A New Look for Google Search | Hacker News Reader

A New Look for Google Search

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31 pointsrbinv17 comments

I mean… it's pretty transparently intended to make the adverts less obvious still, isn't it?

The giveaway for me was that when I saw this headline I got the same feeling I did when my bank sends me a "good news about your interest rate" email – everything's about to get a bit worse and there's nothing to do about it.

Of course, the inherent flip side of making the adverts less obvious is making the content even less obvious still. They've slowly A/B tested their way into using what are basically dark patterns that will be tricking users into clicking stuff they didn't mean to. This won't go well.

They also reward click-bait material with more ad-revenue making it more likely that people produce such content.

I've always liked this comic: http://chainsawsuit.com/comic/2017/12/07/improvements/

> In our quest to improve the service for you, the user, we're making it worse.

> It was great before. It's going to be terrible now, but you're going to love the changes.

> We asked our investors and they said you're very excited about it being less good, which is great news for you.

Looks like the "Ad" indicator has almost evolved into its final form now. There's not even any color distinction any more, and they've put it in the same location as normal results' favicons, which is a spot that people will become blind to very quickly.

I was just going to mention that I don't like when designers put these system-specific icons in a place where user content can also go. Someone can just use a favicon with a black "Ad" text and it will look just like Google's own ad indicator, which then becomes a candidate for phishing or at the very least can mislead users into thinking they are clicking on vetted ad content. The previous design where there was a dedicated location for the "Ad" indicator is clearly much better. I am surprised by this change.

While I agree with you in principle, the idea that Google Ads are carefully vetted and not in fact a teeming mass of malware is already an overly optimistic view that you should be disabused of.

Agree, but I think it is still better than before, because of the color differences to the headline.

I still would prefer a true Icon.

The final form will be when every piece of content they serve is an ad, removing the need for a favicon in the first place.

Maybe in the future it will become a giant link-farm. Google is slowly becoming the kind of site they used to ban from their own search results not too long ago.

I just tried the same search ("hike yosemite") on my mobile with DuckDuckGo.

The results are very revealing. Firstly the DDG format has less space allocated to the logo, more entries visible on the screen, no ads nor dark patterns.

Secondly the results are far better (for me). They start with the same National Park Services result, but the next is a non-commercial labour of love (yosmemitehikes.com) which seems excellent, and the third the the Yosemite Mariposa County Tourism Bureau site. None of these are commercial sites with pop-ups/Hubspot requests and so on. It's just a better internet experience overall.

Google obviously puts us all into our own bubble, so your own results may differ.

That’s just one example though. I think it would be hard to say Google results are not at least equal if not better normally. This coming from someone who uses Google for search maybe 2% of the time for the past ~7-8 years and Bing the rest of the time.

How about showing me the universal resource locator where I am going, rather than a "brand"?

They want you to go to all websites through them, instead of typing the URL. Basically use them as a combined bookmark/history/web search. I admit, its a very nice convenience.

And this is the final straw to make me use DuckDuckGo. I don’t care if the results are inferior, the UI on mobile is so much better, it’s worth it.

About time we gave favicons the love they deserve, I was worried we were almost going to see them die out. Favicons will live!

More hidden ads it seems. :(

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