Google Images Restored
github.com
github.com
This makes me wonder if there is some structure similar to a corporation which would maximise something besides profit, without either being out-competed by a corporation or turning into one.
A private company, however structured, can define out-competing however its owners want to so long as it can pay its bills and employees.
The presumption that someone in theory has access to lots of information and therefore is making the best or even good decisions on some dimensions by virtue of the their access to data is poorly considered. It is entirely possible to be smart and possessed of good data and still use it poorly. People are flawed so companies made of of people are also flawed.
Google image search is a poor product not worth using compared to bing.
My feeling about its utility isn't a scientific statement its purely anecdotal but at least it represents a singular actual and honest viewpoint.
You are free if you liked to express the alternative perspective that the changes are for the better for users or for google and this would be an equally honest anecdote even if we disagree.
The only intellectually dishonest viewpoint is to assert without detail or analysis that its good along some dimension because it is AB tested.
Google image search is mediocre for the following reasons
- They removed the button to actually go TO the image in response to a lawsuit with Getty on the theory that somehow making people go through an extra step would stop people from using their built in browser tools to download images.
- When you go to the page where the image is supposed to be you may actually find yourself on a page only vaguely related to the exact image. Maybe it WAS found on the front page of some infinite scroll through crap but the desired image is nowhere to be found when you click through and get whatever new crap replaced it on the front page.
- Alternatively you get served a smaller sized version of the image.
- Not only are the filters not shown by default in google image search vs bing in mobile firefox google opted to disable that functionality meaning you had to load the slower desktop version of google for the tools to filter by date or other details to show up. This wasn't a bug it was a deliberate design decision to attack a competitor that they ultimately reversed later.
- Google image search seems to deliver subjectively worse image search results. I realize this is hard to quantify.
- On the broader google search issues you actually need an extension to be able to right click on a link and copy the url to share it because otherwise you get something like this
https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&c...
instead of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/This_is_a_test
It's pretty amazing to break sharing a damn link. The addon to fix this requires worrisome permissions to the data for google.com
Also the search "this is a test" without adblock doesn't show any of the textual results on the entire screen on a 24" 1080p monitor. Screen 1 and 2 are a video, exhortations to buy the song, people also search for videos and finally some actual results on screen 3.
Google is basically 90s Lycos with lots of extra money and reach. Everything google does other than ads and chrome ranges from acceptable to just canceled. They do lots of things OK but nothing excellent.
And reverse image search still doesn't work unless you spoof your user agent as mobile Chrome.
The problem with that is if they introduce a bug that requires you to refresh the page more often. All they'd see is an up-tick in "engagement" and keep the change with the bug. I think it happened to me with Facebook page notifications and not being able to clear them properly, at least on Firefox...
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/02/internet-rages-after...
I guess they get to pass the buck to the video uploaders who have asserted (truthfully or not) that they have a right to upload whatever they're uploading and that they "grant to YouTube a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, sublicensable and transferable license to use that Content (including to reproduce, distribute, prepare derivative works, display and perform it) in connection with the Service and YouTube’s (and its successors' and Affiliates') business"
I think that’s mainly because we have UI/UX as a dedicated function now. It’s a job that seems to attract people that don’t know how software _works_. This results in “uncanny” UX that looks similar enough but just doesn’t work the way it should.
Maybe I’m just getting old though!
Overall "betterness" is subjective, but speaking as someone who uses a computer as a tool I can honestly say I'd prefer it to function pragmatically than look pretty, if the prettiness requires sacrificing of pragmatism in some way.
A good ui/ux specialist will be interested in reducing error rates and improving ease of discovery and use through affordances and good organization of information and actions. Obviously other business interest may conflict with those goals but those same interests are capable of corrupting engineering as well.
And I don't think ui/ux work is as recent as this is all making it sound. Perhaps it is more common now even for orgs where their bread and butter isn't software but ultimately making tools useful and safe and accessible predates software entirely.
As evidenced by the discussion here, there seems to be far more of the former than the latter.
When I am faced with the challenge of designing an interaction in software, I always try to make it fit established patterns.
Now I'm working with a UX expert. The interaction designs I receive are just not right. They are not intuitive. I am rather disappointed. My impression is that this expert is simply not an expert PC user. Of course, that's N=1 as far as my professional work is concerned.
Furthermore, in the last… 12-15 years, more and more software seems to change just for the sake of change. My personal opinion is that this is because of designers trying to justify their existence.
So many of the complaints about the dominance of seemingly-incompetent UX professionals really boil down to failure to consume one's own dog food. The UX pros are not incompetent at UX design, but they are unfamiliar with the tasks that the program will ultimately be used for, and that's even worse.
This phenomenon is more widespread than most people realize, even here. If you buy a new Porsche 911 today, you'll find that the garage-door opener button has been moved to a touchscreen menu. People who take a bus to work are now designing Porsches, in other words. It's only going to get worse from here.
Yes, there is flawed design: that covers most design, in the same way there is flawed programming, which covers most programming, and flawed approaches to business which covers most business, and so on.
[edit] the feeling I get from the threads here is that many commenters don't get that most design involves huge tradeoffs, same as programming. Design training is not "make a pretty thing" (which is what many commenters seem to be dismissively suggesting, which is actively offensive), Dribbble is really not reflective of actual design, and much of what you see is surface driven by designers having to find tradeoffs to deal with management edicts/commercial goals/technical limitations that may conflict with otherwise good design
The programs used to ask for a file name before saving it somewhere. Programs with modern UI/UX just save the file to a random place and then you have to search it.
The browser saves it to Downloads, or to the Desktop, or perhaps to the home folder.
The GNOME screenshot tool saves it to the home folder
The GNOME audiorecorder saves it to somewhere else
The the control center... changing audio source - fine motor skills required if you ever find how. Long pressing things means its faster to do things from settigns.
My pet peeve is macos Photos. Forget ever watching your videos for which storage you pay. It just won’t play until you click edit which is gonna just crash app about 10% of time. If it doesn’t it takes 5 minutes to download at like 10mbps.
I would even consider it by design - management doesn't want apps to be deleted so easily. It's a subtle nudge for a user to accumulate apps, which slowly increase and eat up disk space.
The justification is that if no one deletes apps often, the button to do so should be hidden away, so users don't "accidentally" delete an app. And the designers are just a cog in the wheel - they listen to the objective given to them by management and do exactly that.
This is why you see great designs from apps that are written/made by a single person, or from a small team that cares. One such example is IDEs like Intellij - the UI/UX design is very much geared towards developers (by developers).
Everyone has an opinion on design, including stakeholders and management who their jobs depend on. I think all the engineers here don't realise the privilege of having their own impenetrable domain.
On macOS you can usually just drag the .app file to the Trash.
We live in a world of Frankenstein UIs and it's not the designer's fault what ends up on your screen.
If you want to make a historical comparison, I'd argue that it's more likely to be in the way of working of today vs back then when UI design would get locked in much more _or_ get truly designed along the way with the product needs.
That's why "we live in a world of Frankenstein UIs". We don't need "utopic designs" but rather consistency. Both in visual language and interaction design.
There are a few notable exceptions like HMIs on industrial machines or a car's entertainment system.
Of course, incorrectly implemented design exists, too. No doubt about that.
I sincerely feel that the discipline of building user interfaces is long lost and perhaps never to come back. From car dashboards to loud typography, the whole field is regressing. Minimalism, too much white space, infantilization of users, design trends, loss of predictability, etc. are all symptoms of this.
There are still some gems that I find here and there: https://neil.computer/notes/the-design-of-diskprices-com/
Users are not customers now, they are cattle. You farm their attention and don't care about enabling them.
https://www.imgur.com/DcL05OA.gif
(This could be a subset of infantilization, since this art style seems to come from books for toddlers.)
If everyone hated this and considered it "corporate," it wouldn't be the one used by some of the animation studios that create the most popular content (e.g. Kurzgesagt).
While the uncluttered design for something someone only uses a couple times might be fine to avoid overwhelming someone. If you use it daily and even multiple times a day that can make it harder to use.
It also remind me something i read about a ticket kiosk for some transit system. They updated the kiosk with simpler interface to select various things. While effective for infrequent riders, people who would purchase tickets daily found it much slower because the old kiosk allowed them to type in codes they memorized.
Kurzgesagt mentions on its patreon that they used to spend on average 150 hours on each episode and are now at up to 500. While the style stayed mostly the same I think there is now also a lot more going on visually than in the early videos.
"Here we love people, even if they have enormous hands!" https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EbWYR4lWkAEOgAo.jpg
"I don't care if you're white, brown, black, orange, or purple!" https://eyeondesign.aiga.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/Aleg...
This is very low on my list of grievances though. I like those vector characters quite a bit more than the stock photos they replace.
I'd say that the "flat" trend was started by Microsoft with Windows Mobile and Windows 8. Apple and Google followed (for once Apple didn't start the trend). I liked it at the time, maybe for the novelty, but it quickly faded. Still I understand why people may like it.
Never have I ever heard of a user wanting a unified experience. I have heard plenty of designers though.
What about usability? What about accessibility?
Nope.
Those two tend to be related. It really angers me every time I see a huge amount of whitespace for no good reason, but then most of the functionality is hidden behind a dropdown menu whose equally stupid '...' indicator only shows up when you happen to hover over it. WTF.
Back when UIs were still good, things would usually be hidden only if there wasn't enough space. You could see almost everything you needed at a glance. The "designers" dismiss that as "messy" and "clutter", which is frankly absurd --- something functional is not going to look "clean", much like a machine shop that's in active use: Tools and parts are laid out everywhere, because the user needs access to them.
That diskprices.com site is great. Craigslist is another one that comes to mind. The only thing it's missing is a "submit" button for those who have JS disabled... otherwise it's a perfect example of extremely functional design that wasn't ruined by "UI/UX designers".
My wife and I had this conversation the other day. There are things in iOS you only get or see if you long press. How the hell are you to discover these things?
Sometimes by accident, sometimes from hearing about it from others, sometimes from searching on Google for how to do something.
I miss the days when software actually came with very detailed documentation for the user. They had their hidden features too, but at least there was documentation for them.
I hate it.
There's nothing you can do. Computing stopped being about expert users the minute the rest of the world got online. Now the giants control all the devices, platforms, and mindshare. They will never cater to you. Informed users aren't the ones clicking the ads or buying the things as intended.
We've crossed into the gravity well of user hostility, and there's no longer any escape.
I hate it too.
I spent several minutes bashing around, double tapping, longpress, force press, went into settings to look for toggles. Had to google it eventually. Turns out you do this by swiping left. And i had actually tried to swipe sideways before, but only right.
Once you know it it's actually very convenient, but discovering it is near impossible.
The same way power users discover e.g. keyboard shortcuts, I imagine.
At least keyboard shortcuts are visible directly in the menus, for both Windows and Mac.
Of course, hiding everything behind that is not good, but when I look at apps like FairMail that try to show you what you can do directly, it just gets very confusing and the space left for the actual content becomes miniscule.
I think it's good design to hide certain functions behind "..." - For example, I can't tell you the number of times I've accidentally flagged a post on HN just because my finger accidentally touched my phone or because I was trying to click the comments link a few pixels away (which is the feature that people want to access on 95% of clicks that occur in that region). If I had to hit "..." first, it would never happen because I would have just accidentally opened a menu. (And if you flag something, you may never be able to unflag it because it loses ranking and appears at another position somewhere on the site or disappears entirely).
That said, I disagree with its FAQ claiming whitespace and color wouldn't help. It'd be a lot easier to actually read the data with a light alternating row color, slightly more vertical spacing, and not styling the links as a wall of underlined blue text.
One of the best designed products I've ever used is the TiVo DVR. We first got one in 1999, the year it came out. I loved it, but realized how well it was designed when I started using other DVRs in the mid 2000s. As a prime example, to delete an episode on a TiVo required pressing one button. On another DVR I had it was six button presses! It was like this for countless things. It was obvious the folks at TiVo had thought long and hard about usability and design and other manufacturers couldn't care less.
Now imagine if TiVo made their remote a rectangular cuboid with hard edges, and all the buttons were hard plastic squares that were all the same color. It would still be much easier for me to delete an episode on the TiVo than on other DVRs, but holding and using the remote would not be a positive experience. Putting some work into the remote so it fits in your hands, the buttons are nice to press, and color and shape of buttons helps you find the button you want would make it so much better (thankfully they did).
Diskprices is similar to the hypothetical TiVo with a crappy remote. Someone worked hard on some aspects of design and usability, but out of either ignorance or arrogance ignored the rest of the aspects.
Good design has both functionality and form.
Design is not only about being as useful as possible, but also to present something that is beautiful - it is easier to build a relationship with a user when they are compelled to enjoy a product more due to its visual appeal.
I think a lot of developers seem oblivious to the power of aesthetics because they are so ardently in the functionality camp. The density of information on DiskPrices, whist great for a power user, would probably be daunting and overloading for the average user and whilst it has a retro vibe, is catering to a niche - people technical enough to be looking at disk prices.
Functional, high visibility, accessibility, discoverability. There's no bullshit, no hidden anything, it's true minimalism and 100% honest. This is what actual good design looks like. A dark mode would be nice, though.
Google Search on mobile browsers is horrible too. When having a typo in the search terms and trying to fix it, the search field moves to the top of the screen and it constantly happens that I click on the second or third entry in the list of suggested searches.
I also have issues with GBoard, which cause tons of typing errors. My last iPhone was an iPhone 3G and I recall it having a much better keyboard many years ago than Google currently has.
It's almost as it was deliberate to artificially increase certain click KPI's or force users to use the phone's search bar or autocorrect function.
I believe, decision makers at Google are too far away from the products, and while managers might have developed good soft skills they massively lack practical knowledge. Google would do good hiring more engineers and less academics and managers.
It's been the only offline youtube solution I've found.
It's odd, though, I watch much more youtube than Netflix at the moment, but since all the stuff on youtube is available anyway, the monthly subscription still feels too expensive, despite being cheaper than Netflix. I wish they would unbundle their music offering, which I have no interest in, but presumably that's precisely why they won't unbundle.
I find that the rabbit holes I went on years ago were much more interesting than the content I see on youtube now, and I don't think it's that the content is getting worse.
And I am very, very pissed off at the neglect of Google Classroom's UI. I wish they had (and would still) stay out of education, it's so irresponsible to half-ass it like they have.
Google Classroom's UI problems have got to be negatively impacting kids' schooling. It's unethical.
I'm glad things like this exist, but so sad that they need to.
EDIT: and as one commenter astutely pointed out, fuck Pintrest too, a perfect example of the hubris of SEO focused trashes with no morals or sense of personal responsibility; degrading the commons for their own gain
EDIT: I hadn't realized that Getty is the reason for the removal of the view image button! I stand by my comment in general, however I do think removing that button is crappy.
EDIT: They also fraudulently claim to own public domain photos and legally threaten people who use them, demanding payment.
[0] https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/3001353/Filed-Com...
Are you responding to someone else? Wrong thread? Because I haven't expressed that sentiment here.
> you inherently also have to believe Getty should be allowed to take public domain photos (or someone else's photos) and sell them.
Are you responding to someone else? Wrong thread? Because I never said they shouldn't be allowed to profit off public domain photos.
There is profit, and then there's just fucking people over. $1000 for a photo they didn't take and didn't pay for is just disgusting. All it does is restrict access to historical photos to 99% of the world, allowing only the very rich access to this window into our past.
It's definitely not OK that they billed the photographer who took the public domain photos for using them on her own site. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carol_M._Highsmith#Getty_Image...
That being said, anything published on the web should be free. E.g. if some don't want their image to be used, they should not publish it publicly in the first place.
I mean, maybe you can sue your friend later on, but that's between you and him.
All that matters to me is that you've used my IP without my permision.
I imagine they automate copyright takedown notices, and there was a bug somewhere. It's not great, but I don't believe it was malice.
Disney focused copyright laws have nothing to do with the development of modern civilization. There is plenty of case where overly tight licensing has proven detrimental to a technology.
I'd say society wouldn't change much if copyright were abolished. Probably for the better. Claiming authorship should still be protected in my opinion, see next point.
Trademark law gives some nice protections to consumers, so I'd vote for that one to stay.
Patent law? Ahhahaha where do I begin? To think that we rely on that crutch to develop medication makes my head hurt.
As a matter of fact, programming already works as if IP law didn't exist from the point of view of many programmers.I'm hired by a company to produce a product, in exchange for a salary. I don't know any IP that I might produce as a result of my work. I'm simply paid for my time. Could (as an example) novel writers be payed for the time spent writing a book rather than as a function of the sales of their books? I see not logistical reason why not. Maybe the market won't bear many writers under those conditions... But they would still exist, right?
Note: I think Trademark law is really good. And patents have issues but they are mostly good. I'm only talking about copyright here. I'm not entirely against the concept of IP, but I do think copyright law is not nearly as critical as it's made out to be. Maybe the optimal solution is weak copyright rather than no copyright, but I think it's important to understand that no copyright is not as crazy as it sounds.
Also, for most of human history, artists were funded by doing commissions. People wouldn't create music and movies for their fans, they would do it for the millionaires who could afford it, a la Once Upon a Time in Shaolin.
As for programming, maybe you don't care about your IP, but your company sure does. How would your company be funded if anybody could download its product? A few products might be able to survive just by being developed just for government contracts or for other large companies, but any care for ordinary consumers would be gone. And there is no similar market for books. Sure you could set up a book-writing company like you could now but where would the money for those salaries come from? No one will pay the company for a book they can download for free more easily.
> As for programming, maybe you don't care about your IP, but your company sure does.
I don't think they do. The software I write is used by workers in my company's warehouse. It's valuable because it makes their job easier. Sure, we don't give the software away, but we also don't sell it. We would lose very little if we released it for free. I know this doesn't apply to all software, but it applies to a sizable amount of it. It would be interesting to measure which fraction of time spent writing software is for projects like this, I don't know how to even begin estimating it.
> Sure you could set up a book-writing company like you could now but where would the money for those salaries come from?
Some ideas, in no particular order. Asa I said before, maybe reduces the amount of books that get written, but can't say for sure.
-Preorders. The publisher commits to only releasing a book once it has received X orders for it. GMT does this for boardgames.
-Patreon-like model, or plain subscriptions. Customers commit to paying for whatever is released, or just pay periodically and the publisher/author commits to releasing stuff that makes customers happy.
-Making nice editions: this could get very competitive, but surely a publisher who makes nice editions would still sell them. The publisher would be incentivized to pay popular authors to create books so it has more stuff to sell, even if other people could make other editions.
But why we need to add another 70 years is a mystery to me. How does that encourage creativity and innovation?
If you sell me an antique chair, I'm free to upcycle it, transform it into something new, and sell it on. I'm free to examine it and build an exact replica. I can give my chair to whomever I want and let any number of strangers sit on it. Such is the nature of property.
If you sell me a song, I must keep it in your proprietary system, leave the DRM intact, and definitely never even think about remixing it and selling my derived works.
IP is not property, it's a distinct beast of its own. It can't be "stolen" in the traditional sense, and it seems it can't really be bought or sold either.
The new UI is actually slightly better with the image view on the side instead of taking up the center of the screen, since we have widescreens everywhere.
But both are worse than classic google images, which was from when? 2015? 2013?.
It's hidden under "Tools."
I have nothing against sites trying to make money. But sometimes I want to see just the stuff that is straight out there and isn’t wrapped up in dark patterns.
But Bing has unfortunately been going downhill, too. It does some double redirect that breaks the back button, and it often appears to be stuck. And its ads are intrusive. But the worst thing is how they inserted this thing called "Shop for similar", which is a completely useless widget inserted above the "similar images" sidebar widget. It's weirdly dissonant when looking at, say, a photo of people in immigrant detention centers and being offered sweaters similar to those in the photo.
The problem is as always, it is easier to break things than it is to make things.
Can't fathom how Getty was able to make them remove the "view image" button. Thanks copyright.
I wrote a windows app that lets you quickly search google images and copy the original image to your clipboard for ease of use when chatting or if you need to paste a quick image into a document you are working on. It's GPL-3 in GitHub:
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2018/07/styli...
The threat isn't nonexistent and having the source doesn't help as much as you might imagine. Most people can't read the source in any meaningful way and those that can might still trivially miss something malicious. In practice its only as safe as the meaningful analysis by skilled hands makes it in actuality. Realistically you would be lucky if someone notices several months after it started siphoning off your data and only if its egregious enough to get it kicked off of the extensions store.
See, far wanderer, confronted with raw, programmatic instruction in the most pure form. A hesitation, troubled to the terms that this license affirms. By a voyage to explore the mechanism and ponder the making. Ta da! The remedy: an egress without risk.
Leave No Trace via seven principles:
0. Modify language in advance. Attach the Jollo LNT license with copies to distribute.
1. Not responsible for negligent coding of the program.
2. Not sympathetic for negligent coding of the program.
3. No permission to modify it under any circumstance.
4. No permission to distribute under any circumstance.
5. Respect the programmatic instructions.
6. (Do) not interfere with the harmony of a friendship.
Edit: jollo.org is kind of trippy.
Not complaining, I love using the PirateBay to steal. I also don't makeup reasons I do it. It's for theft, because getting something of value for free feels good.
Do you really expect me to believe your are an archivist using a Google Image interface to get images to then wait the ~70 years of copyright to use them?
These, "Piratebay has Linux torrents", or "a hash isn't copyright" arguments don't hold up in a court and don't hold up with mates at the bar.
We are an abstract society, it's why we no longer live like animals. We are right now having to decide what things like Facebook and Twitter really are, beyond the technical they are internet companies.
This add-on is great, and should not be illegal in any free society, but forcing Google to change was a different story.
I'm not claiming to be.
> These, "Piratebay has Linux torrents", or "a hash isn't copyright" arguments don't hold up in a court and don't hold up with mates at the bar.
I don't know people who say any of that.
> We are an abstract society, it's why we no longer live like animals. We are right now having to decide what things like Facebook and Twitter really are, beyond the technical they are internet companies.
You speak in riddles.
> This add-on is great, and should not be illegal in any free society, but forcing Google to change was a different story.
So what's the story?
I love this too. I steal the mountain air when I hit the trails, I steal the sounds of nearby conversations, and I steal the memories of songs I've heard. Sometimes a friend will sing me something, and I steal that too. I play my music loud sometimes, and I hope those around me steal it.
I've stolen things at my job from my coworkers, little ideas that belong to my company. They'll breed and have child ideas, stolen children, which I will make available for theft by others down the road.
I even stole your comment; it had a little value, in its way. I won't pay you for it, even if you ask. In fact, if you ever write something and seal it away behind copyright, I can't promise I won't read it at a library in the future; you wouldn't see a dime.
Finally: If anybody ever asks me for something I know, or something I am capable of reciting--be it music, poetry, fiction, whatever--I will help them steal it by repeating it. I will not turn them away out of some unnatural commitment to the idea that all valuable information has an owner who must "get theirs" in advance of any transfer.