Comment by body12 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by body12 | Hacker News Reader

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6. Pretty much everything about AMP: forcing sites to conform to a standard they created in order to show up in search, a standard that doesn't let sites control their UX or interactivity (then, just showing Google hosted caches by default instead of being a search engine.)

7. Overzealous GMail spam filters making it hard for anyone new to run email services

8. Google Groups: buying the biggest Usenet archive, breaking features, and embrace-extend-extinguishing it with groups that are on the same interface but don't syndicate to Usenet

9. Buying Meebo to shut it down, buying Softcard to shut it down.

10. Breaking reCAPTCHA for Firefox users, then maybe fixing it a year or two later after causing untold numbers of people to switch to Chrome (possible duplicate of degrading services)

11. Running YouTube at a massive loss for a decade to prevent anyone else from competing in online video

12. Not letting YouTube be run on Amazon devices

13. Bundling / requiring / defaulting Google services on Android phones, the world's dominant phone platform

14. Slowly allowing more ads in search (which has 90+% market share) and reducing their visibility so that people have to pay to have their own website show up when they are searched for

All this being said, my gut is that something with their opaque ad markets is what's really going to stand out in the investigation.

The one that will actually get them in trouble is running ads on top of navigational queries to a trademarked brand.

Here is Jason Fried of Basecamp openly accusing Google of a shakedown racket: https://twitter.com/jasonfried/status/1168986962704982016

Of the 100,000 or so people that actually give $2,700 to political candidates, I'd think this is their biggest gripe with Google, and likely the issue that is going to cause Google the most problems.

The more interesting thing to me is how quickly goodwill just expires. Google search is among mankind's greatest achievements in the past century, along with the free gifts of quality email, youtube, android, etc. It is an interesting thought experiment of how to keep a brand burnished in the eyes of the public given goodwill decays so rapidly.

Google Search has gotten worse in the past few years in my opinion. It seems biased towards newly published content and content from the top 100 sites or so. Before it felt like you were grepping the internet, but now it feels like you're at an airport newsstand. It will frequently re-write your queries for you if you are searching for uncommon things, and putting it in quotes doesn't always fix it.

The worst is the blog spam that reaches the top of Google's search results.

I don't think it's a coincidence that those poor quality results are given precedence when they also happen to be littered with, and optimized for, Adsense ads.

Yes, they changed how search works - try using "google verbatim" for the old behavior.

There are many searches that have so much SEO optimized crap content in the results that it is impossible to find any actually useful content.

I've stopped using Google for searching for various generic terms and instead search nearly everything as site:reddit.com 2019 "search term".

Sometimes I get mildly useful information that stands out from the page after page of pagerank gamed garbage.

Now, searching reddit.com for solutions has other issues (notably using Reddit on iOS via Safari, is, as of 9/2019, almost entirely impossible), but that's where I'm at currently.

Have you seen Google Image search recently? They have updated it such that when you click on an image to select/expand in view, the selection is now presented in the top right hand side of the page. But the selection is not floating with your scrolling - so selecting anything below the fold means you end up scrolling back and forth between the top of the page and your previous position. Honestly not sure why they changed it. Terrible.

Using image search on mobile is a truly a painful experience

Amusingly, at least for me, a search for [basecamp] now gives me no ads.

> ... the issue that is going to cause Google the most problems

I am certainly biased because I seem to see more negative HN Google comments than positive ones. But, I'm starting to wonder if taking money from Google will cause politicians problems in 2020. Will we see candidates bashing each other for being too cozy with Google? Could taking Google money even become a third rail?

And Cal AG Xavier Becerra is a test case: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20944284

Would be more effective if he titled it "Dont click this ad | Click the first organic result below"

As a web user, I have to say, I hate AMP. I always click through it. Especially on reddit.

The double-whammy of AMP meets reddit nagging requests to launch the app really grinds my gears

come to europe for extra cookie and gdpr requests

A combination of noscript and only using old.reddit.com prevents this kind of bullshit for me.

Re: #7, I run my own mail server and haven't had issues sending to Gmail addresses (at least that I know of). Having DKIM and SPF working helps Google figure out that yes, my emails are legit. So does running a secure-by-default mail server (OpenSMTPd) and - relatedly - checking spam blacklists / running open relay tests every once in awhile to make sure I haven't been flagged for some reason.

AT&T, on the other hand, is the one that's quite overzealous.

Running YouTube at a massive loss for a decade to prevent anyone else from competing in online video

How is that different from what every VC does?

It can also be illegal when VCs do it: "Pricing below your own costs is...a violation of the law [if] it is part of a strategy to eliminate competitors, and when that strategy has a dangerous probability of creating a monopoly for the discounting firm so that it can raise prices far into the future and recoup its losses." [1]

[1] https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/competition-guidance/guide-a...

So does that include Uber and Lyft?

i cant see why not. and Wework

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