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> But it never happened Oh something happened. Here's a news article from 10 days after that e-mail: https://www.ghacks.net/2019/05/14/fix-chrome-prioritizing

> But it never happened Oh something happened. Here's a news article from 10 days after that e-mail: https://www.ghacks.net/2019/05/14/fix-chrome-prioritizing-search-words-over-visited-sites-in-address-bar/ https://www.ghacks.net/2019/05/14/fix-chrome-prioritizing-se... tl;dr: Chrome started prioritizing previous searches over visited sites for suggestions in the omnibar.

Terr_ 3y ago
> prioritizing previous searches over visited sites To put a finer (more-explicit) point on that: That sounds like an attempt to keep people making google searches over and over merely to return to whatever search-result they already found in the past and wanted to see again. It's true that not everything in the browser-history is what people want, but still... Imagine I searched for "monkey island ferry schedule" and picked the obviously-correct first result at "dot.monkey.gov/ferries". Boom, done, got it. Then if I want that information again tomorrow, why would I ever want to re-search, as opposed to just returning to the same result? In contrast to all this Chrome stuff, let's imagine a browser that is utterly focused on the user's best-interests. With sufficient features/intelligence, it would actually do the exact opposite: "I notice every time you search any monkey/ferry stuff, you always stop once you get to that same result... So you probably always want exactly that page, therefore I should offer it prominently to help you avoid wasting time on unnecessary searches."
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- lostmsu 3y ago
  I feel like that would kill Google.
- ahahahahah 3y ago
  What if you searched "best canon camera 2023" and clicked the top (shitty probably ai generated) result https://www.bestcanoncamera2023.com https://www.bestcanoncamera2023.com? Do you think you would want to go back to that great site when you continued your research the next day? I could see there being a lot of queries where the search is the preferred thing to repeat.
totetsu 3y ago
chrome://flags/#omnibox-drive-suggestions The author seems to wonder what it has to do with Google drive to product, not realizing it’s Jerry from Google marketing driving you to go look at ads. Makes you wonder what schemes the markers are dreaming up for LLM chat dialogue agents to start ‘driving’ us to profitable things.
jeromegv 3y ago
Yep! It was actually something that made me decrease my use in chrome and eventually switch to safari. My mental model and my job requires me to use a lot previous sites. I keep my history for a full year for that reason. I might need to go back to something I read 6 months ago. I know I read it. I know it’s out there. And I don’t use bookmarks because I never know if what I read right now might be useful in 3 months. Sure I can google it again, but then have to go through multiple results on google to try to remember the right one. And with the google algo, you never know which new garbage will show up on top I did notice at some point that chrome would always try to send me back to google even if I knew it was in my history. Safari just shows me the previously visited site above everything. Those emails confirm my suspicions. This was all about ads.
- pxmpxm 3y ago
  I switched to Edge because there was no way to disable omnibox suggestions/ad money printer, especially if it autocompleted what I was typing.

Terr_ 3y ago

> prioritizing previous searches over visited sites To put a finer (more-explicit) point on that: That sounds like an attempt to keep people making google searches over and over merely to return to whatever search-result they already found in the past and wanted to see again. It's true that not everything in the browser-history is what people want, but still... Imagine I searched for "monkey island ferry schedule" and picked the obviously-correct first result at "dot.monkey.gov/ferries". Boom, done, got it. Then if I want that information again tomorrow, why would I ever want to re-search, as opposed to just returning to the same result? In contrast to all this Chrome stuff, let's imagine a browser that is utterly focused on the user's best-interests. With sufficient features/intelligence, it would actually do the exact opposite: "I notice every time you search any monkey/ferry stuff, you always stop once you get to that same result... So you probably always want exactly that page, therefore I should offer it prominently to help you avoid wasting time on unnecessary searches."

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
lostmsu 3y ago
I feel like that would kill Google.
ahahahahah 3y ago
What if you searched "best canon camera 2023" and clicked the top (shitty probably ai generated) result https://www.bestcanoncamera2023.com https://www.bestcanoncamera2023.com? Do you think you would want to go back to that great site when you continued your research the next day? I could see there being a lot of queries where the search is the preferred thing to repeat.

totetsu 3y ago

chrome://flags/#omnibox-drive-suggestions The author seems to wonder what it has to do with Google drive to product, not realizing it’s Jerry from Google marketing driving you to go look at ads. Makes you wonder what schemes the markers are dreaming up for LLM chat dialogue agents to start ‘driving’ us to profitable things.

jeromegv 3y ago

Yep! It was actually something that made me decrease my use in chrome and eventually switch to safari. My mental model and my job requires me to use a lot previous sites. I keep my history for a full year for that reason. I might need to go back to something I read 6 months ago. I know I read it. I know it’s out there. And I don’t use bookmarks because I never know if what I read right now might be useful in 3 months. Sure I can google it again, but then have to go through multiple results on google to try to remember the right one. And with the google algo, you never know which new garbage will show up on top I did notice at some point that chrome would always try to send me back to google even if I knew it was in my history. Safari just shows me the previously visited site above everything. Those emails confirm my suspicions. This was all about ads.

pxmpxm 3y ago
I switched to Edge because there was no way to disable omnibox suggestions/ad money printer, especially if it autocompleted what I was typing.