more centralized and standardized than it's ever been. That has to count for something.
    - 4y ago
dymk 4y ago
You've clearly never been in an abusive relationship. At best it's a bad faux-dramatic attempt at humor that trivializes what abuse actually means.
threatripper 4y ago
If you don't like him then go to your other friends! What, you lost contact long ago? Do they even exist anymore? Too bad. Sounds like we're stuck together for a long long time.
SllX 4y ago
For real. My first thought on seeing the headline was to click through and find out how they were ruining it. Probably most of my queries have quotes in them, just to try and enforce some sanity on the results I get. Instead this appears to be restoring functionality that was lost. I swear Google used to actually do what this blog post says Google will now do, and I’m not sure when it disappeared, just that I stopped looking at the text blurbs since what they show usually isn’t what I got. Maybe that will change now with this backpedaled change? At least they’re not ruining it.

disantlor 4y ago

i get your point but this is really pretty dramatic. it’s a website. not everything needs to be found, let alone searched for

gverrilla 4y ago
"Currently, the predominant business model for commercial search engines is advertising. The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users. […]. For this type of reason and historical experience with other media, we expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers." The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine, Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page
- ShamelessC 4y ago
  Great quote (given the context) - gonna go give this a read now, thanks.
Gigachad 4y ago
Almost everything posted on this site is blown way out of proportion. Google is a tool you can use if you want. The vast majority of people think it works great. But from the comments that get posted here you'd think the government is sending police forces to bust down your door if you don't endure an hour of google waterboarding.
- BuyMyBitcoins 4y ago
  My increasing dissatisfaction with Google’s core product, what made it a company in the first place, it’s prime product, it’s raison d’être, Internet search, is because it now seems to fixate on the most generic terms in my query and returns answers for a question it assumes I have - rather than just being a powerful keyword search like it was two decades ago. You can still use something while lamenting that the product is not as good as it used to be.
- frostwarrior 4y ago
  Early google represented "the good guys" against the bully Microsoft. Back then, they created Google Talk which rivaled MSN. Android started as a "open source mobile Linux" which rivaled Windows Phone. People trusted Google as the good guys open source powered company and, when it got big enough, it screwed everyone over. And that disappointment and outrage is still there
  - tourist2d 4y ago
    > when it got big enough, it screwed everyone over How did it screw everyone over? Almost all my non tech friends adore most Google products.
  - dymk 4y ago
    You may feel screwed over, meanwhile a billion people happily chug away on Google, GMail, and YouTube.
    - trasz 4y ago
      Inferior products can still be popular, how surprising. Seriously though, the only actually valuable thing Google has at this point is its market share.
      - dymk 4y ago
        Given it's an inferior product, weird how nobody's come and made something better and eaten Google's lunch, isn't it?
eyelidlessness 4y ago
But I can’t search for things I know exist and very much want to find. I could previously do this with the same search syntax, really hoping this announcement means I can again. And if that seems dramatic, in the intervening period do you want to know what Google served me for very specific search terms? Malicious content and very little else.
- disantlor 4y ago
  that sounds frustrating but it’s not the same as being with an abusive partner
  - Anyway0161 4y ago
  - catach 4y ago
    Consider that the analogy is intended to illustrate the mechanisms at play, and not the import.
    - dymk 4y ago
      A bad analogy is a bad analogy. If you want to illustrate the mechanism at play, come up with an analogy that fits the situation.
      - catach 4y ago
        I'd agree that it's an overall failed analogy because people here are being distracted by the intensity signal, but I still see it as a good analogy for the purposes of illustrating the mechanism.
  - eyelidlessness 4y ago
    I’m sensitive to the distinction you’re making, I have had abusive partners. One of whom is a routine and often daily reminder of things I’d like to leave behind but haven’t yet been able to. I didn’t take the figurative way the other comment was phrased to mean literally that. Because you’re right, it’s not the same.

hericium 4y ago

> Google is like an abusive partner: it may be gifting you something nice, but in the end we all know he's doing it only to soften you and hurt you later. Wasn't this something nice just a normal, granted thing at the start of this relationship? I'm not using their services for few years now but I remember the search engine working well with quotes in the past - before they started bubbling people in personalized results.

autoexec 4y ago
Google seems to periodically disregard pretty much everything they said they supported in terms of search options. Whenever I try something else to actually get the results I want (or remove the ones I don't) they throw up a captcha and treat me like I'm some criminal hacker warning me that my IP address has been logged. Sadly, even duckduckgo can't seem to figure out what the '-' operator means anymore. Here I was hoping that by now we'd have a decent search engine with full regex support, but instead I'm longing for features we already had 20 years ago.
- shreyshnaccount 4y ago
  full regex support sounds incredible, but is probably pretty damn hard to do now with the scale to which the internet has grown.
  - autoexec 4y ago
    You're probably right, but our servers have greater capacity and capabilities than ever and in a lot of ways, the web is a whole lot smaller than it used to be. Most people have a handful of sites they regularly visit and they only occasionally stray outside the confines of social media. Reddit alone caused the death of countless forums and online communities. Most of the search results we see today are just useless spam. Once you strip out the ads, the massive amounts of JS and the CSS the text you're left with should be easily compressible and quick to parse. The actual content people care about is more centralized and standardized than it's ever been. That has to count for something.
  - 4y ago

dymk 4y ago

You've clearly never been in an abusive relationship. At best it's a bad faux-dramatic attempt at humor that trivializes what abuse actually means.

threatripper 4y ago

If you don't like him then go to your other friends! What, you lost contact long ago? Do they even exist anymore? Too bad. Sounds like we're stuck together for a long long time.

SllX 4y ago

For real. My first thought on seeing the headline was to click through and find out how they were ruining it. Probably most of my queries have quotes in them, just to try and enforce some sanity on the results I get. Instead this appears to be restoring functionality that was lost. I swear Google used to actually do what this blog post says Google will now do, and I’m not sure when it disappeared, just that I stopped looking at the text blurbs since what they show usually isn’t what I got. Maybe that will change now with this backpedaled change? At least they’re not ruining it.