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Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

It's still regular for me but if true this will probably be the last straw for me. It's already absolutely impossible to send someone a link to a pdf you've found through google, this would make it impossible to send any link. That bloody wrapper is also a fine piece of shit. Search engines should link to content, not appropriate that content, hide who supplies it or mess with the links.

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Google isn’t really a search engine anymore. They’re a data harvesting company who then try find ways to profit off sharing that data with you.

Google penalises other websites for stealing content or re-hosting stuff without adding value, then goes ahead and does exactly that all the time.

Google is an organism and uses attack and defense against its perceived enemies.

It makes perfectly sense if you read how Google was originally funded. Culture runs from the birth.

Any link for that please?

CIA grants. As conspiracy it sounds, it's perfectly public knowledge and true.

Again, any link even for the conspiracy theory / discussion, as farfetched it seems.

It's actually true:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In-Q-Tel

Whether it is significant or not is another matter entirely.

That link is cool, I wasn't aware the CIA has a literal VC firm!

Still, I'm skeptical. The link doesn't really say In-Q-Tel influenced Google directly, I especially don't see evidence for influence during Google's early years.

It appears Keyhole (a company G acquired in 2005, who's software became Google Earth) was funded in part by intelligence money. Google went public in 2004, so they were already beholden to public shareholders by the time of that acquisition.

Besides, Keyhole just made good mapping software. DARPA funds lots of robotics labs, but I wouldn't say Berkeley and CMU are any more a part of the US intelligence apparatus than I am as a tax payer. Some work they do has utility to the gov, so the gov funded it. That doesn't make their efforts direct intelligence work.

They funded Facebook as well.

It annoys me how any mention of the In-Q-Tel relationship to certain tech firms is met with derision and downvotes and accusations of crazy conspiracy theory. It's as if NSL's and Prism were just a blip on the radar people want to pretend isn't happening anymore. Snowdens docs though released in 2013 were from 2007! Imagine how much more embedded and pervasive the system is (which probably just got a name change as is standard when programs similar are revealed to the public).

Add in whatever the modern version of Operation Mockingbird is and those companies at the very least are sure to have been infiltrated after the fact. Probably willingly. You'd be surprised how servile people get when men in black suits with 3letter badges show up and say the words "National Security". All these factors and more in aggregate make the probability that there was government influence and involvement highly likely.

For those who want just a primer on this complex subject, here is a decent article: https://medium.com/insurge-intelligence/how-the-cia-made-goo...

Another interesting interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DfUm0RxXWxI

Stockholm syndrome variation? We're all so dependent on Google it pays off mentally to pretend they must be on our side.

I was trying to find the URL of Crate and Barrel Canada yesterday on Mobile on Google and I found myself dropped into some google clickbait hell...

I ended up in their google maps product on mobile and was clicking around between their reviews, their location on google maps, the opinions of other google users about what they thought crate and barrel was good at, pictures of crate and barrel stores, etc...

But I could not find their websites URL... not in what I would consider a reasonable amount of time at least.

Obviously I found it in the end.

But I couldn't help but think that Google really doesn't want me even going to the actual URL.

They want me to call and drive to the store using their phone and their google maps product, and leave a review on their platform, growing their company's value for them.

Crate and barrel and my original intentions be damned.

On DuckDuckGo, when I searched for "Crate and Barrel Canada" (without the quotes), their home page (www.crateandbarrel.ca) showed up as the first search result:

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=Crate+and+Barrel+Canada&t=ffcm&ia=...

DuckDuckGo has mobile apps: https://duckduckgo.com/app

I get the exact same result in Google, so I'm not sure what this proves.

On Google for me, the link is missing. Google also does this fun thing where when you click on the link it invisibly changes in the background to a Google-wrapped URL.[0] If you right-click on the link and select "copy link location", you won't get the result you want, you'll get gibberish.

So it proves that you can use DuckDuckGo to immediately get the link with no fuss, and that Google Search is increasingly not designed to facilitate that kind of interaction.

[0]: https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&c...

Google rewrites URLs to track clicks and improve search, which is mildly annoying but not quite nefarious.

The links obviously works, but if you want it to look nicer, why not just click and get the URL from the browser? That might even be faster depending on device and keyboard/touchscreen/mouse setup and usage.

It is very annoying for pdf documents, where it is downloaded immediatly in your browser though.

I just want the link :)

Sometimes the target site has been rearranged, the link immediately redirects to an unhelpful generic page, and the Googlefuscated link doesn't work in the Wayback Machine.

This is easy enough [for me] to work around with browser developer tools on the desktop, but a PITA on, e.g., iOS, where these are not readily available.

Google could solve the problem without sacrificing telemetry by overriding the context menu for the link with an option to "show original link".

I get the exact same result in Google, so I'm not sure what this proves.

It proves that you don't understand how Google works.

Each search is custom to the person, profile, IP address, geolocation, search history, surfing history, purchase history, social media, and a thousand other trade secrets that Google holds. No two searches are the same.

This is why when Sally in Accounting searches for something on her work computer, and Mike in Facilities searches for the same thing on his phone they get different results.

I doubt OP had never heard about individualisation. It's just generally overrated.

There is little doubt that Sally, Mike, and everyone else, will get that website as the first result for that query on desktop, unless they specifically block English-language results.

But I couldn't help but think that Google really doesn't want me even going to the actual URL.

I've stated this before, but it bears repeating:

Google does not make money from you finding what you're looking for.

Google only makes money from you hunting for what you're looking for.

Same problem dating sites ran into.

That is a very interesting insight. To take your insight and to rephrase it a bit: any two sided marketplace that trades on the time that you are engaged with it is not served by giving you what you need right away.

Thought experiment on funding models for dating sites, assuming omniscience (exclusively regarding relationship longevity, and success rate of services):

- Monthly: Incentives variable, but generally low quality results (for slot machine psychology.)

- For each match/hookup/"real" relationship: Incentives results that produce relationships that last exactly long enough to be considered a match/hookup/"real" relationship.

- One-time upfront: Incentivize finding the best available candidate ASAP in order to save server costs.

- Monthly, cost propositional to success rate: Optimizing for some specific length of relationship that someone calculated to be optimal.

There are most likely other funding possibilities, and I've most likely misunderstood some rule of economics. Note that none of these optimize specifically for happiness in relationships, only for longevity.

Right, but if you're not finding what you're looking for, you may not look for it using the same tool in the future.

Repeating problematic incentives is fine. Ignoring counteracting incentives is misleading but popular in all debates.

Have you tried these Firefox addons:

Google search link fix https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/google-search...

Google Search URL Fixup https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/google-search...

It's not worth it. Just use DuckDuckGo or Searx.

startpage.com is pretty good to, been using that as my primary search engine for a while now.

Startpage was recently acquired by an ad company.

https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/di5rn3/startpage_i...

Startpage.com is now owned by an ad company. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21371577

I switched to DuckDuckGo a while ago, took a little while to get used but as it's my default search engine I've got used to it. The funny thing for me is now google's search results look strange to me as I've not kept up with all their "tweaks/changes".

I think best thing is switch default search to a new engine to get used to it, takes a little adjusting but worthwhile.

It's the same for me. I tried DDG maybe a year ago..and couldn't stand it, I found it too lousy. But now I'm trying again and this time it's slowly sticking in. Idk if it for better or my tolerance against Google decreased.

It did much the same. I let my Google cookies expire on Firefox when they broke Gmail on everything but Chrome. Google search results became even crappier and I got fed up enough to permanently switch to DDG.

I switched to DDG what seems like years ago (at least two, maybe more). I cannot fathom how horrible the UI&UX of Google search results are now. Stuff and things everywhere, ads hidden here and there, images, lists inside search results.

I just want a plain list of websites, thank you. If I want images or videos or news, I'll click that handy tab you provided for me...

I used ddg for a few weeks but the search results were quite poor. I had to search via Google every day anyway to find what I was looking for.

For what it’s worth, I switched to ddg a couple years ago and haven’t found the same thing. If I ever search on ddg and don’t get what I want I just append !g to the search and it sends me to google anyway.

Honestly at this point I'd be more inclined to add the Google domain set to PiHole and treat them as hostile. Except I would have to greenlight those damn CAPTCHAs.

Adding an addon feels more like gaslighting myself that they're not abusive really. Was bad enough when they "innovated" search by adding a JS redirect to every visible URL so what you saw wasn't what you got - just what you eventually got after they've logged and tracked you.

> Except I would have to greenlight those damn CAPTCHAs.

But you can't because they use google.com and gstatic.com.

I'd be more inclined to add the Google domain set to PiHole and treat them as hostile

I've been thinking about adding google.com to my hosts roundfile. Do you what other domains/IP ranges I should use?

Try gigablast.com Its a great alternative to google.

Ah good one, I did not realize they were still alive.

This is the last straw for me as well. I only used Google for search and never had an account anyway, so it's not even a hassle. Their results are slightly better than DuckDuckGo, but I'll take the productivity hit.

This is openly hostile to the foundation of the web. They aren't even bothering to pretend anymore.

well, not just the search engine has been acting weird.

Chrome doesn't show http/s or www in the address bar anymore. this made me incorrectly communicate a URL yesterday. for example www.news.ycombinator.com and news.ycombinator.com look exactly the same in Chrome's address bar. no idea why they made that decision...

just yesterday i noticed that hovering some hyperlinks doesn't reveal the linked URL at the bottom of the screen. so weird...

Have been experiencing the new Google search for several weeks now. It is absolutely horrible and severely confusing. For me too this is the last straw so I started migrating away from all Google products.

> It's already absolutely impossible to send someone a link to a pdf you've found through google, this would make it impossible to send any link.

Do you have an example of that behavior?

I wanted to know "what is a lure in counterintelligence?". Here is a link to the second search result, which happens to be a PDF:

https://fas.org/irp/eprint/ci-glossary.pdf

For the answer to the query, search for "dangle" in the PDF.

Doesn't your browser have a "Copy Address of Link" button in the context menu?

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