Comment by maaaats | Hacker News Reader

Comment by maaaats | Hacker News Reader

Switched last week. Fed up by how Google gives a 90s-looking wap site when using Firefox for Android. I added an extension that switches my user agent just for google.com to get around it, but instead most results are then AMP links. And opening AMP-links hosted on google in firefox gives you a page that you cannot scroll.

Almost wonder if they're doing it on purpose.

Haven't used ddg long enough to comment on the quality. But at least google for Norwegian results have declined lately. Many results are just machine-translated spam on autogenerated blogs.

For instance, last week I googled "pes anserinus bursitt", and one of the top results is http:// bumyjaki .tk/arrestere/pes-anserinus-bursitt.html (don't open it). The preview is broken Norwegian, and clicking it I get popovers saying I've won stuff, and firefox asks if I want to enable vibration, and I'm instantly redirected to more spam. How the f is that so high, google? And it's prominent on lots of stuff I search.

Hi Mats (or do you prefer Matsemann?),

I am an engineer on Google Search.

Sorry to hear about your experiences; I would like to better understand the issues that you're seeing and reproduce them on my end, so that I can file detailed bug reports for the folks working on those features. I would appreciate your help if you're open to that.

First, I compared Firefox on Android with Chrome on Android for a few queries and they seem to get very similar results (but we are likely using different queries). Would you be able to provide some sample queries where Firefox was receiving the results that led you to change its user agent and get different results?

I also visited several AMP pages on Firefox from Google search results (Reddit and BBC) and they were all scrollable, so it's likely that we're looking at different sites as well. Can you tell me which sites' AMP pages were non-scrollable for you?

Regarding the poor results for Norwegian searches: I wasn't getting the problematic URL for this query; will try reproducing this again later. If you have any other search queries for which the Norwegian results are bad (or have been declining in quality over time), if you're able, please share them with me as well: either here, or if you prefer, you can find me on Twitter and LinkedIn.

Thanks in advance!

Yeah Google was getting as bad as Yahoo was in the 90s before I switched. I just think they’re in the phase of trying to suck as much money as possible out of each search.

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