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Larry Page to Googlers: If You Don’t Get SPYW, Work Somewhere Else
- bjdixon 15y agoSo, what are people using as alternatives these days? I use gmail, google talk and google.com exclusively for email, chat and search. If (for arguments sake) I wanted to switch what is there of similar quality that still be around and relevant in 3 or 4 years?
- vyrotek 15y agoI'm not being facetious when I say try Microsoft - Hotmail, Office365, Live Messenger, Bing
- bjdixon 15y agoI know. I'm not a hater.. really =) I just can't seem to make myself go back to MS stuff. I guess it's an old prejudice, I'm stubborn to my own detriment?
- cracell 15y agohttp://duckduckgo.com http://duckduckgo.com is an excellent search engine that takes user privacy seriously. For me it tends to fail on very specific queries and then I use it's Google Bang to just have it redirect me to Google. But it's as good as Google for my typical queries.
- ComputerGuru 15y agoGoogle Talk is plain vanilla XMPP (except the audio/video extensions), and any XMPP server can chat to any Google Talk user. The Google Talk client itself is shit and hasn't been updated in years, you won't be missing out on anything there. I use Mail.app w/ GMail over IMAP and have no problems. I could switch to any other provider of course, but see no reason to do so as accessing GMail over IMAP doesn't have any of this social crap associated with it. Unfortunately, on Windows I'm forced to use gmail.com as no desktop client comes even close to Mail.app's fully integrated and optimized IMAP support. Outlook's IMAP support is STILL blocking/synchronous for most operations, hanging the entire software while it syncs headers or sends items to be erased. Thunderbird is as clunky as ever. Google is the only one left, then. I used DDG for a while, but I think they need to step up their game with regards to simplifying the UI (i.e. remove the attempts at finding the info you're looking for for you or at least provide an option to disable this) and speed up both page serves and queries, w/ geodistributed caching, etc. Or you could just use Google SSL, but disable all cookies for that domain.
- bjdixon 15y agoI agree with the google talk. The most replaceable item on the list. It's just so easy though with it being there next to my email... I'll give ddg a go. See what's up there.
- stock_toaster 15y agoI think fastmail.fm provides[1] email as well as xmpp. I have been considering a switch from gmail to fastmail (also looking at rackspace email), and planning to use my own domain again. I had previously self hosted (a pain), and then used google apps with my own domain. That was when google apps had no google groups or other integration at all, and it was cumbersome to have two google accounts (no multiple login then either). So I switched to plain gmail. Certainly less work and the bonus of being able to tell people 'blah blah at gmail dot com' and not having to spell it out every time someone asked for it cannot be understated. My needs have changed a bit though, and being able to retain my email/domain should I choose to change providers again has become more important. In addition, I no longer use the gmail web interface, opting instead to use sparrow over imap. An unlikely shift back to client centric computing even while more and more of my other services are shifting away! [1]: http://fastmail.fm/help/overview_features.html http://fastmail.fm/help/overview_features.html
- dan85 15y agoMy impression is that Bing is getting better and better. I WILL switch to it IF they provide date filtering for all searches. (For example it's impossible for me to use Bing for searching on HN because I get out of date results, while on Google I just apply the "last 24 hrs" filter).
- Lammy 15y agoI went back to hosting my own email and chat on VPS. Check out iRedMail for a nice easily-configured FOSS mail package and ejabberd for a nice XMPP server. XMPP federates with google talk, so I can still chat with @gmail.com friends.
- Arelius 15y agoGoogle talk is pretty replaceable with many other jabber based servers, and clients, and enough variance that you can generally find a solution that works best for you. afaict, Jabber messages can cross from and too the standard google talk jabber domains. Search, I still find myself using google from time to time, but my default search is duckduckgo, this is greatly helped due to the fact that it's simple to search from google instead by simply adding !g to the search, additionally, you can do similar things for !gmaps !gimages !bing, this feature alone makes ddg a trivially better google replacement for default search. Now, a decent replacement for the gmail client, I haven't been able to find something satisfactory web-based, or even as a desktop app. I use thunderbird for work emails, but it seems to be a little... lacking.
- bjdixon 15y agoyeah, I can deal with the jabber client, I'll try ddg, but gmail is kinda sticky =) Maybe I'll roll my own or something. I guess I know what I like, right?
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- pnathan 15y agoEmail: I use my alumni account which happens to be Microsoft-based. Chat: IRC/AIM/Yahoo/etc - just grab something with a libpurple backend. Search: DuckDuckGo most of the time, Google otherwise.
- bjdixon 15y agoDuckDuckGo seems to have come up a couple of times. I'll give it a trial.
- CJWelle 15y agoI see many great suggestions here, but calendar replacement has not been suggested yet.
- bjdixon 15y agooh yeah, awesome point. I'm totally dependent on the calendar. I share with my gf and friends... That's a tough one. Why google, why? ='(
- pca 15y agoWindows Live Calendar nowadays is very similar to Google Calendar. It should be possible to sync it e.g. with Android via ActiceSync. Some time ago I managed to do this with Android 2.3. I don't have this setup any more, so if you need details try searching for "windows live activesync" or something similar.
- pg 15y agoYou don't have to get a job at another company. You could also start your own.
- benjlang 15y agoLet's hope that this leads to an exodus of Googler's who leave to create their own startups.
- lsb 15y agoThis seems like the perfect time to relaunch "Larry and Sergey won't respect you in the morning." http://ycombinator.com/ad.html http://ycombinator.com/ad.html http://www.flickr.com/photos/martindavidsson/96160482 http://www.flickr.com/photos/martindavidsson/96160482
- pg 15y agoHmph, I'd forgotten that. Interesting that we wouldn't do that sort of thing now. It would seem too rude to mention Google explicitly. Whereas when we first started YC we were so obscure we couldn't successfully be rude to anyone.
- lsb 15y agoIt also dates it, in the same way that "Bill and Steve won't respect you in the morning" would make it uniquely a thing of ten years prior. Whereas making it generic makes it more timeless, and timelessness is good design in general.
- huhtenberg 15y agoI assume it's Steve Jobs, not Balmer. (edit) Why am I at -1? Balmer is a more reasonable match for Bill, but he is not a founder. Jobs is a better fit, but it is odd to see him paired with Gates.
- esrauch 15y ago
- rhizome 15y agoSPYW: "Search Plus Your World"
- geuis 15y agoThanks. I've spent the last 5 minutes trying to figure out what the oft-referenced acronym meant.
- muyuu 15y agoSeriously. I didn't know what they called it, but if it was an idea coming from Google, then it's a really stupid name. Even Google autocompletes it to "spyware" and it starts with SPY. Come on.
- arctangent 15y agoI suppose there are worse names. How about "Enlightenment Via Intimate Links" (EVIL)?
- mindcrime 15y agoHow about "Finding Unsolicited Content & Knowledge"? :-)
- thought_alarm 15y agoIf you google it, it's currently the 3rd and 4th search results. Now, if you google SPYW on Bing then it's nowhere to be found, and that's ultimately why I continue to use Google for search regardless of whatever nonsense they put in the side bar.
- tnuc 15y ago>if you google SPYW on Bing... You don't "google" on bing, you "bing it".
- davux 15y agoI just checked on Bing and it's in the description of the second result, from a Jan 13th article. http://www.bing.com/search?q=SPYW http://www.bing.com/search?q=SPYW > Jan 13, 2012 · Summary: Google’s Search Plus Your World (SPYW) announcement has ruffled some feathers. Both Facebook and Twitter have reacted ... I've been banging the "Bing needs to do so much better to make even a tiny dent" drum for a while now, but they've made strides in the past 6 months.
- apg 15y agoThis all makes no never-mind to me, as I'm going to turn that right off (you can do that, right?). I prefer to evaluate on my own what information is relevant and what isn't. Happy accidents, you know. Did Google ever announce what the rationale for this is, from a revenue perspective? Is a link with content that a person is likely to recognize also likely to generate extra revenue?
- querulous 15y agoThe rationale is clearly to drive traffic to their own products at the expense of competitors like twitter and facebook. SPYW is just more advertising, except for now it's limited to google properties. They're obviously banking that people won't notice or care that most search results are now paid placements.
- icebraining 15y agoI'm going to turn that right off (you can do that, right?) Yes. Settings icon ( ⚙ ), then Search Settings, then Do not use personal results.
- marshray 15y agoWhat if you don't want to tell them who you are at all? I.e., you block cookies.
- esteth 15y agoThey'll still no doubt be using geolocation to filter results, as well as time of day, browser being used, etc... At their scale, they can no doubt see patterns in data that make it worth personalising search based on those factors, regardless of wether or not you are signed in.
- marshray 15y agoI'm less concerned with receiving unbiased search results than I am being in control of the choice to divulge my own identity.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- g1x 15y ago> There’s a full-on war for developer talent that the company has already been struggling with– along with every single startup and sexier large companies like Facebook, Twitter and Zynga. What makes Zynga, Twitter and Facebook "sexier"? > Then again, a lot of what we’re hearing is from X-Googlers. Google has been competing for employees for a while by simply shelling out more cash. Perhaps newer hires are just there for the paycheck, more than the much-vaunted mission. What percentage of Zynga hires are there for the paycheck as opposed to the "mission"?
- fennecfoxen 15y agoI had the opportunity to interact with a couple of Zynga guys on the train once shortly after the "we're clawing back your RSUs or you're fired" fiasco. The good news, for Zynga, is that it didn't seem to hurt morale for those guys. The bad news is that they didn't care and had an "as long as it's not me" holding-out-for-the-big-bucks mercenary attitude. But then, maybe Zynga's just a morally bankrupt go-for-the-bucks mercenary company so perhaps they're a perfect fit.
- angrycoder 15y agoI think the author intended that as sexier than other large companies, meaning it is sexier to work at Facebook than microsoft, SAP, Oracle, or whatever.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- funkah 15y agoWell, sounds like the man has a vision, and is being unambiguous about what it is. I can appreciate that, at least. Count me among the folks that don't "get it", though.
- Kylekramer 15y agoIt is quite the jump from “This is the path we’re headed down – a single unified, ‘beautiful’ product across everything. If you don’t get that, then you should probably work somewhere else" to "Agree with SPYW or GTFO". One is an admirable goal for a whale of a company and the other is a stubborn denial of contrary opinions. I thought Pando Daily was suppose to be a "different" tech news site.
- libraryatnight 15y agoI don't think Sarah Lacy is capable of producing a "different" tech news site, really. The article read like a tabloid.
- veyron 15y agowhat qualifies as a "different" tech news site?
- resnamen 15y agoSomething like Ars Technica, which is way meatier than the hyperbole and cheerleading that the PandoLemonCrunch school of venture journalism is capable of.
- robryan 15y agoTech news does tend to head towards this kind of article. I think they will have some in depth long form pieces mixed in with the standard stuff. I think the problem is that to really drive page views you need a lot of this stuff, many posts a day. Going in depth will earn you some different readers at the cost of some others and people won't revisit nearly as often.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- chauzer 15y agoAgreed. A lot of her stories look like ad placements for the companies she's covering too.
- brador 15y agoLeaders should lead with a unique style. Their way. Larry's playing catchup with Facebook while thinking he can be Steve Jobs, and that, together with guarding the cents by removing the little things that made life @Google awesome (bagels anyone?) has led to low morale among the workforce. Geeks with low morale don't get shit done. They don't innovate. They don't create. Google staff aren't code monkeys, they're not going to stick around to keep the seats warm. The good ones will spend every hour of the day doing the bare minimum required to still get a paycheck while finding a new job. It's money not passion that's preventing them leaving. And that's a pretty depressing atmosphere to work in.
- rryan 15y agoBagels. Really? That's what it takes to make life at $COMPANY awesome? What about working with smart people on interesting problems?
- creativityland 15y agoSometimes it's the small things that make working and life a bit awesome...so if it's bagels for some, then yes.
- jordan0day 15y agoI think the math is something more like: $COMPANY provides bagels. +1 "Sweet!" point. $COMPANY provides bagels, but later stops providing bagels. -10 "Sweet!" points. The removal of a perk has a larger net negative impact on morale than its existence ever did on the positive side.
- Peaker 15y agoYou can turn it around and ask: Really? Is the morale of the employees not worth the cost of a bagel? Removing the small benefits sends a message to the employees -- and it's the wrong message to send. In my company, we've had lots of nice little luxuries in our kitchen. Slowly, they removed these, bit by bit. They save an astonishingly small amount, but morale did suffer because of that. Our extra happiness at the workplace is not worth the cents to the management -- is basically the message.
- knowtheory 15y agoI misread the title and clicked expecting an argument about why Google thinks SPDY (http://www.chromium.org/spdy http://www.chromium.org/spdy ) is vital to internets or something :( This is much less cool/interesting.
- staunch 15y agoI would be much more interested at working at the new Page dominated Google than the old Schmidt one. At least he's trying to do what Steve Jobs did so well: make big leaps forward. Apple found it necessary to own more and more pieces of the stack to innovate. Google is finding itself in the same position. Almost all of the best products are restricted/closed/proprietary systems. Macs, OSX, iPhone/iPad, Facebook, Twitter, Gmail, etc. It certainly would be nice if there was a real competitor to Google like Android competes with iOS.
- capkutay 15y agoSchmidt is the type of person that VCs/investors/financial firms like to see in charge. They feel more comfortable when level-headed, experienced executives are in charge of a company. Now that Google has risen to the top, they have more freedom to put the creative types in charge.
- DanBC 15y agoWhy are big leaps good? Why not small iterative steps?
- staunch 15y agoIn most cases it seems companies either do small incremental improvements OR big leaps at roughly the same pace. Doing something bold doesn't have to take more time -- it just requires a lot more vision, effort, and balls.
- nostrademons 15y ago"Almost all of the best products are restricted/closed/proprietary systems." This makes me really sad. It might be necessary, but you also miss out on a lot of innovation that happens when people can build off the work of others. To steal your examples, would there be a market for the Mac or OS X if IBM had not licensed PC clones? Would there be Facebook/Twitter/GMail if the Internet had not been public-domain?
- staunch 15y ago
- moocow01 15y agoAh yes... and everybody thought Google was immune to the tech company lifecycle. My guess is this is where the downslide begins (which will probably be decades for a company of Google's size). I've seen this play out in small and large companies alike ... once the business model gets solidified and turns into a cash cow all the execs go into defense mode which manifest itself in a number of ways but my way or the highway is usually a big one.
- bishnu 15y agoWell in this case they're sacrificing their cash cow (search) for a social network that is optimistically 1/10th the size of Facebook. I would argue the precise opposite is happening here - SPYW represents an effort to innovate, and nobody is getting "complacent". Whether or not it's too radical is another story.
- moocow01 15y agoSPYW may have some hints of efforts toward innovation in search but its much more predominantly a defensive move by Google as was Google+ against leading social networks (obviously most notably Facebook and Twitter). Defensive moves are necessary and good in business terms but honestly when you start playing defense all the time your getting to be on the other side of the hill. Its just part of the natural evolution of successful companies.
- kls 15y agoI can't help but feel like this is the equivalent event of Ballmer throwing the chair. It's good to have decent among a company so long as it is promoted in a healthy manner, having employees grumble about it at the water cooler only serves to infect the ranks but promoting an open forum where any person can decent and others can rebut allows people to at least understand why the decision where made. In some manner the conflict may be resolved for all parties through a unforeseen solution and by having a forum you promote solutioning. If I worked at Google I would be looking for the door, not because of the issue at hand but because when someone else is told to GTFO, I take it as a signal that it's probably time for me to go to because the open forum has died. It's sad really they where the Bell Labs of this time, a dream and people need dreams.
- zheng 15y agoNot to nitpick, but it's "dissent". I learned the hard way (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3262893 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3262893)
- kls 15y agoThank You for the info, I have a very bad form of dyslexia (among some other related issues) which lent to early childhood issues, with spelling and English related subject, which to this day plague me when writing. As such I have to heavily rely on the spell checker. One of the reason I post is to keep my ability to write up to at least sub-par.
- marshray 15y agoYeah, but "descent" works well too. :-)
- MartinCron 15y agoThat was the word that knocked me out of a spelling bee when I was in junior high school. I still hate that word.
- misterbwong 15y agoI wonder why Bing/Yahoo isn't making a fuss about this. It'd be a good time for them to capitalize on the bad pub.
- myko 15y agoBing has been doing a similar thing with Facebook for awhile haven't they? I'm not sure they could really make a large fuss without seeming entirely hypocritical. Of course I think Facebook and Twitter are a bit hypocritical for complaining about this while trying to charge Google for the data that would allow their products to be added successfully to SPYW.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- cbs 15y agoGuys, unless you're actually a player, save yourself the headache and don't get caught up in this little valley tiff. I think SPYW is dumb, but google is trying something to improve search results, it happens to use data that they have on the user. I don't think they need permission from everyone in the valley with a sign-in service they can't crawl before they're allowed to make changes that are meant to improve search. So all the bitching about it really smells like the big guys trying to SEO through telling google that they can't change their algorithm in a way that they lose rank.
- tedsuo 15y ago“Most portals show their own content above content elsewhere on the web. We feel that’s a conflict of interest, analogous to taking money for search results. Their search engine doesn’t necessarily provide the best results; it provides the portal’s results. Google conscientiously tries to stay away from that. We want to get you out of Google and to the right place as fast as possible. It’s a very different model.” -Larry Page, 2004 I think it is important to note that google is straying from their original mission, intentionally or not.
- ay 15y agoThey are not straying, they are pivoting.
- gfodor 15y agoAnd there goes the last slice of meaning to the word "pivot." I think it's now officially dead.
- ay 15y agoI assumed that I did not need to mark the post with <sarcasm/>. What I implied is that companies are no different to humans in some respects - your life's mission when you are 5 is different from your life's mission when you are 15, and is different from your life's mission when you are 35. And there's nothing wrong about that - companies, like people, have the age. Welcome to the new grown up Google, I suppose. (of course, all of the above rant assumes that the quote is real. Which I decided to hunt down, and it is, apparently: http://glinden.blogspot.com/2004/08/google-playboys.html http://glinden.blogspot.com/2004/08/google-playboys.html) But the other part of the quote got me thinking - "...analogous to taking money for search results. " I caught myself a few times this year that I'd prefer to pay for the premium quality content rather than have to wade through the soup of the ads mixed with semi-relevant results. So maybe therein lies some version of the future. EDIT: of course, the rule "don't attribute to malice what you can attribute to ignorance" still holds and it might be just an experiment that went a bit too far - I can not reproduce the "ads above the search results" on my browser right now.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- steve8918 15y agoLet's hope that the quote isn't true. There's nothing that signals "jumping the shark" better than arrogance and the sense of untouchability. It's almost cliche how people at their peak think they can say and do whatever they want without consequences.
- danilocampos 15y agoA few decades from now, when someone writes up an HBS case study on Google, how will it read? My suspicion is that Google is going to treat us to a very painful object lesson: what happens to your business when you compromise the values of a beloved core product. Here's the thing: having the most complete, most accurate, most relevant search results means never having to say you're sorry. You can add ads, you can do additional products, you can add a kind of clunky single-signon, whatever. Because at the end of the day, the user needs the thing you have that no one else does. Now, Google had this. But one day, maybe around 2009, something happened. Where once I was delighted with Google's search, it started getting annoying. Things like automatically showing you a SERP for a different spelling of your query, because Google thought you were looking for that. Then they started matching to synonyms (tear and rip, say). And so this tool that used to do exactly what it was asked became too clever by half. Meanwhile, SERP quality began to deteriorate as well. We suffered for something like 18 months under the regime of those Stack Overflow scrapers and their ilk, with plenty of equivalent nonsense in other verticals (hello, ebooks!). So, already, Google took its eye off the ball for the one thing that previously had been inviolable. And now there's the comically titled SPYW. Google's not stupid: they get that the rise of mobile and specialty apps/services that go with it are going to whittle away at the searches they'll be asked to do. They've bet the company on Android and Google+ giving them an out. Android was a good call, as it puts them in the driver's seat for a lot of this mobile action. But they need the web, too. Can they get away with compromising their search with this nouveau portal strategy? My hunch is that they're going to pay dearly in the process of finding out the answer is no. They're too big and too smart not to make the transition to whatever the next big thing is after search. But boy – screwing with the golden goose that earns both reputation and cash? Well, give 'em this: they're willing to take risks.
- joebadmo 15y agoI disagree with your premise. The two previous "compromises" you cite are both examples of giving you what you want, instead of what you said you want. While your anecdotal data says that you are annoyingly misled by that, I'm sure there's a measure of selection bias there, and I'm sure Google has a lot more than anecdotal data. I'm a bit confused by the recent outcry about relevance. Do people disagree that social signals can add to relevance? If not, then how does Google get these social signals, if they're locked out of FB and twitter? It seems like a pretty clear strategy to me of simultaneously trying to grab as much social signal as possible by creating a meaningfully competitive social product, while also demonstrating to its competitors the value of allowing Google access to social signals. I find it strange that everyone seems to want Google to just keep doing what it's been doing, to, in a word, stagnate. I, for one, am happy to see Google continue to do big things, undertake big initiatives, respond to a changing world.
- yanw 15y agoSo instead of commending the CEO on articulating a vision and being determined about it the author somehow spins the words to fit the Google bashing theme of her previous posts. To be clear: "This is the path we’re headed down – a single unified, ‘beautiful’ product across everything. If you don’t get that, then you should probably work somewhere else" != “Fuck off”. There is plenty that could be said about the sad state of tech blogging but some of the blame falls on Google because they are losing the PR battle. It’s obvious that PR staff from Twitter/Facebook and others are doing a much better job at selling their rhetoric to these tech blogs, specially to the newly formed blogs looking for audience and traffic.
- amstr 15y agoThe disturbing thing is that people here at news.yc -- hopefully a fairly informed bunch -- seemingly aren't able to see past the infuriatingly self-serving nature of a "Don't Be Evil Toolbar" created by "Facebook & Twitter" employees. And, Facebook, which happily used its dominance in social to lock out users from bulk-exporting contacts during the Google+ launch now complains that Google is leveraging its dominance in search? OP: I'd be really interested to hear your take on why tech blogging is so pro-Apple/Twitter/FB and anti-Google. I have no connection to Google but it seems to me that Google is by far doing the most good in the world compared to the other 3 (Although Twitter has also done good things during e.g. the Arab Spring).
- jrockway 15y agoI think the problem is that people feel forced into agreeing with Google's decisions when they don't, and people don't like being forced into doing something. As an example, say you won't use Google+ because you don't like their account naming policies. That's fine, don't visit plus.google.com, don't use it, and it doesn't exist to you. But when Plus results start appearing in search, a product that you like, you are reminded of a community you can't participate in. This leads to resentment for search, because it is reminding you that you aren't getting the same service that everyone else is. Facebook, on the other hand, is very easy to ignore. I killed my account there several years ago and haven't really thought about Facebook since, since Facebook is nothing but a social network and I'm not really a big social networking guy. I think that's what's going on here. (I would say, "people are worried that there will only be one provider for XXX", where XXX is mail or search or chat or whatever, but I know that's not true. People did not mind AOL or Windows or the three big banks, so I doubt they really care that Google is "the only game". Slashdot users hate monopolies, but I'm not sure the average consumer cares.)
- Hominem 15y agoAm I the only one that thinks SPYW is the right direction? We have seen that rankings were increasingly being gamed. Algorithmic search is a never ending arms race. SPYW aligns with what google has been trying to do for a while, provide results that are relevant and worthwhile to the user. If my mom searches for digital cameras , she would rather have a link to something written on G+ by someone in her circle than a blurb on a content farm.Algorithmic search is a no win situation, there is no way to judge the value of the link, they need to do that through +1 and other social features. It is just wisdom of crowds.
- toddh 15y agoIdeally wouldn't it find the best result? G+ and farm.* seem equally likely to be poor. I did an image search for something like Empire State Building and my G+ results showed first. The results sucked.
- Hominem 15y agoI honestly don't know if it g+ will give better results for all searches or even any searches. When I search for "digital camera" the G+ results I get are people I know talking about cameras and sharing links about cameras.I think that is better than blog spam and content farms. My main point was without something like +1 they are in a never ending arms race, they needed to disrupt that cycle of tweeks and return to status-quo.
- toddh 15y agoDefinitely better than blog spam and content farms, but I was hoping those weren't my only options :-) I would like the highest signal content for the aspect of digital cameras I'm interested in, regardless of source. Using G+ as a mechanical proxy for relevance makes sense of course, but I don't think it gives the best results. I faced this what looking up coffee makers too. There are these search ruts you just can't get out of.
- Shorel 15y agoSo, Google got scared about the possibility of a 'Facebook Web Search' for nothing?
- nazar 15y agoMeta: Throwing the new terms as SPYW around as if they have been around for at least for decade I believe is wrong. At first I thought its some kind of certificate, or even some kind of vaccination.
- Stormbringer 15y agoSPYW ...sounds like spyware... ...looks like spyware...
- redthrowaway 15y agoI'm seeing a whole lot of hyperbole around here for what still seems to be pretty much a non-issue. Don't like SPYW? Don't use it. It's one button. Click it, and move on. Between the Don't Be Evil script stunt from facebook/twitter and the content-free blogspam from Sarah Lacy/pandodaily, it seems like there are a few people out there who really, really want this to be an issue. It isn't. Get over it.
- flyt 15y agoI don't understand: one click opt-out is ok for Google but not for Facebook's product launches?
- redthrowaway 15y agoFacebook's ongoing record is one of introducing opt-out products that harm user privacy. This is just a matter of preference. Nobody is hurt by SPYW, and it's far easier to disable than many of facebook's updates. The issue with Facebook's changes to privacy was not that they are opt-out, but that they were opt-out and significantly impacted user privacy. Opt-out services on their own may be annoying, but they aren't a cause for alarm unless it hurts the user.
- Stormbringer 15y agoGoogle also has an ongoing PR problem with regard to privacy, with Eric Schmidt (sp? the recently ex-ceo dude) going on record as saying he doesn't believe in privacy. Facebook at least pretends to care about privacy and then screws the user, whereas Google just skips to step B
- myko 15y agoGoogle has a team whose job is to make sure privacy needs of the user are met: http://www.dataliberation.org/ http://www.dataliberation.org/
- 15y ago
- dhruvbird 15y agoIt's not even 1st of April today.
- trotsky 15y agoI wonder which of the prestige investors that Sarah just closed told her to write these Google hit pieces. Good old valley "journalism".
- jordan0day 15y agoI really like how the article speculates that talented Google employees who value "don't be evil" enough to consider quitting over SPYW would take jobs at... Facebook.
- peterwwillis 15y agoSpent over 20 minutes to disable all of Google's bullshit personalization of search. I swear to Bob, if they shove one more god damn "feature" into Search i'm gonna make my default engine Yahoo.
- tnuc 15y agoHow did you disable this "bullshit personalization of search"?
- moylan 15y agoi find changing my search from standard google to; http://www.google.com/pda http://www.google.com/pda eliminates instant preview and instant results that really annoy me.
- saalweachter 15y agohttp://www.google.com/preferences http://www.google.com/preferences If you disable Instant, you can also crank it up to 100 results per page. Hell, you can manually block gplus.google.com, facebook.com, and twitter.com and pretend the whole "social" thing never happened.
- moylan 15y agoi do use that. however i spend a substantial amount of time on other peoples systems and when using other peoples systems especially windows systems i avoid logging into google in case of malware. the default settings of google search are just garish these days. i tried duckduckgo and while it was ok it just wasn't as good as google... yet. of course i'm not a fan of their new makeover either. i just prefer simple design.
- peterwwillis 15y agoIf you google around you can find links to disable Google+, Google Instant, SPYW, etc (the most effective form being deleting your profile and disabling web history, but still retains your main Google account). This way when you're logged in you get the very least amount of bullshit crowding the plain-old search results we used to love.
- RobertKohr 15y agoI don't care much about google+ infiltrating search. What I care most about is that searches are now more fuzzy. If I want to search for terms : A B C D The results will consist of things with any combination of those items, and sometimes things that are similar to those items. There used to be a + operator to force things, but that has been removed in the last half year. They supposedly added back something similar when you wrap things in quotes, but that doesn't work either. Now when I go to bing and search for +A +B +C +D, it really does just return only the results I am looking for. This is critical for searching for tech stuff. Not convinced? Try: +trueskill +javascript In google, bing, and duckduckgo.
- Karunamon 15y agoFWIW, you can enclose things in quotes to force strings to be searched verbatim. It's an extra character, true, but it does work.
- mekoka 15y agoHow did it go from This is the path we’re headed down – a single unified, ‘beautiful’ product across everything. If you don’t get that, then you should probably work somewhere else. to If you don't get SPYW, work somewhere else. I understood the first as "if you don't understand our goals, you should probably not be working here" and the second as "our way or the highway".
- squarecat 15y agohttp://eqi.org/defensive_people_are_insecure.htm#Dealing%20with%20Defensive%20People http://eqi.org/defensive_people_are_insecure.htm#Dealing%20w...
- lifeisstillgood 15y agoI'm dubious just how much relevance social signals add. And for me this is the crux of the matter. It looks like google is just chasing after facebook, with the sole intention of monetizing those lovely social graphs. That might not be evil, but it loses you a lot of goodwill. Telling the cows they are monetisabke beef units will hurt Daisy's feelings. If the google search page came with some means of showing the raw search and the adjusted ones, we might be willing to give them the benefit of the doubt (I.e. Your results, plus the raw duckduckgo equivalent, plus the ones based on your past search history but ignoring your google+ account etc) google is search, and the other posts are right - they forget that at their peril. But they can be forgiven the other dalliances if they can show us how those products made search better
- kmfrk 15y agoI think the most important part of this HN thread is that people have gone from giving Google the benefit of the doubt to assuming that everything they do is a part of trying to fuck over the users in any way imaginable in a depiction that is beginning to exceed a vilification greater than Mark Zuckerberg. Google are having the biggest crisis of trust in their entire history. A Gmail alternative seems more welcome than ever before, because who knows what they will do next. I don't really see anything newsworthy nor controversial in the article, but people are just fed up with everything Google are doing now. It actually reminds me of the binary ways people tend to hate politicians: either, they find them evil, or they find them incompetent. Microsoft went from being evil to bumbling idiots (to wit, try to remember the Seinfeld ads) - to being sort of neutral in the game. Now, Google have gone from being regarded as bumbling idiots to evil profit-maximizing clueless assholes who've eroded their brand and goodwill and danced on the line of antitrust suits. Facebook seems to be viewed as consistently evil, although some developers just seem to hate them for their API and "move fast and break things" philosophy, so YMMV. It's probably not doing them any favours that they of all the giants have the most invisible CEOs and owners of all, which makes the Google seem like an amorphous corporate blob of evil whose tendrils reach into our data and private lives. Even Ballmer adds some humanity to Microsoft, especially in the recent interview with him: http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/steve-ballmer-reboots-01122012_page_1.html http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/steve-ballmer-reboots-0....
- p0ss 15y agoGoogle lost me at Nymwars, they banned me, a loyal customer who had given them loads of money, for using the same name I use all over the net. That was the binary switch for me, perhaps they had been eroding my trust for years, but there was a clear snapping point where they jumped from good guys to bad guys, and it was a calculated business move on their part. I am now weening myself off google, its hard, they own half the net, but when their own employees are being silenced for defending my best interests, it is time to leave.
- rogerchucker 15y ago<fantasy> Google will have a mutiny where someone will kick out Larry and spin off Android, Google+, Youtube and Chrome OS and shift the focus back to basic Web search </fantasy>
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- scoot 15y agoI didn't know what SPYW was, and swear my first thought was it must be an abbreviation for SPYWare. Which is more than a little ironic now I know what it actually stands for.
- kaffiene 15y agoGoogle adds a feature that allows more personal relevancy to searches and now they're evil? I really don't understand the tech world's tendency towards group-think. First, the cult-like relationship with Apple (and M$ to some degree), then these wails of outrage when Google add a quite innocuous little feature that many people (myself included) will like. Google are not forcing you to use SPYW, you can turn it off. Google are not angels. Google are very far from evil. Quit the hyperventilating.
- Stormbringer 15y agoWhile I agree with the premises that (a) doctoring the search results is killing the golden goose and (b) Google is essentially just a big advertising company The reality is that even with watered down results they are still better than their competitors. If I want to search MSDN then Google gives better results than Bing. Think about that for a moment. How can Bing be a serious competitor to Google when they can't even search their own site properly??? So I think that there is some wriggle room for Google here. They can water the beer down... but it is still better than the cow piss the pub down the road is serving.
- zmonkeyz 15y agoI'm just amazed that this is such a big deal.
- tocomment 15y agoHey guys, should I know what spyw is? The article doesnt see, to say.
- loceng 15y agoThis has nothing to do with "if you don't get SPYW" Search Plus Your World itself can change and evolve. All of this negative media is being perpetuated by Twitter and Facebook who are losing massive amounts of free traffic they used to get. If Twitter and Facebook want to be guaranteed to be in Google's results, then they should guarantee that Google/Google+, etc. show up in Twitter and Facebook's search, though that's probably not a very good deal for Google - and Facebook wouldn't do that because of their closed/controlled ecosystem, and Twitter wouldn't want that traffic leak either. I would point this to being hypocritical and just trying to stir up negative public opinion about the whole thing - because it's all Twitter/Facebook are able to do. Don't you think Google is tracking the effects of their changes? And they likely did small tests first too. They can still measure the user's experience and maybe it actually is providing results people care and benefit from just as much.
- silkodyssey 15y agoI would much prefer to see Google fail trying to stay relevant than fail (like RIM) for not being able to adapt.
- BiosElement 15y agoThis nonsense gets voted up? Why cater to Google bashers, because that's all the author is doing.
- code_pockets 15y agoI think duckduckgo works like google should. That's why I changed , and will never go back.
- glimcat 15y agoUsing bang syntax in the address bar is awesome. I still use Google fairly often, but via DDG. It shaves about 30 seconds off of the time it takes me to get a result. Most search tasks I do are "hand me that spanner" tasks. I don't want you to give me a big spiel about how great your business is or to show me how thoroughly you can erase all semblance of privacy via data mining - I just want the damn spanner so I can get back to work. I switched to Google in the first place because they did the best job of getting the right spanner with the least amount of fuss. They're getting much worse at choosing the right spanner vs. feeding me a bunch of spam and ad content, and they're simultaneously taking longer to do it.
- code_pockets 15y agoAgreed. I also use DDG in the same way you mention, though only going to google for the rare image I can't find anywhere else (which is about once a month). Such is the reason why I'm always promoting DDG to others. It just works. I plan to contribute (code) to DDG as soon as I finish some open source projects I'm working on. They openly invited hackers to create stuff for them, which is a fantastic idea.
- JulianMorrison 15y agoI think this is just mistaken. How is mixing your social circle into your search NOT relevant? Given that people routinely move in tight cliques, whether or not they know it. If all your buddies are into kink, a search for "horse" or "crops" is likely to turn up something rather different from if they are into agriculture, and this is not uncool.
- zak_mc_kracken 15y agoYet another "Google is turning evil" article. We've had these regularly since Google went public in 2004. Yawn.
- Wrap 15y agoI'm not going to discuss the article itself as others have already said what I wanted to say,, rather let's take a look at the author of the article: Sarah Lacy. To give you an idea of who Sarah Lacy is, let's check out a video titled: "Mark Zuckerberg Interview with Sarah Lacy at SXSWi" After you've checked out that, read the article again and you'll see what I'm pointing at; Sarah Lacy is not an unbiased source, rather she's an FB mouthpiece.
- eurohacker 15y agolooking forward to the announcement that Facebook buys Wolphram Alpha
- resnamen 15y agoI don't understand why the TC diaspora gets so much attention. Have they earned the spotlight for reasons other than just being inflammatory?
- dbin78 15y agoFirst, I honestly do not understand the notion that Google is being “Evil” with Search Plus Your World. How is changing your product, whether it ends up being good or bad, evil? Second, my friends and family have no idea what SPYW is and don’t notice a difference. Heck, the majority of the searches I do are not drastically change to any large degree.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- salimane 15y agowhat I haven't seen in the previous comments is that people naively don't learn from past experiences or other failures. Now let me explain : - CURRENTLY, we can safely say Google core product is search and at least CURRENTLY people still needs "google search". - will it be the same in the FUTURE ? well, you don't have to know the answer, but I'm sure some crazy numbers crunching happen every day at Google and those would signal some trends about "google search" in favor or not. - Now let's learn from "some failures"...Microsoft didn't want to reinvent itself, they thought their cash cows (windows & office) will always give them a foot ahead, so never wants to let them go and try something totally new without "windows" in them...well u know their history. - Apple once was "Apple Computer", changed to "Apple Inc", entered new industries, created new ones, planning to enter new ones, never cared about "ideals, fair treatment, transparent", never care about what their users think they want, they controlled all their products like never seen before, they basically do what they want and their customers just take it or leave it...basically in short, 13 billions of profits in a quarter!!! Now with all above, assume you're smart, can learn quickly, , you're Larry Page and you don't want to become something of the past, what will you do ?
- salimane 15y agothanks for the downvote instead of discussing. if you can't discuss, why are you downvoting ?
- latj 15y agoduckduckgo.com
- skeltoac 15y agoEventually Google's algorithms will be so smart that they will index your sentiments to give you the experience most likely to retain you as a user. Maybe your Google will look like 2008.
- zizee 15y agoSPYW -> Search Plus Your World. This is the path we’re headed down – a single unified, ‘beautiful’ product across everything. If you don’t get that, then you should probably work somewhere else.” -larry page memo