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Google Ideas
- ISL 11y agoJust getting a black screen with a mute button. Page source is more readable :).
- SG- 11y agoI'm just getting a dark blue screen with a sound icon at the bottom in latest Safari. Seems the JS for the site is breaking and the UX requires JS.
- foldor 11y agoI'm getting the same thing on Firefox 38.
- ocdtrekkie 11y agoIt's telling me I should turn on my sound for a better experience.
- jaytaylor 11y agoYou're not missing much imo: http://i.imgur.com/yN0f3Sf.png http://i.imgur.com/yN0f3Sf.png
- mindhunter 11y agoyou're missing a lot if you're into web design. of course, content is king and google fucked up big times by not having a proper fallback. but that parallax scrolling is the best I've seen so far https://www.google.com/ideas/products/digital-attack-map/ https://www.google.com/ideas/products/digital-attack-map/
- barrkel 11y agoThe parallax scrolling on that page is mediocre IMO. It's unnoticeable when not using smooth scrolling (my personal default). Not a huge problem for a design feature to be unnoticeable though. When smooth-scrolling using the middle mouse button on Chrome/Linux, it doesn't update dynamically as it scrolls; the background snaps into position when scrolling stops. In Firefox/Linux, it does update dynamically with middle mouse smooth scrolling, but jerkily. It's noticeably bad in both browsers.
- conorgdaly 11y agoI visited that page in both Chrome & FF and see no use of parallax scrolling. This is a good example of parallax scrolling: http://www.firewatchgame.com/ http://www.firewatchgame.com/
- ChikkaChiChi 11y agoThe Verge's Apple Watch review will probably blow your mind, then: http://www.theverge.com/a/apple-watch-review http://www.theverge.com/a/apple-watch-review
- talles 11y agoWhat's so special about it? Seems pretty typical to me.
- toolz 11y agoI was on that site for 5 minutes and I still have no idea what it's actually trying to do. Looks like they spent so much time on all the fancy crap that makes the page load take forever that they forgot they had a message they were trying to get out. or maybe their intent was to bore me off their site because I'm not a journalist. In that case they did well!
- glesica 11y agoI remember fondly the days when Google web sites could be relied on to be usable, well-designed, and easy to read. The Nexus page has been a bit of a canary, every time a new phone was released it got worse and worse.
- edgarvaldes 11y agoSame here. Can't believe this site design is from Google. They must know better.
- vosper 11y agoGoogle outsources a lot of design and build work to external agencies. Especially for projects like this, which are sort-of side-projects and not really core Google functionality. Also, quite a lot of paid client work for YouTube is/was outsourced. I used to work for one of these companies, and we built quite a few highish-profile sites for Google and YouTube. The quality of work done by this company varied wildly between excellent and utterly dismal. Project management interactions with the Google side were haphazard at best and chaotic and disruptive at worst. Requirements would constantly change, and the designs would be all over the place. I don't think one time we thought about accessibility. A number of the projects were death marches, and I worked on at least one huge failure, which fell over on a live TV show with millions of viewers. TL;DR - just because it's on google.com doesn't mean it was designed or built by Google.
- SG- 11y agoMaybe they should still review it or set proper requirements.
- ChikkaChiChi 11y agoIdentity coherence in Google products left when Marissa Mayer did.
- wenham 11y agoBlank screen for most, try going to https://www.google.com/ideas/products/ https://www.google.com/ideas/products/
- jusben1369 11y agoFascinating. I'm not sure how long this has been around but feels like a nice counterweight to Tim Cook's critique last week about the importance of privacy and making the world a fairer/safer place.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- darkstar999 11y ago> Avoid gratuitous negativity. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- krisroadruck 11y agoI thought this was going to be about actual ideas not bla bla terrorists cyber dude fear mongering. Shame.
- jackmaney 11y agoCan someone please summarize what the hell this is supposed to be? Sure, DDOS attacks, hacking, etc are bad. What else, exactly, am I supposed to pull away from this horribly designed site?
- strebler 11y agoIt seems to be a collection of things to help fight against evil. I couldn't navigate the site (firefox), so I just looked at the source. What I see is: -a reverse proxy -service to scrape various business records, helping journalists analyzing records -anti-phishing tool (browser plugin?) that verifies you're not putting your (Google) password into a wrong site.
- jackmaney 11y agoWow. That's....really underwhelming.
- kbenson 11y agoI don't know. Taken from a sort of "Digital Poverty" point of view, these seem like good sane items to try to reduce that, and they aren't all aimed at one area. They are supporting both human rights (from the internet access as a human right perspective, which may be controversial, but is at least arguable), and fighting corruption. Both noble goals IMHO, and areas where Google's possible contributions line up with their core strengths and values.
- jonknee 11y ago> Google Ideas builds products to support free expression and access to information for people who need it most — those facing violence and harassment. > Google Ideas is a team of engineers, researchers and geopolitical experts who build products to support free expression and access to information, especially in repressive societies. We focus on the problems faced by people who live in unstable, isolated, or oppressive environments, including the billions of people who are coming online for the first time. > With the right tools, we can make the internet more free and open. Many of us take the internet for granted, but for human rights activists, journalists, and artists living under censorship, a free and open internet can be a matter of life and death.
- raonyguimaraes 11y agoBlank Screen!
- pidusd 11y agoAnd when I try to help! http://cl.ly/image/0R1d0Q3n291z http://cl.ly/image/0R1d0Q3n291z
- BinaryIdiot 11y agoThis is confusing and I'm not entirely sure what the message is. What am I missing? Edit: okay so I think I get it; they outline a product then you can click through and apply to use that product. Not very descriptive though.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- addedlovely 11y agoLike that glitch effect on the text and images, tried something similar with CSS clipping masks before. This canvas implementation is rather slick.
- nickdirienzo 11y agoCan't explore more than the landing page in Firefox... Wish I could see more.
- yellowapple 11y ago"Enhance your experience by turning on sound" How about no. Seriously. Google of all companies should know better than to rely on autoplaying any sort of audible multimedia, especially as what I'm guessing to be the preferred source of information (guessing since - at the point where people started talking - I simply closed the tab).
- arthurcolle 11y agoOn first thought, this sounds like Google's version of Hooli XYZ, but on a deeper level I guess this is kind of like Facebook's ThreatExchange?
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- CrackpotGonzo 11y agoLol at the site not working on Chrome but working fine on Safari.
- Rifu 11y agoAs an aside, I can't help but be amused at how flash-like the experience is. Impressive what we can achieve natively in the browser these days.
- danso 11y agoOne of their products: Investigative Dashboard https://www.google.com/ideas/products/investigative-dashboard/ https://www.google.com/ideas/products/investigative-dashboar... Some good ideas there, but mostly it's a collection of high-level tools and visualizations...my main objection is that journalists have a tendency to see data and documents as "magic" and making a slick Investigative Dashboard doesn't really dispel that. The main problem of data and document collection is not much different than in data science, where research and data cleaning/collection is by far the most time consuming part of the process. Improving OCR (and let's give Google credit for its work on tesseract) and creating a more friendly interface for tesseract (such as a training GUI) would be much, much more useful to the average investigative reporter. And in terms of collection/research: if Google took up the work of reverse-PACER (for court documents), or furthered its work in election data (https://developers.google.com/civic-information/ https://developers.google.com/civic-information/)...those would also be hugely beneficial initiatives.
- kbenson 11y agoI think any worthwhile investigative journalist will use what they see as a starting point for a deeper investigation. Writing about some visualization a tool showed you doesn't win you a Pulitzer.
- ChikkaChiChi 11y agoBut it will get you clicks. Which means more advertising, which means more money for (probably) Google.
- kbenson 11y agoExcept that making vague accusations about large companies without evidence is possible more problematic than making them about people (which we get all the time now already). Companies can afford lawyers, and lawsuits for libel, even if not successful, will put a strain on a paper. If a paper is getting a double negative hit from an article, both in loss of reputation (if it has any left) and in legal fees in defending itself from libel, then it may be less willing to publish crap. Of course, a well researched and written article will defend itself, and the last think a company that really has something to hide wants is to go to court when there's unflattering things that can be proven, not just reported.
- logotype 11y agoA few issues in mobile Safari: background cropped in landscape mode and form submit button styling on :hover.
- jokoon 11y agoHaving a decentralized forum/chat/data system would be really awesome, even if that might be against google's interests. I really want the future to have more p2p systems. There was edonkey, then bittorent, then the cloud, then git, then bittorrent sync... I don't understand why systems like freenet and bitmessage have not taken off. The internet was built for p2p, but it's still mostly used as a broadcast system where everything is centralized. Why isn't google trying to fund those projects ? Because they re so much invested in the web of HTML content they can't look eitherway.
- explorigin 11y agoRetroshare is underrated. It has already solved many of these issues.
- joeyspn 11y ago> I don't understand why systems like freenet and bitmessage have not taken off. I think the problem has been always the poor UX, but eventually something well thought out like popcorn-time could appear and cause a greater adoption.
- benkant 11y agoI had a rant about this on Twitter yesterday[0]. Google makes money precisely because the web is centralised. If we moved to P2P systems they could still provide an index, but I'd wager far less data would ultimately pass through them. Not to mention that if people were more in control of their data rather than LinkedIn, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, I bet they'd be less inclined to having it indexed publically simply because they have a choice. There's all sorts of network effects and shitty incentives at play, and it's a shame. My twitter rant (not the whole thing even) > though they have their place, centralised systems reinforce the role of the middle man, which is prime for rent-seeking and lopsided value > in reality networks exist on a continuum between centralised/decentralised. The web makes it difficult to choose the correct degree per case > both centralised and decentralised systems have trust issues, but they are different in kind not magnitude > the incentives are wrong for innovation. Google requires centralised, so HTTP is fine. Ubiquity, so HTML is fine > web developers have spent years becoming skilled in their corner and are incentivised to defend and perpetuate the platform > if you think discoverability, zero-install and sandboxes are only possible on the web, I invite you to consult the literature > we could have decentralised, secure, simple, efficient primitives, but network effects and incentives steer us away > tech solutions are moot unless they incentivise behaviour that leads to better returns for everyone. layers on HTML/HTTP will never do that [0] https://twitter.com/benkant https://twitter.com/benkant
- Splendor 11y agoI'd be curious to know how Google's decides which ideas are worth defending.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
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- skbohra123 11y agoDirect link to products https://www.google.com/ideas/products/ https://www.google.com/ideas/products/
- perrygeo 11y agoLeave it to Google to create an atrocious, bloated, horrible UX for a dead simple content page.
- JustSomeNobody 11y agoIt's not just Google. It has now become OK for developers to shift the burden of the app almost completely to the client. It has become OK to not care about graceful degradation if a user doesn't have JavaScript running. It has become OK to completely over engineer the front end, UX be damned.
- indians_pro 11y agoi can never tell why certain comments get downvoted on hackernews. yours obviously has a sad tone, but people take everything literally here.
- sidcool 11y agoPeople bitching about UX here. That's fine, freedom and all. But those comments being upvoted to top??!!
- Lancey 11y agoDoes Google have a team working round the clock to develop the most annoying webpages possible? For as many "cool wow amazing" CSS tricks as this site uses, it doesn't do a good job of explaining what it is at all. And what's up with the products page? Why does it scroll so slowly?
- calbear81 11y agoI was hoping to learn more about the project too but they broke scrolling on that "wheel of content" thing.
- meesterdude 11y ago> Does Google have a team working round the clock to develop the most annoying webpages possible? They certainly seem to try, don't they? to be horrible. I tried using google maps today a few times and each time was filled with curses and WTF's. They just, shouldn't be making websites or doing any kind of design work at all. Maker the backend technology, sure - get someone else to do anything front end. Across the board suckage.
- alfonsodev 11y ago"Protect against hackers" I still feel bad when I see the word hackers used like that. Although words end meaning what the majority think they means, it feels wrong to see this usage in a Google website.
- JustSomeNobody 11y agoWell, there's "Crackers", but that carries some racial connotations with it...
- Eupolemos 11y agoIf I was doing sensitive stuff, I wouldn't expect Google to protect me from anything in which the US has economic or intelligence interests. I think these products are meant for journos and NGO workers who want some level of protection without knowing much about what they are doing. The way I see it from under my tinfoil hat, is that this is a bit of protection paid for by making your work instantly indexed and searchable by the US for various purposes.
- themeek 11y agoIt's more of a cyber shield for NGOs that align with US strategic objectives.
- gmisra 11y agoJulian Assange believes that "Google Ideas" is, amongst other things, a channel for Google to get involved in geopolitics while maintaing political cover and distance - and Google Ideas often engages in surreptitious actions in concert with the US government. http://www.newsweek.com/assange-google-not-what-it-seems-279447 http://www.newsweek.com/assange-google-not-what-it-seems-279... IMO, anything Assange say needs to be taken with a grain of salt. But then again, the same holds for Google PR.
- task_queue 11y agoIf your concept of human rights are not in sync with the US State Department because of where/who you are or what you think, you should not use a US-based service for your security.
- themeek 11y agoJulian Assange is perfectly right in this case. Google is already very involved in geopolitics. Google Ideas is a way to protect US investments in culture export "civil society" apps.
- indians_pro 11y agothat article has a 'paywall'. is this the same one with the full content - https://wikileaks.org/google-is-not-what-it-seems/ https://wikileaks.org/google-is-not-what-it-seems/ ?
- molsongolden 11y agoInvestigative Dashboard doesn't seem to work at all beyond the home screen. Not sure if it is just FF.
- flinty 11y agoInspired a little bit by Aaron Swartz?http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/epiphany http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/epiphany
- daveloyall 11y agoI'll focus only on "Project Shield". It's supposed to protect news outlets from DDoS. Fine. It's altruistic. Fine. I see no technical guarantee that some future Google couldn't pull the shield away from a news outlet that speaks ill of Google. Not fine. No centralized "shield" tech can provide said guarantee--rather, only a decentralized, community-driven shield can be provably neutral. Amiright?
- iMerNibor 11y agoIt which point the news agency could make a big deal out of it, probably not worth the hassle. I mean you can search for bad stuff about google on google and find results - they havent filtered that either
- indians_pro 11y agoha, if they filter that, it will be the ultimate red flag. i read an article on prisonplanet.com that said they removed them, and cnet.com from search listings on the front page because they published some critical articles involving google and the 'see aye lmao' (three letters)
- themeek 11y agoGoogle will, in all likelihood, very selectively give protection to news outlets. For example those from the Board of Broadcasting Governors, or from the BIIP, or from USAID, or from US sponsored NGOs are definitely going to get support.
- daveloyall 11y agoDon't forget VOA. :P
- themeek 11y agoVOA is under the BBG. :)
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- osipovas 11y agoWhy is tracking radicalization in the Muslim world a bad thing for Google? The less conflict around the world means there are more people looking at ads. Unlike the Cold War and the military–industrial complex, Google is actively pushing for 'peace'.
- indians_pro 11y agowhat do you mean by 'tracking radicalization'?
- dmix 11y agoGoogle's designers have totally lost it, just try scrolling on this page without getting dizzy: https://www.google.com/ideas/products/ https://www.google.com/ideas/products/ The page looks so nice but then they proceed to destroy usability with bizarre navigation schemes and breaking nearly every common design pattern - scrolling is just one of them.
- MarkSweep 11y agoFor me it scrolls ridiculously slowly. And they broke the side scroll bar and arrow keys, so I have spin the mouse wheel a ton to get it to move at all. I don't see what the point of breaking scrolling is.
- on_and_off 11y agoIn OsX + Chrome it works perfectly with the trackpad. They might have only tested this on a limited number of browsers/OSes ?
- nindalf 11y agoUnusable on OS X + Firefox. Definitely didn't test on other browsers.
- EarthLaunch 11y agoIn order to have automatic device compatibility we've built this whole web platform, paying huge prices along the way in speed, data size, etc, but it's all worth it because you can deploy your application instantly and everyone will be able to use it with a consistent experience across all devices and platforms. Then they go and try to re-do something probably a dozen layers deeper than the frontend application code they used; scrolling - and will probably be surprised to learn there are compatibility problems!
- j2kun 11y agoI was recently talking with my friend about Google and he brought up a good point. Google had a really deep and good idea with PageRank for search, but what truly innovative ideas have they had since then? Scaling datacenters with commodity hardware? Giving people lots of free email storage? These were neat tricks (and huge engineering challenges) but they don't feel very game changing. Maybe I'll feel differently if I can ever get my hands on a self-driving car, but until then... I'm honestly curious what game changers Google has produced.
- bobcostas55 11y agoHere's an idea for you, google: don't hijack my effing middle click. I use it to open the link in a new tab. It's not up to your website to override that.
- phragg 11y agoThat infinite scroll on their "Products" page is the best "Idea" they've implemented on this site.
- kevinSuttle 11y agoJust going to leave this here. https://wikileaks.org/google-is-not-what-it-seems/ https://wikileaks.org/google-is-not-what-it-seems/
- themeek 11y agoGoogle, like most other multinational companies inside the US, have partnerships with various parts of the US government. Google is aligned with the United States State Department and DoD when it comes to investing and spreading American culture and values around the world. This partnership brings the United States a lot of value, and those at Google also believe that it enriches their company, America and the world. There is a bit of a paternalism to the conscious design of culture export, and it can be hard to think clearly about.
- littletimmy 11y agoGoogle's influence is quite concerning. Being a corporation, it should not be allowed to be a player in geopolitics. Break it up.
- sangnoir 11y ago> Being a corporation, it should not be allowed to be a player in geopolitics. Says who? Corporations have been waist deep in geopolitics since (at least) the beginning of the 20th century. see British Petroleum & the Iran coup, or Hearst and the American-Spanish war ("You furnish the pictures and I'll furnish the war.") Here's a list of corporations that are also players in geopolitics - Fox Media (and anything owned by Rupert Murdock) - Oil companies (e.g. Haliburton) - Movie studios - Fracking companies - Numerous corporations behind TPP/TTIP
- frankchn 11y agoThe East India Company, with its own private armies fighting wars, is probably the most egregious example in history.
- eveningcoffee 11y ago> Says who? As I read it, parent commenter said this. It is an opinion. > Here's a list of corporations that are also players in geopolitics It does not follow that it should be like this.
- indians_pro 11y agoi think sangnoir wrote it in a morally outraged tone, and listed evidence to support littletimmy's post.
- littletimmy 11y agoMy claim was a moral one. An entity like a corporation exists to make profit for shareholders and is therefore an amoral, psychopathic entity. Being subject to a corporation is fuctionally no different than being subject to a dictator or a king; it is a morally repugnant condition.
- yjgyhj 11y agoI miss old Google... Their UI was the simplest, most basic of all saas companies. My browser uses my GPU and my computer has 4x as many cores, and 4x as much memory. But googles web pages are unusable on my machine. It may not make web designers swoon circle jerk, but a web site with 0 CSS (or close to) would give a better experience. In this case, and in many many many others.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- drinchev 11y agoSidenote, but I'm taking a look at how googlers made this website. Reason for this is that whenever they create a webpage I can see how they've achieved an effect that people are blogging how to do efficiently. In this case the effect is the background parallax. So... I see that they are doing this on their ideas page [1] with the following code on their background image : position: fixed; transform: translate3d(0px, -402px, 0px); -webkit-transform: translate3d(0px, -402px, 0px); Difference from any other methods is they use position fixed and it actually looks smooth on my old mac.
- themeek 11y agoThe United States Department of Defense is doubling down on investment in the tech sector for national security and strategic purposes. One of these investments is into something called "Civil Society Apps" - applications that support exporting American culture and values to certain areas of the world. The United States benefits by being the center of entertainment (Hollywood), for example, and by having US Social Networking cites filter the content according to American values and ideals across the world. This is a form of 'soft power'. The DoD's investment in the tech sector, while also focusing on defensive and offensive cyber capabilities, is putting money into culture export apps. While some of this work is already done, the governments and civil societies and organizations of other countries do not always like this export, and the US has been known to 'weaponize' some of the networks to stir revolution, dissent, etc (e.g. ZunZuneo). Google Shield is a project whereby these cultural export apps can be given additional protection.
- zoo1 11y agoSimilar site http://www.hooli.xyz http://www.hooli.xyz
- meesterdude 11y agoWTF is this shit? This site makes no sense, groundbreakingly horrible design, and totally unclear mission and purpose. Just 100% BS. Maybe it's a jaberwocky. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=spyJ5yxTfas https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=spyJ5yxTfas
- sj4nz 11y agoSo I get a blank blue/purple screen. Shrug.
- chrismarlow9 11y agoI smell another too big to fail coming in 20 years for some of these tech companies.
- kup0 11y agoInteresting content but one of the worst scrolling mechanics I've seen on a website
- a-dub 11y agoThe website is a mess, but, I met a guy who works for this group a few weeks ago and it sounded pretty cool. When I asked what the hell they did, he said that they did some Cloudflare like stuff for political speech in the middle east and spent a bunch of time on building and deploying infrastructure to link up a bunch of anti-human-trafficking agencies all across Asia.