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Google Drops Discussions Search Filter and Others
- Piskvorrr 13y agoIf this isn't ironic, I don't know what is.
- viewer5 13y agoWhy ironic?
- jaxn 13y agoNSA?
- jaxn 13y agoAs in, it is ironic b/c Google is limiting our ability to deep search conversations while facilitating the NSA's deep searching of our communications. But, simply stating "NSA?" is too subtle for the down vote happy set.
- Piskvorrr 13y agoGoogle (which started as a search engine, way back when dinosaurs roamed the Earth) is now increasingly working on _narrowing down_ the search options available to users.
- psbp 13y agoI need more clarification on how this is ironic.
- Piskvorrr 13y agoThe appeal of Google, back in the days of Altavista, was in the fact that it could search various things, giving better results. Now it's intent on giving you fewer things to search.
- watwut 13y agoThat changed long ago. All the google is doing last two years is stopping projects, removing features and replacing acceptable GUIs by less practical ones.
- acheron 13y agoTo be fair, they also work pretty hard at collecting your personal information.
- dclara 13y ago"Now it's intent on giving you fewer things to search" This intention is viable and supposedly helpful for users because we don't need millions of results back, which just does not make sense. We need fewer but more relevant results back with high quality information. This is hard to achieve. Only some human-powered search engines can provide this much quality but they cannot cover a wide range of the web due to the resource constraints. Google always tries to use better algorithms to do this job better. So users are suffering from their experiments. I agree if search engines can only do this much job is ok, don't need to be too intelligent, like the days back to AltaVista. Actually Google's PageRank and server farms killed it, while some meta search engines can help to provide a broader coverage. Now we are about the time to find better solutions: http://bit.ly/1fu5glK http://bit.ly/1fu5glK
- coldtea 13y agoHere, from the Oxford English Dictionary: """A condition of affairs or events of a character opposite to what was, or might naturally be, expected; a contradictory outcome of events as if in mockery of the promise and fitness of things.""" One would expect Google to help IMPROVE search, not hinder it.
- dzhiurgis 13y agoNail in the head. All they want now is displaying more results = more ad revenue.
- FrankCastello 13y agoA true shame, I used it to research everything before buying. I guess we should click on Google ads to be "good" netizens
- midgetjones 13y agoYou still can, just not as obviously: https://www.google.com/?tbm=dsc https://www.google.com/?tbm=dsc
- ddeck 13y agoThank you, it works. After some googling, it seems the following are supported [1]: Applications : tbm=app Blogs* : tbm=blg Books : tbm=bks Discussions* : tbm=dsc Images : tbm=isch News : tbm=nws Patents : tbm=pts Places* : tbm=plcs Recipes* : tbm=rcp Shopping* : tbm=shop Video : tbm=vid * those not available via normal search page (from my location at least). [1] http://stenevang.wordpress.com/2013/02/22/google-search-url-request-parameters/ http://stenevang.wordpress.com/2013/02/22/google-search-url-...
- warnhardcode 13y agoDoes anyone know what these searches do? Does a filter limit the search to known domains, or silently add keywords that identify a site as a blog or a video?
- cynwoody 13y agoDoes anyone know what 'tbm' stands for?
- sentenza 13y agoThe promise was that, as search engines get better, there would be no need for bookmarking and downloading, since all the content in the world is only one sloppy search query away. Somehow, I seem to have ignored this stubbornly and instead bookmarked pages, downloaded videos and copied strings (!) out of the web for years. Not that it did me much good, I now have thousands of inconsistently sorted bookmarks and a bunch of directories filled with assorted data. What this article tells me (again), is that because you can't trust search engines to behave in a predictable manner, you can't even be sure you'll be able to find the stuff that you know is online.
- jaredmcateer 13y agoYou can't really trust bookmarks either. Most of my bookmarks are dead either because the site is now gone or because some blog author decided to change their path format and didn't bother setup 301 redirects.
- Pxtl 13y agoMicrosoft's help pages are the worst for this. "Oooh, confusing .NET problem I'll google a response - Hey, a nice forum-post explaining that MS has a document telling me how to handle this issue click NOOOOOOOOOOOOO".
- AznHisoka 13y agoWhenever I have a C# problem and google it, I always skip the MSFT documentation and go straight to any possible Stackoverflow or discussion page.
- ToastyMallows 13y agoSame here, it's not even worth going on their site.
- eterm 13y agoThere used to be a whole slew of helpful msdn (technet?) blog posts which now not only redirect but also require logging in with an MS account to read them. It's really unhelpful. edit: Actually I just checked and it looks like they've eased up on the need for logging in, I guess they saw too much of a backlash. (Or just flip flopped their own decision again.)
- hysan 13y agoAny alternatives? I asked about this two days ago but got no answers: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7124132 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7124132 Also, I know that "?tbm=dsc" works but I expect the quality of the results to start falling (it already has for a while) since Google probably isn't going to work to improve the filter.
- lubujackson 13y agohttp://boardreader.com/ http://boardreader.com/ is a search engine of just forums. Pretty useful. Also this search list of Q&A sites might be useful: http://nuggety.com/u/nuggety/questions-and-answers http://nuggety.com/u/nuggety/questions-and-answers
- mhb 13y agoMaybe this is a good spot to mention how much the updated Google Maps also suck. Pretty though.
- dgabriel 13y agoJust awful, I agree.
- sixothree 13y agoI still can't figure out how to get street view without actually searching first.
- hahainternet 13y agoClick where you want it, it should appear in the upper left.
- heroh 13y agothe New android Map app is a terrible piece of crap too it's a damn shame that the new phones ship with the new version stock & you have to root to permanently uninstall it.
- dclara 13y agoInitially I think the Google Map is the best product from Google. That was the reason why I moved from Yahoo to Google. Then I got used to it. Later on I found that the map printing has big problem to keep it as 100% like before after they did some weird change and changed back. I guess Google should listen to their customers more than what they think and want to do. Is the information on this topic will be ignored by Google? Most probably. Then they tends to lose customers sooner than later.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- alextingle 13y agoThis is the final nail in the coffin of DejaNews. Just another step in Google's continuing mission to make their Search product worse & worse. It's baffling.
- giardini 13y agoThis. DejaNews was the absolute best source of technical information from the USENET archives, with posts back to the 1980s. By 2001 Google had everything under control: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!search/USENET$20archives https://groups.google.com/forum/#!search/USENET$20archives Then Google lost it. The addition of "Google Groups" resulted in tons of SPAM and almost nothing of use. Now, because their own baby is so ugly, Google decided to kill all their adopted children. So much for "Don't be evil".
- dclara 13y agoI like USENET too. Information should be organized in that way. It was just too old. If we put the search engine of top of that with a nice graphical UI, that'll be a lot more help. This is what I'm always thinking about since 1997. Now I got the chance to put together something for people's daily life, but not perfect. It's in early beta now. http://kck.st/JNqv8z http://kck.st/JNqv8z
- Istof 13y agoIt feels like they will eventually remove all features except maybe for the get lucky button, if we are lucky.
- tambourine_man 13y agoI keep dreaming of an open source, distributed search engine and social network. But I guess things will have to get much worse before they get better.
- mindcrime 13y agoDon't give up, it can still happen. A lot of the bits and pieces exist to do that already, we just need to keep raising awareness, and maybe get a well-heeled individual or company (or two, or three) to throw some support behind the whole thing.
- icebraining 13y agoOpen source, distributed search engine: http://yacy.net/ http://yacy.net/ Open source, distributed social networks are a dime a dozen: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_software_and_protocols_for_distributed_social_networking http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_software_and_prot...
- mankypro 13y agoDuck Duck Go. Jus' sayin'
- blueblob 13y agoI am afraid I don't understand. Duck Duck Go searches google, so if you are having a problem with a google service, how would this help?
- 3JPLW 13y agoNo, it uses bing + a little secret sauce, as I understand it. Edit: "Link results are API driven, though top links may come from other sources. Link sources include: Bing, Yahoo, Yandex, Blekko, WolframAlpha, and many others."[1] "DuckDuckGo gets its results from over one hundred sources, including DuckDuckBot (our own crawler), crowd-sourced sites (like Wikipedia, which are stored in our own index), Yahoo! (through BOSS), Yandex, WolframAlpha, and Bing. For any given search, there is usually a vertical search engine out there that does a better job at answering it than a general search engine. Our long-term goal is to get you information from that best source, ideally in instant answer form."[2] 1. http://highscalability.com/blog/2013/1/28/duckduckgo-architecture-1-million-deep-searches-a-day-and-gr.html http://highscalability.com/blog/2013/1/28/duckduckgo-archite... 2. https://duck.co/help/results/sources https://duck.co/help/results/sources
- blueblob 13y agoAh, my mistake, I confused it with scroogle. I tried to upvote you but I don't think I have enough Karma.
- whizzkid 13y agoAm i the only one recently having moments like "wait a second!", while using google services? Connecting every google service to a single one might be the best thing for Google, BUT, not for me! Google, you are almost merged with whole Internet thing, so stop forcing people into using a single system!! I like and use gmail often but don't want to be logged in while checking youtube!
- alextingle 13y agoJust use a different browser.
- 6cxs2hd6 13y agoWhy would you want to search Discussions or Blogs? Everything interesting is already on Google+. /sarcasm You know, someday Google+ will no longer be the "strategory" priority. There will be a new CEO. All the hands on the corporate ouija board will shift in yet another direction. At which point, all these moves to deprecate parts of the web, in an effort to shore up G+? They will look even more unfortunate. So much discarded, for so little gain.
- lukeschlather 13y agoThis actually looks worse than a move to shore up G+. The list of things they've pared it down to looks suspiciously like a list of categories that have the highest advertising revenue.
- frigg 13y agoYou can use this url* although it seems to me it's inferior to what they offered previously. Maybe it's just my imagination. * https://www.google.com/webhp?tbm=dsc https://www.google.com/webhp?tbm=dsc
- blueblob 13y agoIs there an operator similar to "define:" that you can use? I can find a link for operators, but I do not know how up to date it is. http://www.googleguide.com/advanced_operators_reference.html http://www.googleguide.com/advanced_operators_reference.html
- dgabriel 13y agoI am very sad to see the blog option go away. I used that all the time.
- dzhiurgis 13y agoThis train has derailed a while ago. You couldn't search discussions AND verbatim. Verbatim got broken a while ago too. Now they explicitly state that they skipped some of your search terms (presumably for better paid keywords). Oh, and don't forget paying link-scheming SEO clients.
- brudgers 13y ago"Now when you search, the type of results you can select at the top of the page will vary depending on what makes sense for your search." Makes sense to Google, that is. Shopping and apps make sense. A discussion that might take an hour to read or prompt one to read further discussions instead of shopping, liking or checking in doesn't. It's a future where I decide to go out to eat because I can't find a recipe I like. I climb in my self driving car and it takes me to Taco Bell. And only Taco Bell.
- nemof 13y agoI also notice that depending on your search terms it now changes the order of the menu items; I was very surprised a few day ago when I noticed that Images wasn't the second list option on the screen. To test this seach for "images" or "videos" on google. It will change the list order. This is extremely irritating as it tries to guess whether you're trying to search for a certain type of of thing (text/images/vid/news/shopping/etc), as it frequently guesses wrong, and then sends us searching for the right list option because they've been shuffled round. Designers, do not change your menu item order unless you're damned sure you're gonna get it right. Confusing your users is never helpful. ** edit ** Ah, I see the article mentions this. Well it's still bloody annoying.
- dclara 13y agoAgree. We need the consistency, at least in a certain period of time. Whenever the search results changes, we are lost unless we choose to do the filtering. But the group of filtering does not quite make sense for everybody. Google tried to be more intelligent on search, but it's not the right way. Let people keep their useful information of their own should be the right direction. See the video here: http://bit.ly/1hJKNux http://bit.ly/1hJKNux
- valas 13y agoEveryone is dissing Google here. Perhaps understandably so since most folks in HN are advanced users and an advanced search feature was removed. Google is driven by data and sorry but advanced users are a mere blip in that data. I can bet there was a gazilion user studies that showed that your grandma was super confused when 10 options would pop up when she pressed 'More'. The same studies showed that she was much less so confused when 4 options were presented, increasing engine usability for her. My point here is that some folks attribute sinister motives (more search dollars), while the actual motive is just to make the interface usable for more people. (Disclaimer: I work at Google, not in search though.)
- ksk 13y agoI don't get your point. Is it that people should not complain about Google removing a feature they like, because you have presented a guess as to why they removed it? (FWIW - I agree with you that it was not maliciously removed) Personally I like it when users complain loudly about decisions that impact them. The idea of negative publicity might deter such actions in the future (in theory anyway).
- vinkelhake 13y agoThe point is in the third paragraph. A lot of comments here conclude that the motives for doing this are sinister. One person even thinks it was removed because it would make users spend hours reading discussions when that time should really be spent shopping. People should absolutely complain when a change impacts them negatively. People should also keep in mind that with a user base the size of Google's, every change is going to upset someone. http://xkcd.com/1172/ http://xkcd.com/1172/
- ksk 13y ago>People should absolutely complain when a change impacts them negatively. People should also keep in mind that with a user base the size of Google's, every change is going to upset someone. We're in violent agreement !
- 13y ago
- agumonkey 13y agoSorry to simplify, but I remember when Google enabled,
- argumont 13y agoI tried to use Google to autocomplete your sentence but all I got was a link to this discussion.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- leterter 13y agoI want that f--- filter back, it's the best thing about Google...
- merrua 13y agoI am finding google search more and more doesnt find what I am looking for. Its frustrating.