Google is Backtracking on its Controversial Desktop Search Results Redesign | Hacker News Reader

Google is Backtracking on its Controversial Desktop Search Results Redesign

theverge.com

32 pointsinfodocket12 comments

It feels like Google is just utterly incapable of ever saying they messed up, on anything. The statement here should have been really simple: "At Google, we're always listening to feedback. We want to make sure that ads are clearly marked, so we'll be experimenting with different favicon placements."

Instead, they go on this weird aside for 2/3rds of the official statement about how everyone actually really liked the changes on mobile, and all the initial desktop tests were great too, and site owners loved having their branding front and center.

If your users widely complain about something, to the point that you're forced to backtrack on the changes, then why do you think that any of them care about what your initial user tests showed? None of this qualification is necessary or relevant except to satisfy Google's weird need to always make sure that everybody knows the company is always right.

> Last week we updated the look of Search on desktop to mirror what’s been on mobile for months.

Like seriously, what is up with these weird jabs? I'm sorry that we didn't like your UI redesign, Google. Get over it and stop being so defensive over user feedback.

My take is a little more charitable. It looks to me like Google fell for the same fallacy that Microsoft did: thinking that what works well on mobile will also work on the desktop. That isn't actually true more often than not. The two forms are very, very different.

Or, and hear me out here, they’re saying this wasn’t just a random overnight change but one that’s been tested and has shown positive feedback on mobile over a long stretch of time.

It sounds like you just hate Google and put a negative spin on anything you read now. It would be healthy for you to step away and explore other options if the company being responsive to customer feedback is this agitating for you.

I, for one, like the changes so your whole aggressive take is trying to speak for me when you aren’t.

> "that’s been tested and has shown positive feedback on mobile over a long stretch of time."

This is a very smart argument for Google to have shifted to.

The thing is, this UI change is quite attractive. I 100% believe that they focus-grouped this, and that a vast majority of users agree that this looks nicer.

The "problem" with it, as you probably know, is that the redesign was done to make ads blend in with real results more effectively to further increase the no doubt already impressive share of searches that end in a user clicking an ad.

Users pretty much don't care about this. They generally click whatever's first and don't care that some retailer or whoever paid Google $1 for the privilege of appending ".com" to what the user typed and providing a link to be clicked.

The people speaking up are primarily:

* Geeks, who in general avoid ads because they know that they add no value and instead just get in the way of the actual results.

* People who have to pay Google due to this racket, who will have to pay slightly more now that even more users will conflate paid ads with results, meaning that having the best and most relevant website matters less and paying Google the most money and having a higher-clickthrough paid Google ad matters more.

It's simultaneously true that Google tested this and picked a design that nearly all of its users prefer, and that they're acting like greedy, craven racketeers here.

Well yeah, I'm pretty open about the fact that I trend towards an anti-Google bias. At the same time, I regularly defend Google when they do good things or get unfairly maligned -- especially recently with their proposals around the privacy budget, deprecating agent strings, 3rd-party cookie changes, better CORS defaults, and so on. Very few companies fall into a binary good or bad category, and like most companies, Google makes a mixture of both good and bad decisions.

One of my primary problems with Google today is that it's just frustrating to interact with them. It feels like pulling teeth to engage with the engineers or support on issue trackers/twitter/press releases, in a way that very much isn't the case for other companies. Generally, when I look at issues or feedback threads, I'm not thinking of them as a personal failing for the engineers at Google. I'm not trying to assign blame or start a debate.

There is a very weird combative element to Google feedback threads and official statements that isn't present in press releases and issue trackers for other companies.

You can see the same kinds of asides in Google's previous statements about Manifest V3 changes, about the Web Audio fiasco, about URL changes, about merging the Chrome/Google sign-in. There's a pattern of immediately taking what should be very brief, neutral statements about rollbacks or changes, and then quickly transitioning them to, "we need you to understand that this wasn't our fault, it was yours." I don't understand that attitude, it takes the conversation to an emotional place that isn't worth going to.

It doesn't need to be anyone's fault. Just say you're rolling back the changes and then publicly pat yourself on the back for listening to feedback.

The frustration you're seeing here isn't just an anti-Google bias, it's the result of years[0] of watching Google regularly respond poorly to feedback from people who just want to work together with companies in good faith to make the web better.

> to step away and explore other options

This isn't really an option to for people who care about the web as a platform, because open feedback and (occasionally) criticism is the only way to make your voice heard about the direction that the Internet should go.

In some cases we can just say, "Google will be Google" and advise people to use DuckDuckGo or Firefox instead. In many other cases, where Google is proposing new web standards, or changes that will significantly alter how ordinary people interact with browsers and websites, paying attention and offering feedback is just really important -- because Google's response to all of this criticism very often boils down to, "you should have complained sooner, it's too late to change now."

[0]: https://danshumway.com/blog/chrome-autoplay

TBH, I quite liked the changes (a more clear and easy to read indicator of what the site was seems like an improvement). Adblock deals with the ads regardless of how similar they look.

> a more clear and easy to read indicator of what the site was seems like an improvement

Interesting. I found the new way to be less clear and easy to read...

I am more bothered about the hiding of the URL to some weird breadcrumb-y structure than the showing (now re-hiding?) of the favicon. Gave DDG a try and don't see myself switching back.

Yes, I find this more bothersome than the ads blending into the search results as well. But Google has been very vocal about their desire to hide important things like URLs from users, so that wasn't a surprise.

It seems the A/B testing for this has morphed over to 'what dark patterns can we ultimately get away with?'

Some of the excellent points Kent Beck makes in this video about leaving Facebook seem to resonate here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fH4gqsIYzyE

What is there to iterate? Just go back in Google's history and use the design from 2007.

The main reason everyone likes Google is clean design: as it was from the start, blue links and black text on a white background. It always had the simple-HTML feel, making it light and fast, which is what really mattered. But here they are, trying to insert more images and assets into every page load...

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