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Comment by wgx | Hacker News Reader

The OP raises a wider point:

  For the longest time google made good on their promise to keep their search page simple and easy to use.
  Now, bit by bit the search page is getting more filled up with cruft that you don't need and stuff that you do need gets removed.

I am getting a hunch (just a vague feeling) that we might be approaching a time where a new, simpler search experience would pick up a lot of users - maybe amongst us HN/early adopters?

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What’s that cruft you are talking about? Ignoring for a moment the cache link (I’m not sure how many people use it, maybe it’s worth testing whether Google could do with it being a bit more hidden) Google’s results page is very sparse and only provides truly useful tools.

I use Google’s ability to search for links from a specific time frame all the time, for example. I couldn’t do without it, it’s also accessible and minimalist. I also quite often switch between the different kinds of links I can search for.

I don’t see much on the results page one could reasonably remove. Exposing some of the advanced search options in the UI was the right step for Google to take. They didn’t pick everything, only the most important stuff. It’s all still very minimal.

For me, more than visual cruft (although I would argue there is more of that than before) - it's interaction cruft.

Big annoyances for me:

1. Auto suggesting and searching for words I didn't mean - common with technical phrases

2. Ignoring "quoted terms" and searching for them as an AND instead

3. Auto refreshing the results page as I modify my terms - it makes the experience slower, and I don't need to see results for half-typed words

There's probably more I can't bring to mind right now.

Google does not ignore quoted terms.

I for one love instant and suggestions.

Google does not ignore quoted terms.

Many times it seems like it does, to the extent that I've even gone back and replaced double-quotes with singles in hopes that the parser distinguishes literals.

Well, Google sensibly ignore quotes if it doesn’t find anything which is probably what happened to you. Would you rather Google to just display that it found nothing?

Yes.

Even when it can find something, it will mix in non-matching results with your matching results.

I can't scroll the page with the up/down arrows. It don't get why no one mentions this. Sometimes I'm afraid they're targeting just me. Is it really the right trade-off to steal the arrow key to scroll the results with a cursor? Who uses that feature? Leave my arrows alone.

Really? I find being able to go through the results using the arrows very useful. When I'm doing a Google search, I want to get to a web site, optimally without using the mouse. Having this feature routinely saves me from having to use the mouse, which is particularly nice on a laptop.

Having the arrow keys go directly to search results is very useful especially because it takes three or four times less presses to navigate that way than using tab. Besides, if I want to scroll, I can always use the space bar--it's faster anyhow.

Indeed. It is extremely annoying to have my arrow keys hijacked for no apparent reason. I know how to scroll a page and click on links, thank you very much. I tend to look through a page before scrolling, and use the arrows to scroll down and reveal more stuff.

Better still, my browser has that feature (ctrl+arrows to navigate links instead of scrolling). This feature of Google's brings zero benefit to me.

Yes yes yes yes yes.

(I know me-too comments are generally frowned on, and quite right too, but we have a senior Googler reading this thread and comment scores are invisible now...)

You can add a "+" before a quoted phrase to enforce a strict search, but share some of these same frustrations.

You can, but it doesn't always do what you expect: try +"society of spectacles"

True, and it is an annoying extra step.

Note to self: read article and comments thoroughly before commenting to avoid being redundant.

Let's not forget DuckDuckGo. I finally switched around when Google Instant came out, and never feel I'm missing anything.

Also, DuckDuckGo renders better in elinks (Google has a lot of header junk you have to scroll past).

I feel like I'm missing relevant and useful results a thousand times a day. More and more, DDG is just a !gateway to google.

That's concerning! I'd really appreciate if you could collect a set of specific examples and report at http://duckduckgo.com/feedback.html

That's how we improve fastest. But generally, the way we get results shouldn't result in a lot of stuff actually missing, which may speak to some bugs in there.

I've been noticing the same pattern -- the results from DDG aren't quite complete enough. Sometimes, it's just missing a few minor things, other times, I'll run a search query and there will be a major search result that I know is missing, that I can get in one of the top 5 results from Google.

Which sucks, because I hands-down full-on no-buts prefer DDG's interface to Google.

I hope I'm not being uncool here, but a while back I privately suggested mining the data from "!g" queries as a way to see where DDG wasn't returning the results that people expected. Is there a reason you can't do that? In my case at least, I usually start with DDG, and if I don't get what I'm expecting, then I use a "!g" -- so you'd have a nice little database of results to perform comparisons from.

Since we can't see vote counts anymore, I just want to chime in and say I agree. As a previous DDG user, I feel much the same way. And mining !g sounds like a great idea, though there might be some privacy issues to deal with (I'm imagining a dedicated DDG user who wants to Google his name).

I feel the same way. I keep trying to switch back to DDG and then run into results that just don't have what I want (and Google does).

I'm going to switch again and start sending DDG results that aren't helpful.

Thank you!

Actually, something else that bothers me, but I'm not sure there's much you can do about it. I really like the Chrome location-bar search completion thing. Most of the time, when I start searching something, I can see if my search terms are good by seeing whether it's been searched before. If it comes up with nothing, I know my search terms are probably not well-worded.

Not sure how you could provide for that, though.

Thx, duly noted. We are working on a suggestions feature though not sure it will address this particular issue.

I used DDG for about a month as my main search engine, I love the bang syntax and lots of other goodies, but for me down in Brazil DDG just responds 10-15x slower than Google -- so my commitment is that I will keep coming back to test for latency improvements until I can switch over completely.

I don't think that's strongly geography-related. I see the same thing from California with a very fast connection.

If you search for some things (try "stack overflow" or "red bull"), you seem to get a near-instant results for the thing judged most likely/relevant in a red box at the top of the page, then the "ordinary" results are loaded separately, I think in a separate javascript call.

They seem to have a some split architecture that keeps a few bits spooled up for quick retrieval, and say to heck with the rest. My first instinct would be that they're RAM-poor, and also wonder if, not being able to cache sufficiently in RAM, they're also being hamstrung by I/O performance on EC2.

Same here, but in Canada. DDG response time is a major showstopper. From a brief examination the issue appeared to be rooted in DNS response time, which is something that I wasn't able to fix by trying different DNS servers. So, regretfully I had to switch back to Google.

That's weird (on DNS). We have been having an issue with in Canada where one of the major ISPs is dropping packets on route. If you'd email us I'd love to investigate this further.

http://www.google.com/xhtml is a simple, less-cruft version. Unfortunately it doesn't have cache links.

Yes it does. Click options, a little dropdown appears with "Cached, Similar and Mobile formatted"

I couldn't find that, then I loaded it in Chrome and saw the "Options" links. Viewing it in Chrome also enables search suggestions.

I guess Google are sniffing for a WebKit useragent to detect a modern mobile browser.

Strange messing with user agents. The only one it shows an ad on is the "iPad" user agent.

If you want Googles search results, but without all the interface spaff, use Scroogle: https://ssl.scroogle.org/

Google accessibility search doesn't violate Google's TOS, yet gives the cleanest possible interface:

http://www.google.com/cse?cx=000183394137052953072%3Azc1orsc...

But scrolling seems to be somewhat broken.

Removing the "In Cache" link probably makes the user interface less cluttered. I used it a lot, and had to go look for it yesterday. From the official support thread:

http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Web+Search/thread?tid=...

But I don't have the user data that Google has. If less than 1% of the users account for the "in cache"-usage, the solution to require an extra click to get to it, is more sane, viewed in that light.

Shouldn't be too hard to make a browser plug-in / Greasemonkey script, so to add a link to:

https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:www.yc...

directly under search results.

I really dislike services like that. Searches cost real money to Google, using them through that is almost stealing, in my opinion. Just use a different search engine.

EDIT: I'd like if someone would reply if they disagree. Do you dispute that each search costs money to Google, or what?

Google clearly doesn't think that that Scroogle is a net minus to them, so why would you think so?

How do you know that they think that scroogle is not a net minus to them?

That they've been operating for a long time gives me that impression.

Or they just don't want to deal with the PR problems.

I feel no guilt. Google's main revenue stream is advertisements, which I will never click on. Yet, I still use Google continuously. Does that mean I'm stealing? Either way I'm getting something for free and not contributing to their revenue.

Hmm, I suppose that's true - I never click them either, if only because my eyes skip them unconsciously - but on the other hand, accepting $20 from my aunt or taking it from her wallet are very different, despite her ending up with the same money.

You're contributing data to them

This is absurd. It's like worrying about charging your laptop in Google's offices because it increases their electricity bill.

I wouldn't charge my laptop in anyone's office (or home) without asking them and receiving permission. I don't see what's absurd about this.

If you were sitting in Google's lobby (with permission) you would feel the need to ask permission before plugging in your laptop's power adapter?

Yes. But the situation is not analogous, so the answer is irrelevant.

there is no cache link in there...

Scroogles lack of cache link isn't relevant to the comment I replied to.

"I am getting a hunch (just a vague feeling) that we might be approaching a time where a new, simpler search experience would pick up a lot of users - maybe amongst us HN/early adopters?"

If it was a top level comment, you'd have a point.

I wonder whether they split test these types of things?

They probably do, but Google is unlikely to be immune to corporate pathologies, where for example it is politically impossible for some team to leave well enough alone. I suspect that could easily end up trumping split test results.

I believe they do a tonne of testing, this video from Google is a great illustration of their process:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J5RZOU6vK4Q

Isn't Google incredibly famous for their dedication to A/B testing?

A/B/N testing from what I heard. One of the examples I know of it that they split the users into about ten groups, and very slightly changed the blue hyperlink colour between them. They found that even a slight variation made a difference to the click-through rate.

I've had this same experience at work. I've complained about how ugly some features of our sites are on several occasions, only to learn that they are that way because the ugly (version/size/whatever) performed so much better than the others in our tests.

Other times the differences are subtle but increase the click-through rate by surprising amounts.

99% of the time I'm searching, I don't need to use the cache feature.

Thus, I think it makes sense that it's hidden in the preview flyout than having "cached" repeated over and over again. Makes for a much cleaner search results page.

It already is happening, look at ddg.gg

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