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That's a bit of a non sequitur. Quotes no longer working doesn't have anything to do with the JavaScript on the website. My theory about this is that Google has

That's a bit of a non sequitur. Quotes no longer working doesn't have anything to do with the JavaScript on the website. My theory about this is that Google has slowly and steadily A/B tested every useful feature out of their product, and I assume that's because power users are simply a statistically insignificant group.

TeMPOraL 3y ago
> I assume that's because power users are simply a statistically insignificant group They probably assume the same, but the problem with this assumption is that it's self-fulfilling. The reason power users are so small a group is, in part, because software and UI/UX design trends actively prevent it. Especially with SaaS, we live in the era of perpetual MVPs - features get offered the moment they clear the "demo" bar, and hardly ever improved afterwards, except to cut them down further. There is no space for mastery - what you learn to do in first 30 seconds is... all there is to do. More powerful functionality, if it existed, is already removed, after being first hidden away in a non-discoverable "advanced" menu, and then removed, citing low usage. Well, no shit, people won't be using things you go out of your way to hide from them. And then there's the "attention economy", to which power users are anathema, as the attention economy's core idea is to make things as hard and as annoying as possible, and then make money on friction. So honestly, I wouldn't trust such A/B tests alone - they generally cannot distinguish between something people like, vs. something people hate and have no chocice but to make do.
KMag 3y ago
In this case, the A/B testing is mostly in the form of machine learning in their learn-to-rank scoring algorithm. The machine learning gets the final say as to if those quotes are important or not. I'm not sure what they do to prevent learn-to-rank from over-optimizing the median case, but it seems to not be enough for the tastes of many power users.

TeMPOraL 3y ago

> I assume that's because power users are simply a statistically insignificant group They probably assume the same, but the problem with this assumption is that it's self-fulfilling. The reason power users are so small a group is, in part, because software and UI/UX design trends actively prevent it. Especially with SaaS, we live in the era of perpetual MVPs - features get offered the moment they clear the "demo" bar, and hardly ever improved afterwards, except to cut them down further. There is no space for mastery - what you learn to do in first 30 seconds is... all there is to do. More powerful functionality, if it existed, is already removed, after being first hidden away in a non-discoverable "advanced" menu, and then removed, citing low usage. Well, no shit, people won't be using things you go out of your way to hide from them. And then there's the "attention economy", to which power users are anathema, as the attention economy's core idea is to make things as hard and as annoying as possible, and then make money on friction. So honestly, I wouldn't trust such A/B tests alone - they generally cannot distinguish between something people like, vs. something people hate and have no chocice but to make do.

KMag 3y ago

In this case, the A/B testing is mostly in the form of machine learning in their learn-to-rank scoring algorithm. The machine learning gets the final say as to if those quotes are important or not. I'm not sure what they do to prevent learn-to-rank from over-optimizing the median case, but it seems to not be enough for the tastes of many power users.