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Comment by shiado | Hacker News Reader

I remember I used to do filetype searches for mp3, mp4, flac, etc... and get all sorts of good stuff. I would find ftp servers with thousands of songs and just download anything interesting. I feel like the Google search algorithm peaked many years ago and has gradually been neutered by all sorts of special interest groups who have no doubt harassed Google with legal threats. Google probably doesn't want to censor results the way they have been forced to. Even pdf filetype searches got ruined too because Elsevier and JSTOR probably harassed Google as well. The recent change to Google images where they removed links to images made me switch to Bing.

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Google probably doesn't want to censor results the way they have been forced to.

From what I've seen, there is a large contingent of Google who doesn't want to provide unfettered access to information. Rather, this contingent wants to socially engineer everyone for the better using their power.

Source?

Wouldn't these people need to be specifically from the search team, and not Google in general (which would have almost no control over search)

Google keeps on demoting sites in search for doing certain things. In the past, this has largely been good. This stance against piracy and the stance that YouTube has taken against the principles of free speech mark a trajectory I find disturbing.

I see it as a concerning second phase to citizens united. Give corporations virtually unlimited influence and watch as they also find ways of capping everyone else's influence. Google sticks you into your (their) filter bubble and Facebook performs the social equivalent to gerrymandering on their platform. WCGW?

Going from “their stance against piracy” to “socially engineer everyone for better using their power” is quite a leap and strikes me as overly dramatic / FUD.

It was very clear that one was about what a contingent in the company believes and another is about what the company does. It strikes me as quite the leap and overly dramatic to compare specific quotes about different things just because they're in the same thread.

Google would've fought back much more -- as it has in the past -- if it wouldn't have gotten into the "content business."

That's really the main leverage studios have over Google right now: "either remove the stuff we tell you or you'll no longer get access to the content you want from us."

I wouldn't be surprised to learn that MPAA's board seat on the W3C was sponsored by Google (and Netflix, maybe Microsoft, and a few others).

The mental gymnastics employed by HN's pro-Google users never cease to impress. Excuses, explanations, speculation abound all so you don't need to confront the simple and obvious truth that Google's a business, it exists to make money and for no other reason, and the primary method it employs is doing all manner of things that degrade the quality of it's services to impress and court the advertising industry.

And now let the down-votes rain in.

Yeah i thing a watershed was back when movies were added to the Android Marketplace (later renamed Google Play).

This coincided with Android getting a much more restrictive permission regarding removable media (under the label media storage permissions), that made it impossible for non-system apps to write to removable storage (sd cards, usb sticks, etc).

Google makes its money selling advertising - it has no incentive to provide unfettered access of information to everyone.

You can pick an arbitrary contentious political topic, or even a topic that borders a political topic, and get markedly different "leanings" from bing and google on the first page. One of them at least appears to be aiming at something with the results.

It's unclear what "unfettered access" would mean for a search engine. Google has always been ranking results from the very beginning (PageRank). To get unbiased results you'd need a random sample of something, which is never going to be useful in a search engine.

So they are always going to make some people unhappy and the question is who. It used to be people nobody on Hacker News cared about like spammers and click farms (remember them)? But you could still call that censorship or social engineering even then. Isn't getting rid of spam also "using their power?"

Without heavy-duty ranking and spam prevention, would you even use it at all?

So yeah, they have a lot of power, they're getting leaned on by other powerful forces, and we don't need to agree with their choices. But just like a newspaper has to decide on something for its front page (and leave other stuff out), a search engine's gotta rank things.

So they are always going to make some people unhappy and the question is who.

What happens when these large companies start making people unhappy just because they have the wrong politics? What happens when groups of people within companies like Google start looking the other way when people start to manipulate/SEO page rankings to bury facts and promote their own interpretations of documented facts and science?

It's already happened.

“So they are always going to make some people unhappy and the question is who. It used to be people nobody on Hacker News cared about like spammers and click farms (remember them)?“

For me, I want pirate sites when searching for piracy and I never want click farm.

Google used to have a simple mission- organize the world information. This means helping you find what you’re looking for. Link farms didn’t do this, they made it harder to find the real thing. If I’m looking for a document and Google knows I want it, and knows the document’s location and doesn’t show it to me, that’s bad. I don’t really care if Google morally doesn’t like piracy, or makes more money by blocking piracy, or whatever. It’s their site, they can do what they like.

But this is why they are worse at their job than they used to be.

One of the reasons I never liked AOL is because their search was like an index through the yellow pages and didn’t use what made the internet so awesome (all the world can connect to each other) and rather was about what was most advantageous for AOL and their advertisers buying keywords.

It would be funny to see bing finally reach google search quality not because it got better, but because google got worse.

I use Bing whenever I want to find "pirate" sites.

This is already frequently true depending on what you're looking for.

They probably do this the way Google usually does, some sort of probability of similarity. They don't know for sure if a picture is pornographic, or a piece of audio is fair use. Once they reach acceptable accuracy, in their calculus....

A lot of stuff falls into grey areas both for AI classification and human opinion. Let's not forget that humans disagree widely over what's pornographic and what's fair use. Let's not pretend there's a canonical oracle of pornography or (apart from court rulings) what's fair use. It stinks when their AI is clearly wrong or when you disagree with their AI, but it's hard to fault them for setting some accuracy goal when they're trying to hit a fuzzy target anyway.

Maybe your complaint is really that their appeals process is too opaque or difficult. There I agree, but I don't fault them for stopping short of perfect on their AI classifiers.

It is already better for video search. I don't remember Google video search being that good.

I just used Google Image search and in frustration switched to DDG because I have no idea how to get direct links to the images that Google presents. I don't think it was always this hard? Or maybe I've grown dumber.

EDIT: Evidently you can right-click and view image. I thought that wouldn't get me to the original image since the image as presented in search is smaller in resolution than what Google says the image really is. Either way, in DDG the image actually links to the damn image and not to the site where the image supposedly maybe appears on.

You know what DDG is doing is illegal, right? Google Images used to link to direct images as well. But then there were lawsuit threats and a settlement with Getty, which forced them to stop linking directly.

If DDG / Bing become big enough, they too will be forced to stop their practice.

It's not illegal. They were sued then Getty dropped the suit when Google agreed to partner with them and remove the links.

https://9to5google.com/2018/02/09/google-images-features-get...

Lawsuit threats don't make something illegal.

The case with linking is far from settled.

Legal or not, I don't care though. But I do look forward to highly anonymized p2p networks with useful services and software we can rely on by the time the lawmakers have made the internet useless.

Interesting! These makes me remember the documentary/movie “Bananas!” which was about the criminal behaviour of the fruit- and vegetable company Dole. During the making the Americans involved in the making got so scared of being sued their house from them that they left the project. The swedes never cared about the threats from Dole. This also made the news on Sweden that even parliament members backed the project and said that Doles threats where so unethical.

Having said that, I think Goggle is just hiding behind the lawsuit threats.

There's a chrome extension that restores the view image button.

There is a Chrome/Firefox/Userscript extension that brings back the View Image button:

https://github.com/bijij/ViewImage

I've noticed a steep drop in the quality of results I receive from Google without the extensive use of search operators. Especially for politicized topics, I feel like I'm constantly fighting the search engine for access to a more diverse and useful spread of results. This has become such an issue that I've moved over to searx.me (meta-search engine) for the majority of my searches. While there are some edge cases where I have to move over to google (mostly image search), I feel like the results I receive from it are broadly superior to the ones I'm receiving from Google alone.

It’s even more funny since google got worse intentionally. It’s one thing to go IBM and just get slowly bad through attrition and attenuation. A whole different level of curiousity to cuck yourself.

I hope they wise up and improve as I actually would rather have 2-3 highly competitive search companies rather than just 1.

I wonder if there's a secret, vanilla Google endpoint out there without all the special interest filtering.

I wonder if people working at Google get a different google search from the rest of us. Seems likely.

Maybe, but it couldn't be widespread, or I would definitely think it would leak eventually.

Possibly. But aren't everyone's google searches already customized when you are logged in to Google. If people at google don't have special options, then how would they know they get a special (ie. better) type of search. I wonder how many people have access and understand the full search source code at google (less all the machine learning stuff)?

In older versions of google, one could quote a full error message of almost any type that came up on your computer and get a very good page describing that that error meant. Now that is not the case. Maybe the internet has degraded and this is no longer possible, but I would imagine it would really help out google coders if they had a system of searching the web for error messages that worked (and quite a competitive advantage if it only worked for them).

> I wonder how many people have access and understand the full search source code at google (less all the machine learning stuff)?

Not many, it's probably the highest guarded secret in the company as far as products go.

No, doesn't seem different to me. Of course, when logged in with the corp Google account / on the corp network you can see some debugging info and there will be likely some experiments running, but pretty much the same.

If you’re inside Google, do you have access to api definitions or source? There must be some raw result before they apply all the various removals and cosmetic (piracy ban) weights.

It seems like you would to test with this to assess quality.

a little off topic, but [here's a link to a chrome extension to get the image links back](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/view-image/jpcmhce...).

Is it that these results no longer show up or that we need to go to something like page 15 to see them?

I still do this and yeah, it's harder to find interesting stuff. I mostly do it now just for curiosity's sake.

you do know images links are still there ? you just need to click on them.

That takes you to the site, not the image.

RT click on the image, choose "open image in new tab"

That is, by definition, not a link.

Sure, by definition. But that's a distinction without much of a difference. They removed the image link, but they didn't disable a fairly obvious and trivial way to go directly to the source image, just like the link used to do.

That opens the thumbnail of the image, not the image itself.

You must be right-clicking the thumbnail in the image search list.

Instead, first left-click the thumbnail to open the larger image preview. Then right-click the large preview image and select "open image in new tab". You will get the full image.

If anyone has an example where this doesn't work, I'd be curious to see it. It works every time for me.

>Instead, first left-click the thumbnail to open the larger image preview. Then right-click the large preview image and select "open image in new tab". You will get the full image.

Works only for some sites. If the large preview is a stretched thumbnail of that picture, then "open image in new tab" will not get you the full image but the thumbnail.

> If the large preview is a stretched thumbnail of that picture

That happens when the large picture hasn't yet loaded. If you wait it usually will load.

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