The Mosaic browser (1993) had full text history search.
We then got a bookmark system that was every bit as terrible as a web directory.
It stayed that way. The delicious search revenue made organizing websites uninteresting. That obscure website you enjoyed a decade ago but don't even remember, they had lots of traffic like you. No point updating or keeping it online. You can't have rss in Firefox but here is a Facebook like button in your address bar in stead.
I've tried to maintain the bookmark menu but I rarely use it since everything is dead. Why aren't browsers storing a text version of the bookmark? Did people in 1993 have more resources than us? Should I be afraid it grows to a few GB over the decades?
A good few dead websites have a backup some place but there is no automation to find it. If you had a string of text from a page you might be able to search for it. If the page found is highly similar we might automate the process to have alternative location for bookmarks with a nice warning dialog.
Bookmarks died because most humans are allergic to having to do bookkeeping and cleanup tasks that are incidental to what they really want to do.
We see that over and over again, in a bunch of non-tech fields. My kids never want to clean up their toys; they will pull out new ones, but it is a struggle to get them into the habit of putting the old ones away first. My parents used to keep a notebook with every gas fill-up they made; nobody born after about 1990 does that anymore. We were taught how to balance a checkbook in elementary school; basically nobody does that anymore, we put everything on autopay and if you are diligent you check a statement or import it into Quicken once a month (most people don't even do that, they have no idea what they are spending and predictably, usually no money left over). GMail succeeded because instead of putting your mail in folders, you just leave it in one lump with Google and rely on full-text search. A lot of Zoomer computer users don't even know what files and folders are, they just use apps, which take them straight to what they want to do and don't offer things like possession of your own data.
Back in the (~early 2010s) days when Google still allowed internal innovation, there were recurrent demos produced by engineers of full-text search over your web history, though of course it was your web history as stored by Google and none of this was local. It never became a product, largely because users are too lazy to go to a separate search product just for your history, or because they're too lazy to check a separate box saying "Search my history". Instead I think web history became a ranking input to general search and it would mix in results that you frequently visited to the general results, which honestly I think was a more useful approach.
That and google had a major interest in killing bookmarks. Bookmarks were actively competing with google search traffic, so they put in a lot of effort to get you to stop using them. Why bookmark something when you can just search for it.
Eh, it's true that Google's incentives aren't really aligned with bookmarking tools, but the magnitude of the effect is much less than you're thinking of. Basically 100% of Google's revenues come from commercial-seeking queries, cases where the user has a purchasing intent before they came to the search engine. All of the non-commercial uses - coding, random facts, research, education, navigational queries, etc - are just loss-leaders so that your fingers automatically reach for Google when you're searching for lawyers, contractors, home-improvement fixtures, apps, furniture, flowers, restaurants, consumer electronics, etc. Google (of the 2010s certainly, but also true now) considered Amazon to be its primary competition, not Yahoo or del.icio.us.
They put precisely zero effort into killing bookmarks. I know because I was there, and probably would've been tasked with doing it. Well, that and because bookmarks still exist and I can still use them. They also put zero effort into improving bookmarks or making them easier for you to use, but it's death by inaction and consumer choice, not by anything Google did.
I don’t know if they did or didn’t try to kill bookmarks.
But on the commercial incentives, it does make sense for them to kill it.
Companies pay good advertisement so they show up first on the search result when a user want to find them.
Eg you want to go to carglass website: you type carglass in google and the company will most likely pay Google to show up first in the ads section because competitors are trying to sway away customers from them. If they didn’t outbid their competitors, even though the customer want to go to carglass, he will click on first result and may end up buying from their competitor without even noticing.
That wouldn’t happen if people had put carglass.com website in bookmark.
Google doesn't show ads on navigational queries because of the potential trademark-infringement legal issues that could result from recommending a competitor when somebody searches for a trademark.
Search for [carglass], no ads. Search for [facebook], no ads. Search for [spotify], no ads. Search for [american airlines], no ads. All of these would be very desirable queries to advertise a competitor on.
(IIRC they've gone back and forth on this depending on what the lawyers thought they could get away with; ISTR when Bing launched Microsoft would run ads on [google] that pointed to Bing. It's been a long time since I've seen an ad on a navigational query though.)
As a counter example, a couple days ago I was to install DaVinci Resolve on a new windows installation, so I searched "davinci resolve." Since I was used to having adblocker, I just clicked the top result, which is titled "DaVinci Resolve" but actually takes you to some awful shady thing like wondershare or softonic/uptodown, I forgot.
I feel like, navigational queries or no, Google should be held liable for allowing scam sites like that to advertise. I think there was a trending HN post recently on that front.
> As a counter example, a couple days ago I was to install DaVinci Resolve on a new windows installation, so I searched "davinci resolve." Since I was used to having adblocker, I just clicked the top result, which is titled "DaVinci Resolve" but actually takes you to some awful shady thing like wondershare or softonic/uptodown, I forgot.
I just tried this query on chrome / android.
This is the first link on the page at the very top:
When people tell me this stuff about their Google searches it drives me insane, I want to know why our experiences are so different. It is regional? Is it OS, is it browser, is it something else? I want to know!
You know your search results are personalized right? If I google something and my girlfriend googles the same thing, on the same network, we get different results.
>You know your search results are personalized right?
Of course.
But these results don't seem to change on a degoogled chromium on desktop, with no google account login personalization, no account logged in, in incognito, using: Ublock origin lite, User Agent / OS Randomizer, Privacy Badger, and using a VPN to other locales.
That's why I want to know, I've been curious about this for years, and nothing I've looked at seems conclusive.
My biggest guess is country or native language, but it's been hard to pin down. I think that may be the biggest factor (with local laws contributing maybe to how search results get displayed).
I'm curious! I want to know the driver behind the bad experiences people are having with it. (I've been using it literally since it was released.)
This a search domain term that means a search query where the user is trying to find a specific destination/product. I don't know how Google search works, but often a search will first go through an intent classifier and then use a different model based on the query type.
A "navigational query" is a query with a certain website in mind. So like if you search for [facebook], 99.99% of the time you are looking to go to Facebook, if you search for [hacker news] 99.99% of the time you are looking to go to news.ycombinator.com. Basically it replaces the address bar for people who don't know what URLs are. You aren't looking for information about the business, you want to go to the site/business itself.
In my experience, those commercial seeking queries are what google can't do. Many stores in the result ship to USA only, and there's also no good way to compare prices and features.
Google used to not have any ads for many years while they got market share. Then only small ads off to the side. Eventually the ads moved inline and were half the results, etc.
AI summary seems like the same play, even if it hurts their current ad business some. After all why search for stuff when a chatbot can just tell you? Makes sense they'd view it as an existential crisis and push their AI.
Google will be well positioned when ads start being added to AI for most users.
Are you sure you don't have any privacy protections enabled?
With my normie setup (logged in account, granted location permissions, no PiHole, no particular anti-tracker mechanisms beyond classic ad blocking), I get decent local results on Google, in contrast to basically any other "privacy focused" search engine.
Chat GPT and Claude seem to be struggling a lot more. I suspect this is because OpenAI and Anthropic aren't talking to the local companies here, and they may have some robots.txt shenanigans going on.
I don't really understand why they were able to exist as they do and not lose users. I have not had Chrome for over a decade, I use Gmail exclusively for my actual real identity, which I don't recall the last time I used - I can only access my Gmail from a tablet I never use. I used to use Google search, when all other options failed - but these days, google is the first to fail, I literally do not remember the time I used it.
It is a genuinely novel experience for me, to see any sort of ad on the internet - that is not hyperbole.
I am not as capable as so many of the people who frequent HN, tbh - very little of what I do is hard, why do all of you live as you do??
I don't understand at all.
Think of some very fringe group of 0.1%, which you question from time to time how they function/exist/for what purpose. That’s basically how general populace looks at people who go through efforts of de-Googlifying. Stuff that matters to you (privacy, owning your data and etc.) does not matter to super majority of the people, especially outside of the tech circles.
I’m somewhat in-between of two extremes, but in grand scheme of things I don’t really care, as I have completely different priorities in life. Convenience services enable me to focus on those priorities, and I don’t really care about all other stuff to a specific degree.
I’ve been lucky enough to see how people from every walk of life interact with the Internet, and realized the way I function is extremely different. To them, I am the “flat earth weirdo and do stuff differently than the others”.
To give another example - I’m expecting people in HN type about 100 words per minute on average because of our general exposure to coding, typing, internet and etc. That puts us to 99th percentile. Average person does not live like us, nor cares about it.
Frankly I just don’t care that much, I hate Google and llms have mostly replaced the search but after work I want to spend time with family and do hobbies and degoogling is a nice to have that is nowhere near the top of my priorities list.
>they put in a lot of effort to get you to stop using them
such as? maybe I am missing something, but I find this "this big outcome is due to some engineered effort" applied to this specific case to be inaccurate as I was there and I remember.
econ · · focus · HN ↗
We then got a bookmark system that was every bit as terrible as a web directory.
It stayed that way. The delicious search revenue made organizing websites uninteresting. That obscure website you enjoyed a decade ago but don't even remember, they had lots of traffic like you. No point updating or keeping it online. You can't have rss in Firefox but here is a Facebook like button in your address bar in stead.
I've tried to maintain the bookmark menu but I rarely use it since everything is dead. Why aren't browsers storing a text version of the bookmark? Did people in 1993 have more resources than us? Should I be afraid it grows to a few GB over the decades?
A good few dead websites have a backup some place but there is no automation to find it. If you had a string of text from a page you might be able to search for it. If the page found is highly similar we might automate the process to have alternative location for bookmarks with a nice warning dialog.
nostrademons · · focus · HN ↗
We see that over and over again, in a bunch of non-tech fields. My kids never want to clean up their toys; they will pull out new ones, but it is a struggle to get them into the habit of putting the old ones away first. My parents used to keep a notebook with every gas fill-up they made; nobody born after about 1990 does that anymore. We were taught how to balance a checkbook in elementary school; basically nobody does that anymore, we put everything on autopay and if you are diligent you check a statement or import it into Quicken once a month (most people don't even do that, they have no idea what they are spending and predictably, usually no money left over). GMail succeeded because instead of putting your mail in folders, you just leave it in one lump with Google and rely on full-text search. A lot of Zoomer computer users don't even know what files and folders are, they just use apps, which take them straight to what they want to do and don't offer things like possession of your own data.
Back in the (~early 2010s) days when Google still allowed internal innovation, there were recurrent demos produced by engineers of full-text search over your web history, though of course it was your web history as stored by Google and none of this was local. It never became a product, largely because users are too lazy to go to a separate search product just for your history, or because they're too lazy to check a separate box saying "Search my history". Instead I think web history became a ranking input to general search and it would mix in results that you frequently visited to the general results, which honestly I think was a more useful approach.
bognition · · focus · HN ↗
nostrademons · · focus · HN ↗
They put precisely zero effort into killing bookmarks. I know because I was there, and probably would've been tasked with doing it. Well, that and because bookmarks still exist and I can still use them. They also put zero effort into improving bookmarks or making them easier for you to use, but it's death by inaction and consumer choice, not by anything Google did.
aucisson_masque · · focus · HN ↗
But on the commercial incentives, it does make sense for them to kill it.
Companies pay good advertisement so they show up first on the search result when a user want to find them.
Eg you want to go to carglass website: you type carglass in google and the company will most likely pay Google to show up first in the ads section because competitors are trying to sway away customers from them. If they didn’t outbid their competitors, even though the customer want to go to carglass, he will click on first result and may end up buying from their competitor without even noticing.
That wouldn’t happen if people had put carglass.com website in bookmark.
nostrademons · · focus · HN ↗
Search for [carglass], no ads. Search for [facebook], no ads. Search for [spotify], no ads. Search for [american airlines], no ads. All of these would be very desirable queries to advertise a competitor on.
(IIRC they've gone back and forth on this depending on what the lawyers thought they could get away with; ISTR when Bing launched Microsoft would run ads on [google] that pointed to Bing. It's been a long time since I've seen an ad on a navigational query though.)
picture · · focus · HN ↗
abustamam · · focus · HN ↗
miki123211 · · focus · HN ↗
someguyiguess · · focus · HN ↗
abustamam · · focus · HN ↗
esseph · · focus · HN ↗
I just tried this query on chrome / android.
This is the first link on the page at the very top:
<a href="https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/davinciresolve" rel="nofollow">https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/davinciresolve
(The product page)
The next site listed was Wikipedia.
I don't have any adblockers. I am in the US.
When people tell me this stuff about their Google searches it drives me insane, I want to know why our experiences are so different. It is regional? Is it OS, is it browser, is it something else? I want to know!
someguyiguess · · focus · HN ↗
esseph · · focus · HN ↗
Of course.
But these results don't seem to change on a degoogled chromium on desktop, with no google account login personalization, no account logged in, in incognito, using: Ublock origin lite, User Agent / OS Randomizer, Privacy Badger, and using a VPN to other locales.
That's why I want to know, I've been curious about this for years, and nothing I've looked at seems conclusive.
My biggest guess is country or native language, but it's been hard to pin down. I think that may be the biggest factor (with local laws contributing maybe to how search results get displayed).
I'm curious! I want to know the driver behind the bad experiences people are having with it. (I've been using it literally since it was released.)
kid64 · · focus · HN ↗
If so, you may not be aware that the locations represented by square dots on the map are ads.
bradly · · focus · HN ↗
nostrademons · · focus · HN ↗
kid64 · · focus · HN ↗
n_plus_1_acc · · focus · HN ↗
elcritch · · focus · HN ↗
dragonwriter · · focus · HN ↗
Which explains why they push an AI Summary to the top of most searches which discourages clicking on any of the search results.
Or not.
elcritch · · focus · HN ↗
AI summary seems like the same play, even if it hurts their current ad business some. After all why search for stuff when a chatbot can just tell you? Makes sense they'd view it as an existential crisis and push their AI.
Google will be well positioned when ads start being added to AI for most users.
miki123211 · · focus · HN ↗
With my normie setup (logged in account, granted location permissions, no PiHole, no particular anti-tracker mechanisms beyond classic ad blocking), I get decent local results on Google, in contrast to basically any other "privacy focused" search engine.
Chat GPT and Claude seem to be struggling a lot more. I suspect this is because OpenAI and Anthropic aren't talking to the local companies here, and they may have some robots.txt shenanigans going on.
Ajakks · · focus · HN ↗
tokioyoyo · · focus · HN ↗
I’m somewhat in-between of two extremes, but in grand scheme of things I don’t really care, as I have completely different priorities in life. Convenience services enable me to focus on those priorities, and I don’t really care about all other stuff to a specific degree.
I’ve been lucky enough to see how people from every walk of life interact with the Internet, and realized the way I function is extremely different. To them, I am the “flat earth weirdo and do stuff differently than the others”.
To give another example - I’m expecting people in HN type about 100 words per minute on average because of our general exposure to coding, typing, internet and etc. That puts us to 99th percentile. Average person does not live like us, nor cares about it.
edgyquant · · focus · HN ↗
frgturpwd · · focus · HN ↗
such as? maybe I am missing something, but I find this "this big outcome is due to some engineered effort" applied to this specific case to be inaccurate as I was there and I remember.