Hacker News Reader

Comment by flyGuyOnTheSly | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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.

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.

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.

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.

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".

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

I just want the 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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com