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Comment by amelius | Hacker News Reader

Google, just give me the option to ignore Getty images altogether.

Why does Google always think they know what is best for me?

> Why does Google always think they know what is best for me?

This is the entire ethos of the "AI Revolution" in tech. The algorithm "knows what is best for you". This will only get worse with more "AI" being applied to more tech.

Not just the AI revolution. For over a decade, I've grown increasingly frustrated with software suffering from overly-clever syndrome.

I'd rather use software that is predictable than predictive.

Too bad those algorithms don't know when I'm yelling at my computer because it's fucking up

If only folks on HN wouldn’t be so paranoid about microphones...

The problem with AI is that we are building it, with all our biases.

This is my gripe with Facebook and why I stopped using it. Biaaaaootch, I added people to my friends list because I want to see their posts. Ditch the dang algorithm and literally just show me everyone’s posts, in chronological order. That’s all you literally have to do. Don’t worry about me getting annoyed by spam, idiots who abuse their status updates will be blocked or defriended by me and everyone else who isnt having it. It’s self-policing. My discretion and the discretion of people on the platform is better than your dumb algorithm. But now I don’t use your app at all, because you thought you knew what’s best for me, and I kept missing out on people’s posts that I did in fact want to see, and that pissed me off more than whatever you’re trying to keep off of my newsfeed.

Your value proposition is having my entire social network on one feed. You’ve done that. That’s all you have to do. Ditch the algorithm.

Yeah, the biggest problem with these types of algorithms is that they show that the application developers don't trust the user to know what they want and trust the user to fix their own problems.

It's one thing for an application to provide sensible defaults. It's another thing entirely if it just second guesses the user.

The sad thing is the algorithm fixed zero problems for me. And it introduced the problem of hiding things that I did in fact want to see.. for no good reason other than apparently for their engineers to feel like they did something. Because how can they justify their paychecks when the newsfeed sorting order hasn’t changed since its prime of ~2009?

I often see a great deal of contempt for users here on HN, why should Facebook etc. be any different?

You can view "most recent" posts and that will do exactly what you're saying you want.

Except for the fact that Facebook keeps changing that back

You must not use that feature very often or else you would know that Facebook does not respect that setting. When you set it, come back in a day or two and they’ve switched it back. Because once again, they know what’s best for you. You don’t know what you want, even if it’s not default and you go through the trouble of turning it on.

Tried it and got tired of randomly noticing that it’s not showing me “most recent” any more, and not knowing at what point in time they had switched it back on me, and what I might have missed that I would have wanted to see during that time. You have to religiously go through the process of seeing if it’s set to “most recent” every time you visit. FOH.

Actually I didn't even know it's supposed to stay in the most recent settings. I just go and click on it every time I open FB.

you make it sound so easy. It’s a hassle. It’s not like it’s always switched off when you come back. Sometimes it is sometimes it isn’t. So you have to navigate to a switch even if you’re not going to toggle it just to be sure that you’re getting the experience that you had explicitly expressed you want by switching away from the default to begin with. Why does it even switch back? They don’t think you’re capable of making your own decisions?

I just go there every time and make sure it is switched the way I like. I never said it is easy nor that I agree with their way of doing things, but the fact that sometimes it is set up like I want it to be does not make it a bigger hassle, it's exactly the same.

They don't. You decided to use Google's image search service, and that's what you got.

I think other sites could follow the Getty precedent and sue Google so they have no choice, at least within USA. Still, the PR spin in the message is just funny, it really made me feel "empowered" and "excited" :D

DDG still works anyway, so it's not like I have no choice if I need to quickly find an image.

This. People can be angry at Google but they have to respect a ruling from a US judge. And you can bet that there are a lot of vultures out there willing to sue Google.

Today its Getty tomorrow some blogger hoping to make a dollar.

> they have to respect a ruling from a US judge

It's not the US, it's the EU, and it's not a ruling from a judge, it's an agreement directly with Getty.

http://press.gettyimages.com/getty-images-files-competition-...

http://press.gettyimages.com/getty-images-and-google-announc...

Thanks for pointing this out!

I guess the enthusiasm regarding technology as a solution to the problems of humanity was unfounded and it needs to revert back to politics, hacking people...

1. Try adding "-getty" to your image search

2. For the more general problem of searching free images only try hitting tools -> usage rights and select as desired

Wow, that still works. I'd largely given up on + and - lately.

It’ll work until they launch a Google- product.

'+' is dead, but you can (usually?) fake its role via quote-wrapping individual words - it'll force their presence like a full quoted string, but won't require them in sequence.

'-' is still working. It also works with the 'site:' tag, so you can do things like '-site:w3schools.com'.

> -' is still working. It also works with the 'site:' tag, so you can do things like '-site:w3schools.com'

It would be interesting for google to globally A/B test “-site:w3schools.com” as a hidden default and see if their crawlers detect less overall brokenness in the web six months later.

I still use them (replace + with quotes around the word), along with searches for quoted words. Sometimes you have to click the "search for what I typed, not the spell-corrected version" button, though.

Yes, but that doesn't enable the "view image" button.

Every couple of months something like this happens and people bash the companies that did it while simultaneously there are posts where screams of how great AI will be at predicting what we want, and then executing it based on all the information harvesting.

One option is to go to advanced search, where you can change the search to restrict only to Free or other less restrictive licenses than commercial.

https://www.google.com/advanced_image_search?biw=1404&bih=67... as a sample, and more detail at https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/29508?p=ws_image...

You can already do this with search operators:

cat pictures -site:gettyimages.com

They do, just add -site:gettyimages.com to your search.

Because they know what is best for the least common denominator, if you aren't part of the target product pool, using them is a disservice to your-self.

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