The only one I've encountered that does't send people a Google site or widget is "I'm Feeling Stellar", which is just an image search for "reflection nebula".
I ran the two searches that were at the start of the article: "Real Life" and "Is there a god". When clicking "I'm Feeling Lucky" the difference in results between these two searches shows a preference towards Google's property, youtube, instead of the first result being the lucky property.
For "Real Life", there is a youtube video immediately at the top of the results, above ads and featured snippets. This youtube video is what is shown by clicking, "I'm Feeling Lucky." Despite this, the first result was only shown on my desktop when I hit pagedown twice and looked at the very bottom of the page.
However, the result that is returned by "I'm Feeling Lucky" for "Is there a god" is actually the first result and not any of the special content at the top. But in this case, there is no youtube video in the listings.
Funny, I tried it and ended up on http://www.agoogleaday.com/. The site looks broken because clicking on the only button "start playing" does not work.
DuckDuckGo still has this, but it's not in the form of a button. Instead, if you prepend a backwards slash (\) to your query, it'll take you to the first webpage in the list of results. This is done server-side, so it also works in your browser's search bar.
DuckDuckGo's !bangs[0] deserve a mention as well, where you can use an exclamation point with an (abbreviated) site name to forward your query to the site's internal search (try !hn).
(Using a plain ! anywhere in your query seems to do the same thing as \)
> DuckDuckGo's !bangs[0] deserve a mention as well
Agreed. They're an awesome feature, too. I just like sharing this little trick every now and then as it's not really mentioned anywhere (I accidentally discovered it), unlike bangs which DuckDuckGo very strongly advertise.
I clicked the link for that and was taken to a page where I could purchase the scholarly work, "Algorithms of Oppression - How Search Engines Reinforce Racism". $28 softcover / $90 hardcover
"militaristic proclivities, ravenous surveillance schemes, and white supremacy."
Serious question, if the article had only made the first two casual accusations, but omitted the third,would you have still thought it lacked credibility?
Side note, accusing someone of white supremacy is subtly different from, and to my ears less strident than outright calling them a white supremacist. If I am a jaywalker, it could mean that I've committed one, a few, or many acts of jaywalking, even without my knowledge. It's a mere statement of fact. But if I were a "jaywalkist," if such a term existed, it would more likely mean that I have a personal philosophy that Jaywalking Is Good, or at least, that I was a blatant and habitual practitioner of transgressive traversals. It says something about my essential character in the eyes of my accuser.
> In 2007, Marissa Mayer, then a Google exec, shared that only one percent of Google searches went through the button; internal analysis further estimated that “I’m Feeling Lucky” cost the company more than $100 million in revenue per year because it skipped over ad-filled search pages
Being generous, one would take into account the folks who click to the second, third, etc page of results. But I highly doubt there's a fat enough tail there to amount to much.
> Leaving the search bar blank used to yield a random webpage; now, hovering over the button produces a slot machine-like roll of “I’m” statements (“I’m Feeling Curious,” “I’m Feeling Hungry,” etc.). Clicking through then furnishes a Google-branded Web page at random.
Aha! I'd have never noticed this Easter egg if I didn't see the article.
I did, but it’s surprisingly hard to use. The first thing you need to do is get to Google’s homepage in the first place (haven’t been there in ages as well) and then once you start typing, the auto-suggest moves the buttons around. You have to mentally prepare yourself to not hit enter and press on the Feeling Lucky button instead.
The idea of going to a web page to get an answer to a query is becoming increasingly dated, which makes the I'm Feeling Lucky button even less relevant. Why should I have to read through a whole page to find the bit I'm looking for when the system can pull out / synthesize the exact answer?
I had to view the source to read the article since it seems text won't display without javascript. I know it's considered a lost battle to expect sites to at least make basic static content (text/images) accessible without needing to execute 3rd-party code/trackers, but I still judge sites that can't.
The only substance I can extract from this article is that the author really dislikes Google. If there is any other signal it's buried in the noise of the preachy and verbose writing style. At least the links to $90 books don't include an affiliate tracker :).
Google is a company that has built things which have changed the world (whether this tends to the good / bad / neutral will take a much longer time to sus out - and it'll certainly vary on the perspective of the person looking back). Any undertaking that results in the impact the size that Google has would find itself in a very similar space.
> whether this tends to the good / bad / neutral will take a much longer time to sus out - and it'll certainly vary on the perspective of the person looking back
The only truthful answer is "all of the above".
But, I suspect Google's fate is the same as IBM.
It fades into obsolesce within a generation. It's already happening. The tell-tale sign is that its search product is becoming absolutely useless as every search category follows the same pattern as the recipe problem (have you googled error messages recently? If even stack trace search results are dominated by useless ad spam, you're done...). It used to be that search was the sacred cow of Google. You could inject a few very obvious and low-screen-real-estate ads into search, but that was it. All sorts of shady shit happened in every other product category, the company shut down services left and right, etc. etc. But search -- search was sacred. Take a reasonable profit, and no more. That mentality is apparently gone.
Our children will think of Google like we think of IBM. They'll remember a company that invented the search engine, as well as the "just save everything and then search for stuff" mode of work. The core innovation was an enormously useful and a powerful augmentation to human intelligence, but in the end the innovation factory was burned to the ground by smart people yielding spreadsheets.
I'm reminded of the "what have the Romans ever done for us?" scene from Life of Brian: https://youtu.be/uvPbj9NX0zc
I'm not sure the history with workspaces, but Google Docs etc. were very important. Google also gets points in my book just by scaling YouTube, Maps, Gmail etc. To the degree they've published their work it's been revolutionary to the field.
Excellent engineering with terrible/conservative corporate strategy, imo.
A sibling poster points out there is quite a bit of original work but can we discuss acquisitions?
Most acquisitions are kind of gigantic re-orgs: they cost a ton and rarely leave things better than when they started - oh and generally execs will always feel they were successful :)
Most of the examples you listed are the dream acquisition with exponential improvement. I have a hard time seeing Android on 2 billion devices or YouTube with millions of creators delivering HD content across the world without standing hand-in-hand with the rest of the teams at Google. Similarly Google would not be able to do it either (Google video would have been sunset without YouTube acquisition and no one was building a consumer electronics focused os).
Google certainly has screwed the pooch on many acquisitions but to chalk up all those other successes as a given or as pure luck is a naive statement. There was a ton of hard work, huge chance of failure and really impactful results.
Cloud infrastructure, the Go programming language, Kubernetes. Now of course your definition of "change the world" comes into play here, but it certainly hasn't just been advertising and acquisitions.
"Now of course your definition of "change the world" comes into play here"
Indeed.
Cloud Infrastructure = playing catch up to a player that set the stage (and still leads), Go I don't think "changes the world" quite as much as consolidates and improves things that already were available in everything from C to Python, but suited to a specific set of use cases that Google particularly cared about for their own business first and the "world" later. K8s came out in roughly the same window as other orchestration tech (e.g. Mesos) but had/s the benefit of the 'Google' name attached to it. It simplifies some things certainly, but is it really a "world changer"?
TBH, more seems to be about changing Googles world more than the broader one, but that goes to your original quote.
iirc Mesos was inspired by Borg. Google kept Borg secret for quite a long time, eventually releasing K8s when they started failing hard at cloud and needed to keep their foot in the door for developer mind-share.
Borg's real win was the insane colocation and oversubscription it enabled, both of which K8s and all major public clouds have failed to replicate because you can't securely share bare metal between customers.
and K8s ended up being too little too late, despite beating Mesos and being quite successful, because VMs had won by that point.
So when you didn't find any substance in the article, you filled the void with "Google changed the world"?
I wouldn't miss I'm Feeling Lucky if they bin it. What I do miss is the option to show "forum results only". Google removed the option a few years ago. They don't want people going to forums, presumably they can't follow and scrutinize your activity. How dare you login to a service untrackable by the company that changed the world!
> whether this tends to the good / bad / neutral will take a much longer time to sus out
This conveniently implies that nothing should or can be done about Google’s known, current abuses. After all, in the grand arc of time, who’s to say they won’t have had a positive impact by someone’s reckoning?
How does the first sentence follow from the second? The possibility that a company does good "in the grand arc of time" is no excuse for not holding them to the law.
Now if you're saying "negative effects", then comparing to longrun impacts is fine. But "abuses" is a much stronger claim, and enforcement needn't have anything to do with estimates of longterm benefit.
But its not, its a reminder of when they were cool, and that button might actually work and not dump you into a morass of listicles and low effort blogspam posts.
No, I don’t ever remember the button being useful. I believe they have looked in to removing it many times but people just like the look of it. But these days the google search page has largely become irrelevant anyway.
Yeah if they removed it there would definitely be commentary about how theyve changed. Plus there must be a whole team that managed that functionality, what would they do then?
I've recently begun thinking that Google can't, in fact, improve their search results. They've forced the algorithmic landscape of available data onto a local optima because of seo and financial incentives. The only way they could improve results would be the cooperation of all players - website owners would have to agree to not try to game the algorithm, which will never happen. Everything is so oriented around gaming the Google algorithms that the game is deadlocked.
There's a clear opportunity right now for an awesome search engine to usurp Google's throne. Bing and Microsoft are too conservative to be a serious threat, but would happily acquire an engine better then Google. Nobody wants to be David on purpose when Goliath is a terrifyingly huge and scary as Google, but I think it's gonna happen soon.
I don’t think it’s possible. SEO is targeted at google because that’s what the users use. If another engine became top, seo spammers would redesign around that.
It’s almost similar to how GANs work. Google tries to filter crap from content and the SEO spammers try to generate crap that is indistinguishable from content. And we settled at a point where seo spammers have won and their content looks like real valuable content but without real substance that ML can’t identify yet.
What was the tipping point where spam won the SEO arms race? Feels like SEO has been a thing for decades, cat and mouse, back and forth and the outcome for the search user has been good/decent results for most of that time, there have been big corrections against spam like Panda but generally consistent good results.. then recently bam! huge downswing in quality, spam won the war? Or Google gave up? Seems kind of unbelievable that suddenly its all gone to shit, what changed?
Let me very slightly push back: Google can't improve their search results without changing how they approach the problem. Now, it's Google, so the odds of them changing their approach is basically zero. But, it's my belief that for instance, a review team of 50 employees whose only job is to look at common searches and the results and hunt down ... let's call it low quality links... and manually blacklist them and pass aggregated results along to the machine learning teams that run the normal algorithm, could absolutely improve their quality. But, it's Google, and manual intervention is impossible (in their world view), so yes, in reality it will never be fixed.
In my opinion, it's not going to be as simple as someone outcompeting them at the existing game. It's that someone will beat them at the next iteration of the game, at a new paradigm of information discovery and distribution.
The analogue here is Microsoft losing its software dominance not due to a desktop competitor overthrowing them, but through failing to play the Web and mobile games as effectively as the new dominant players.
There were days where seeing a unique doodle makes your day. And then one day you realized that there is an official page for all doodles and you spend a good time on it. Now it is just PR department yelling: we didn't forget it's international trans-women day etc.
Please use Bing or DuckDuckGo. If you are on HN you already know that both of them are orders of magnitude better than Google. It's Google's monopoly and anti-competitiveness deter Bing and DDG from gaining more momentum. We should all use Bing or DDG.
It would be nice if it were true, but neither are better. Yes, both perhaps have less pernicious ad tracking and placement, but they just don't feel as effective
you.com has the best results for coding-related queries. Today, I searched 'torch a 100' on google and I got results for flashlights. And this is despite Google knowing everything in the world there is to know about me. I tried the search on you.com and the first result was Stackoverflow.
I've run experiments multiple times, and Google always returns better results for me. Maybe it's because they know me so well from all the other Google things I use, but it's just... better for me.
I wonder what %age of bing and DDG traffic comes from Windows OS's. Alot I would imagine, so where MS doesnt have things like google analytics, google fontapis etc to track people's usage online, MS who own Bing and seed DDG, will still get web tracking from the Window OS, because most of the time in Win10 Security, App & Browser control will report back the website, files & apps you may visit or download, and you have the Virus & threat protection settings which can also report back stuff.
So at the moment, for search engine supremacy, you have MS & Google going head to head using different methods to track people online.
I'm surprised Apple doesnt do their own search engine for their products, its really not that hard to do imo!
- I'm Feeling Doodley: Google search for "google doodles"
- I'm Feeling Puzzled: redirect to http://www.agoogleaday.com/#date=2012-02-29
- I'm Feeling Trendy: redirect to https://trends.google.com/trends/trendingsearches/daily?geo=...
- I'm Feeling Artistic: redirect to https://artsandculture.google.com/asset/xwE7rgYgnWm68w
- I'm Feeling Adventurous: Google search for "roll a die" (with die rolling widget embedded above search results)
- I'm Feeling Playful: Google search for "tic tac toe" (with tic tac toe game embedded above search results)
- I'm Feeling Generous: redirect to https://play.google.com/store/apps/editorial_collection/prom...
The only one I've encountered that does't send people a Google site or widget is "I'm Feeling Stellar", which is just an image search for "reflection nebula".