Hacker News Reader

Comment by gvurrdon | Hacker News Reader

Recommendations, algorithmic timelines and so on are indeed a bit of a nuisance. Similarly, Google Now is annoying me a lot at the moment but I can't use my watch fully without turning it on.

View on HN

I find Google Now to be far more useful than e.g. Facebook "recommendations", which are basically ads.

Same, but google now for me is basically a mash of:

1. The weather

2. Stocks that have the same acronyms as things I've searched for

3. Flight information for any flight with the same code as mine

4. A recommendation of a film I might like to see because I searched for actors in them (which might be good except the reason I was looking up those actors was that I had just watched that film)

5. Sports scores for teams I don't follow

6. Possibly updates to sites I visit regularly (equivalent to a highly unreliable RSS client)

> 6. Possibly updates to sites I visit regularly (equivalent to a highly unreliable RSS client)

This is what annoys me the most in Google Now. It's a damn black box. I'm happy that they provide "updates to sites I visit regularly", but even more than those updates I'd like to see the list of those sites. Without that, and any kind of information about how reliable this reporting is, I have no way of trusting I won't miss an "important update". I just don't know, and Google Now does nothing to reassure me.

I may be assuming ill intent where there is none, but I feel like that's part of the plan of the entities (Google, FaceBook) that automate recommendations: get you to discard that nagging feeling like you're missing something of actual importance, and just get your info from the feed. If I were nefarious and had their real estate, I would certainly like to not be transparent so that I could manipulate things without people being able to tell or complain.

I don't really rely on them to show me important updates. I see the stories they provide me with as more of a friendly suggestion that they've found something I might like or might of missed. I don't get them very often and I really like the spontaneity of them appearing when I'm not normally looking for them.

The only time they annoyed me was when picking up a false article about Breaking bad being renewed. I shared the headline with several people before realizing it was a fake article.

http://www.businessinsider.com/breaking-bad-season-6-hoax-20...

I've turned most of these off. The weather is useful as is commute information, but site updates and things Google think I might like based on my searches are generally poor. There was a recent reminder not to forget to vote and occasional "are you interested in such-and-such an popular event" cards, but these never seem to have an option to prevent recurrences.

Parking information would be useful if it were both accurate (it isn't, due to taking a park and ride bus) and consistent. Like many Google Now cards it seems difficult to predict whether it will turn up or not.

Another trick it used to do was show me cards with navigation information to somewhere I'd searched for, usually the night before a trip. But, when I got into my car at 6am the next day such information was nowhere to be seen and I'd have to search for it again. Now I save the location in the calendar so at least there's a link to click, causing Google Now to remind me to leave on time after I've already left, sometimes when I'm nearly there.

Overall, it's not a useful product and relies upon data being collected which I'd rather wasn't. The only reason I leave it on is so that I can dictate reminders to my watch, which I find a very useful feature. The requirement to use Google Now for this last feature seems rather arbitrary to me.

This pisses me off to no end. When I disable something like web browsing history because I get a nagging feeling that Google knows more about me than it should.

Then on the way out of work I try an "OK Google. Directions home"[0] to get a time estimate or best route estimate and it tells me I have to turn on browser history to continue or some other such bs. I wonder when Google Now will understand "Ok google. F?!k you Google."

[0] correction: that's more likely "ok Google. OK Google! OK GOOGLE! Damnit (click google now, click microphone). Directions home."

This particular point was rather annoying, and involved working around it in this manner:

Me: "OK Google, navigate home" Google: "You need to turn on web and app activity." Me: "OK Google, navigate to $NUMBER $STREET, $TOWN." Google: "No problem".

But, they then decided that web and app activity was essential in order to give me commute information, and the only way I found around this was to turn it back on and start doing almost all my searches via Duckduckgo.

I have done the same thing. My default search engine is now duckduckgo. Changing the default theme to blue/green (upper right corner) made a huge difference. I don't know why duckduckgo uses a black and gray color scheme that essentially does not distinguish between link/site/description. Makes the results appear very muddled when they are, in fact, usually comparable to google.

Google Now kept creepily insisting I was on my way home and kept calculating directions day after day..Even after disabling this directions to home feature, it still killed my phones battery life, so as omnitious as everyone likes to say Google is, they still had to have my phone do the ML cycles. Bah! Keep it all on your server Google! protesters yell 'Take it off your servers Google!' heh.. :-)

How do you know the battery drain was caused by CPU usage, as opposed to something like network?

I had checked the statistics on the Play Framework service that it ran under. There was abnormally high CPU usage, high battery usage, and it was running all the time.

Lots of apps use the Play Framework, not just Google Now.

I am aware. But consider that I literally disabled/enabled it with intent to discover if it was the problem. It was. Google Now is a huge drain. Googling it turns up thousands of other similar experiences unfortunately. [1]

[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=%22google+now%22+cards+causi...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com