Google pays ‘enormous’ sums to maintain search-engine dominance, DOJ says | Hacker News Reader

Google pays ‘enormous’ sums to maintain search-engine dominance, DOJ says

bloomberg.com

404 pointshelsinkiandrew532 comments

Google does this yet lies about their searches to maintain an illusion of competence.

For example, you can type in something like "purpose of life" and it will say it has 2 billion results, yet if you try to go to result 500, you can't, it will stop at 400, then change the number to 400 results only on the last page.

This happens for every query. Google lies about the astronomical number of search results, then only shows a few hundred at most.

Could the number be valid from indexing standpoint but irrelevant search results are deemed unworthy of display to user? Unworthy + maybe costly on back-end side e.g. because infrequently accessed data is in cold storage?

That's exactly what it is. Each page is more expensive to serve than the last (it is basically joining a bunch of indexes for each term and then skipping the first N). At some number of pages they drew a line and decided that the value of these pages isn't worth the cost (and DoS vulnerability) to serve them.

Nevertheless, it's a dark pattern.

They should make it clear to the user how many results are available to them.

They are "available". Just the way to get there isn't by going through the result pages but by refining your search.

It made sense back then when you could tell Google the exact words that you are looking for. But now that Google drops random words from our query, it's not exactly easy to refine the search query.

> At some number of pages they drew a line and decided that the value of these pages isn't worth the cost (and DoS vulnerability) to serve them.

They have literally one job.

To serve you the 5 millionth search result for "funny"? Unless you are going to directly pay for that server cost it just doesn't make sense, and it is such a rare use case that it doesn't even make sense for them to give you that option. They have to cut you off somewhere. When is the last time you legitimately wanted the 401th page of the search results? It will be more efficent for both you and Google if you instead refine your search query than paging through the results forever.

Pro tip. Never reply to someone who uses "literally" incorrectly.

A definition of literally is literally one that is "not literally true", thus using literally in this case is literally correct

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/literally

> is literally one that

Does this literally mean not literally?

It is literally clear as literal mud

I was thinking this too. Not to claim google is trustworthy, but pagination with large search result sets can be tricky when you go back really far if the queries to fetch them are expensive. The count is probably a different system from the actual results, and the count switching may just be how they handle the 0.000000001% of people who try going to page 400. So the lie may not be how high the number is, but the expectation of being able to see all the results.

That would mean that the lie is that they show a completely irrelevant number which paints Google as a very extensive and comprehensive search engine while hiding the relevant number which is always radically smaller.

> the expectation of being able to see all the results.

Which would not exist if Google weren't pushing this massive mystery number that we're currently, in this thread, only speculating about what it could be referring to. This expectation could be easily solved by showing the number of results that Google is planning to return to the user, and tossing out the number that means nothing to anyone.

> So the lie may not be how high the number is, but the expectation of being able to see all the results.

The slight twist is that you can see all of the results. Just not by paging. You can refine your query to see them all.

I'm sure the number is just an estimation, but it does have some value.

This comment could have been written in 1998. I think by now most people know how the result estimates work (i.e. not at all).

"most people" take the top results of a google search as gospel.

wow, never noticed that before.

This is fraudulent marketing, but I’ve seen bing do this as well

Bing is worse in that it makes it seem like you can go to e.g. page 100 and will say stuff like "1,000-1,006 of 659,000,000 results", but it's really showing you the results from page 5. Then, for example, in page 5, 6, 7, etc. you can see the same results between them, just shuffled around. You can't even tell how many results you're really getting.

Gawd, the same results shuffled to different positions on every different page of results, and how they make ads and sponsored "results" almost impossible to distinguish... It's truly terrible.

This is mostly a technical limitation and has been placed since 1998. 99.99% of search queries won't go beyond result 100 then what's the point of showing the result 10000000 other than technological demonstration?

It's called "showing an accurate representation of reality"

Ya know, that whole thing indexes are for by definition.

Oh, but if they did that they wouldn't have a convenient way to implement dropping something from public view either, so there's that.

Technical limitation or not, it is still a lie.

It's not a lie. "There are eleventy badillion results" is a true statement, not a promise to show you all of them.

By that same logic, businesses can advertise "sale, many items 90% off" but when you show up, nothing is 90% off, and you could argue that the business only claimed that the items existed, they never said they would actually sell it to you.

I'd be surprised if this didn't actually happen.

There are laws (at least in the US) about advertising sales that prevent it from happening.

Except that the word "sale" literally means that you can buy something.

Similarly I think most would expect result to imply retrievability.

How so? It makes perfect sense to say "there are 1 million results but you can only access 1,000 of them" but it's complete nonsense to say "we are selling 1 million items but we are only selling 1,000 of them."

> It makes perfect sense to say "there are 1 million results but you can only access 1,000 of them"

Except that's _not_ what Google is saying. Google is saying there are 1 million results and won't tell you that you can only access the first N.

Where do you see Google's implied or explicit promise to provide with you every result they've found?

> Where do you see Google's implied promise to provide with you every result

The implied promise is the button that says "Search".

1. It's a search engine. Searching is useless if it doesn't provide results.

2. Searching with other tools works. Use `grep` or your computer's local search feature and it will give you all of the results.

3. If I go through my old email, I can download literally every email. I can search literally every email, for hundreds of thousands of email.

> Searching is useless if it doesn't provide results.

True. But that's not the question, is it? The question is whether only giving you the "first" N of the results makes it useless, or something else...

Nobody, I think, is contesting, that search in some contexts is always expected to provide you with access to everything that is found. The issue is whether that can be expected to apply to a case where 10M results are found, and if not, what the cutoff point ought to be ...

> > > Where do you see Google's implied promise to provide with you every result

> > The implied promise is the button that says "Search".

> True. But that's not the question, is it?

You wanna stop moving the goalposts?

I will if you will. You said:

> Searching is useless if it doesn't provide results.

but nobody has suggested that Google doesn't provide any results.

would you say it's at least misleading to say that there are 10 billion results? If not, how far would it have to go before you would consider it misleading?

i would call it a tease. i don't (currently) have any particular reason to disbelieve the result count. but under some circumstances i'd be pissed that google would not show me more than 500.

Imagine you search Amazon for “blue baseball cap”, they say they found 1,234 items and then you could only see and purchase 10… Why say you have 10,000,000 search results if you only intend to show 100? What’s the use of the number 10,000,000? To inspire a sense of awe in the user, that you then cannot make good on? To inform the user on some technicality? To me this feels like Google is selling a car that can technically drive 250 km/h but is limited at 150 km/h, and then advertising it as “Do you love driving 250 km/h? Then buy the Google car!”

Actually, if the number actually meant something I would find it very useful.

If google said there were actually just 1234 results for my search, my attitude towards checking things much further down the list would be quite different than if it said there are 123,456,789 results. With a number like that, I know that "deep searching" is likely to be fruitless, which is paradoxical but so is life.

The problem is that I'm not convinced that the result count actually means what we generally think it does.

You can certainly buy things at this store, and there are certainly things for sale at 90% off. The things that are 90% off are at other stores, though, and this store can't be blamed for your assumptions.

aha! Sale means SOMEONE can buy something. Not necessarily you! Under the hood, it means that only relatives of the store owner can actually purchase it. Gotcha! You shoulda read the fine print more closely!

We wouldn't tolerate a business advertising "up to 90% off" if there doesn't exist at least one item that is 90% off. Businesses can't point to an item that is 30% off and claim that 30% off is a subset of 90% off.

You could test that hypothesis by publishing some long hash on several hundred pages, then search for it.

I believe you can no longer google hash values? It used to work years ago but I just searched for "6867d9167683fb8f42558a81ad107f5b" and got zero results. That is the MD5 hash for "asd3" and this is short enough that it should be on one of those MD5 web pages...

Update: Wow, zero results for "2585ecdb9a753ca54a96fae62bfda433", the MD5 hash of "r68". They must be filtering them out on purpose.

Update 2: Googling "2585ecdb9a753ca54a96fae62bfda433" now turns up this exact 10 minute old comment, so your approach might work if the hash is embedded within "real" content.

When I search for "How do elephants know what time it is", and Google tells me there are "Ungefähr 429.000.000 Ergebnisse" (about 429 million results), what is Google actually telling me?

There are 429,000,000 pages that are related to my search? There are 4.29x10^8 pages that have, what, one or more of those words on them?

Seems more like a lie than like the truth.

In the 53 mins since you checked, google has apparently found another 4.3M results for this query :)

How is this not a modern flavor of bait and switch?

If I ran a store with a 10 digit inventory of tools and advertised that, but refused to offer more than a tiny fraction of them because it was too hard to offer more, what do you call that?

If you ran a store, you probably would not have a billion items in your inventory, and if you did, not all of them would really be available at any one time. And most likely your web page wouldn't be able to show them all, either.

See: Metaphors

The replies on this thread illustrate why "bike shedding" is an evergreen [1].

Maybe they leave that in the results so people will focus on trivia, instead of antitrust and other issues that actually matter. "Look! Over there! They're claiming there are 9 billion answers and you can't see them all."

Clever.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_triviality

I think you're failing to respond to the strongest version of what someone is saying...

Home depot has roughly 36000 items stocked in a store. Try using that number for _jal's argument.

Well... "running an offline store 101"? In stores based on modern supply chain you usually don't always have gazillions of shelves to display every single items you have so there are multiple tiers of storage from super sized warehouses to small local storage.

if you have a 10 digit number of screwdrivers and somebody asked for "screwdrivers", do you bring the entire warehouse to them or do you ask them to be more specific in what they want?

"Here's the first 20 inches of the screwdriver isle."

"Can I keep going?"

"No. You need to be more specific, no browsing more than a few dozen models at a time."

Eh, it's useful for a power user to know which way to refine.

Searching for [product 1234] has "about" 157 million results -> narrow the search -> [product 1234 bookshelf] has about 3.4 million results.

Searching for [product 1234defg] has "about" 280 results -> widen the search -> [product 1234 defg] has about 54000 results.

If you just show a number that's around 400 for essentially every query, you don't have any feedback on whether to widen or narrow the search if you don't see the result in the first couple of pages.

Makes sense, I wonder if G can even possibly display the accurate number since by default it's including synonymic variations of your query words.

Not surprising though, as others have mentioned.

GitHub does this too, if you click on the Issues page and change the search query it searches all of github, not just your own repos. But you can't go to the last page of the results (not sure about the max page number, but there is a limit and for good reasons).

That's called "good engineering". It's a lot better than "excessive pedantry".

  <query> | head -n 500

I’m sure they could remove spam results if they wanted to, but what’s the incentive when alternative engines are mediocre and time wasting will mean you’re going to use their engine for longer.

... who cares? Functionally, I have never gone beyond the 3rd search page when looking for a useful website. I can see how the search engine does find the astronomical number of search results, but then just decides for technical reasons to not display them. This seems perfectly reasonable to me.

The word "lie" is kinda hysterical, don't you think?

I joined Google in Nov. 2005, and "The Life of a Query" was one of the classes that everyone took. Even then, we were told that figures like "110,000 results" were an estimate, and if you kept hitting Next, you'd only get about 1,000. Maybe now it's 400, I don't know.

What do you expect -- the engine collects all 2 billion and puts them in a queue somewhere, just so that the one person in 500,000 who actually tries to see them all can?

> What do you expect -- the engine collects all 2 billion and puts them in a queue somewhere, just so that the one person in 500,000 who actually tries to see them all can?

If it's inaccurate and misleading, it's a bug.

If they've noticed it and kept it, that bug has become a feature.

> If it's inaccurate and misleading, it's a bug.

> If they've noticed it and kept it, that bug has become a feature.

It's a filtered mess.

Search for test and then search for test test in two different tabs. Once the results appear, switch between those tabs. The estimates of results radically differ from each other, and the results are not shared between those two tabs. The tabs should return mostly identical results due to the keywords, but they are not even close to each other.

If you look at the types of results shown between those two tabs, the issues with search results being filtered will be immediately shown. One tab will show 98% of the results filtered to show COVID-19 information with a little bit of results for sites that charge people to train for standardized tests. However, the other tab shows vastly different results about network speed tests, test.com, the word test at wikipedia, the definition of the word test, the etymology of the word test, etc.

So you're saying it's incompetence not malice? Not sure if that makes it better.

I expect that the estimate is more accurate than "we said 11000 but the actual result was 1000". Of course I understand it isn't going to be perfect, but that's two orders of magnitude off.

> the actual result was 1000.

Wrong. I tried "the meaning of life" on Google just now. It said:

About 9,890,000,000 results (0.66 seconds)

Where is the claim that you will be able to scroll through 9,890,000,000 results?

There is plenty to complain about with Google, and the rest of this thread shows you some of it. It will be a lot more productive for you to focus on some of that.

That's not the issue OP has. The issue is that the claim changes when you reach the last page.

For "purpose of life" it changes from "Page 22 of about 12,270,000,000 results" to "Page 23 of about 226 results".

I'm not sure what you're trying to say, how else would I interpret "9,890,000,000 results" than "there are 9.89 billion results for that query (that you could theoretically scroll through)"?

I would interpret it as an invitation to refine my search query, because that’s too many results for me to usefully filter.

Yes, but a reasonable person would likely think that there is that many results to wade through if they so chose.

An invitation to try to refine your search query, while Google simultaneously does its best to ignore a significant fraction of the terms in your refined query because it thinks it knows better than you.

I would interpret "refine your search query" as an invitation to refine my search query. Not, there are ___ results and here is the first 10 of them and an arrow at the bottom of the page to go to the next 10. That is a pretty bad way of conveying "refine your search query". A pretty bad way that happens to be flattering to the company.

But really, as far as any non-Googler is concerned, there's 400 actual results and a random number generator that generated "9,890,000,000" for that search.

It's not a million miles from hotel and flights websites saying "37 people are looking at this page right now!" It's a dark pattern to increase engagement. A pretty innocuous one in Google's case, but it is a little deceptive.

Isn't this how all search engines have worked for most of the history of internet search?

I was an avid user of altavista, hotbot, yahoo, and early google. I recall that I was always able to 'page' through an absurd number of results. But I am old and have a bad memory, maybe I'm wrong

I think in 2022 we can expect the most profitable Internet company to return a count of search results more accurate than 4 orders of magnitude off.

They are saying there are that many results but Google isn't going to serve some random dude all of them.

Then why are they giving people useless information that they didn't ask for?

As other have suggested to show your search was too broad and you should refine it. (and probably to brag too)

Is there a special cheat code to unlock them?

Do you seriously think that the whole Internet contains exactly 400 pages mentioning "the purpose of life", including synonyms? ;)

Google does.

> figures like "110,000 results" were an estimate, and if you kept hitting Next, you'd only get about 1,000.

Sounds like they're using biased estimators for the number of search results. If the estimates weren't biased, the underestimated numbers would balance out the overestimated ones, so for every query where they fall short by 2 billion there would be one that has two billion more hits than shown by the UI (or two billion with one hit more).

> The word "lie" is kinda hysterical, don't you think?

If it's true that they show biased estimates, I'd say that's a pretty adequate description.

Google limits number of search results to between 300 and 400[0] and yea as you know the reason is it is technically challenging, expensive and most probably unnecessary to show all results but devil is in the details or in this case information gem/s are on the 98th page or something like that :)

[0] https://the-digital-reader.com/2019/03/27/did-you-know-googl...

> What do you expect -- the engine collects all 2 billion and puts them in a queue somewhere, just so that the one person in 500,000 who actually tries to see them all can?

No, I'd expect that it would be able to generate subsequent pages on the fly.

Why would you expect that.

Idk what technoligies google uses, but generally its kind of hard to skip directly to the i'th result of a full text index efficiently.

People expect it because it's the expectation they are told to have. When you see "1 of 200,000,000 results" you think you can scroll through all of them.

If Google would say "1 of over 1000 results" and cut off at page 10 of 100 results with a nice message saying "please refine your search query if you haven't found what you're looking for," nobody here would be complaining.

Google has done this since the beginning of Google and it is the first time that I have ever seen this is come up.

This is something that just doesn't matter.

Can you name a single site that works this way (i.e. a site offering full text search which allows you to page through more than 100,000 results of the full text search)?

I appreciate that everyone has different life experiences that lead to different expectations, but for me personally it would go without saying that google would not let you view all results to a query that returns million of results.

If Google determines that 99.999% of the people will never go beyond result 400, and 99.998% of the people find the result they were looking for in these 400 results, then what’s the use of showing those users there are “about 200,000,000 results”?

Yes, and if 99.999% of the people will never go beyond result 400, then logically, it wouldn't be tough for Google to offer the 0.001% the ability to go beyond result 400. I am sure those determined users wouldn't mind waiting a few more seconds for Google to compute those results.

This does make me wonder: what would the actual statistic for 400+ theoretical page visits be? Would there be a single person in a world who would ever reach such page?

(I mean, damn, if every page shows 10 results, there would be 400 clicks in the same page + 4000 lines of results. You would need another search engine to sift through such amount of results in any sane amount of time...)

There is a good chance that someone could get to the 400th page if there were around a total of 8000-10000 hits for an for a obscure topic. It would be a multi-day effort, and I am sure that person would wish that they could search within the result or group the result by some properties.

The question us non-Googlers are asking, right here ^

How does it serve the user? If it doesn't, what is the purpose?

> What do you expect -- the engine collects all 2 billion and puts them in a queue somewhere, just so that the one person in 500,000 who actually tries to see them all can?

Yes.

Perhaps after wading through a billion search results, you would actually find the meaning of life, but dismiss it to make a pedantic point.

What's so pedantic about expecting a search engine to actually be able to return the results it has found? What if I'm curious to see what matches Google considers irrelevant enough to place in the billionth results page?

The absurdity of it?

Is the theoretical amount of results the important part? Or the results itself?

Let's imagine you go to your imaginary mentor to ask a question. Your mentor can give you thousands of answers - they are a creative person - would you really even care about all those answers, or do you want only one or few (more) accurate?

But fair point, if I were an immortal person with infinite amount of time I too would want to see ALL the results, not only the "best".

My imaginary mentor doesn't tell me they have a billion different answers to my question.

Would you use an SQL database that doesn't return a proper result set to your query or take LIMIT and OFFSET into account?

Hmm... If the database somehow manages to still do what I need it to do - yeah, sure?

(But I may be strange here, dunno. I am alright with using suboptimal tools - like WordPress for my eshop, haha...)

It's hilarious how smug Googlers can't help but be.

Everything I've heard and seen (thanks to remote work I can work alongside them now) has shown me that Google's culture is fundamentally based on Googler egos. Their weirdness about org charts and levels really exemplifies it (org chart and level are obscured from you - contrast this with Amazon, for instance).

I'm not sure I understand your comment. I'm not a Google employee.

Unless something big changed since I left two years ago, the org chart is totally visible to the entire company, and so are levels except when someone explicitly opts out (most do not bother).

I don’t work for Google. I work for another BigTech company. I am also much older than the average tech bro (48) and I work remotely in a more business oriented tech area.

But how can you pay a bunch of 20 something’s 200K+ and have them around other equally entitled people and not expect some amount of smugness.

No, I think most of us though google was a more innovative company that could create a way to share that many results, feels more like an EA move where google stopped trying years ago and just went into search maintance mode.

> The word "lie" is kinda hysterical, don't you think?

No, I consider it accurate.

I still consider Google to be marginally useful these days, but the quality has slipped and the UX has yet to keep pace.

> What do you expect -- the engine collects all 2 billion and puts them in a queue somewhere, just so that the one person in 500,000 who actually tries to see them all can?

Yes, that is what people expect when someone says "I found a billion hits on what you're looking for, here is the pile." How does this being wholly inaccurate by orders of magnitude to what the user can retrieve benefit the user?

No, that's what you expect. And you are weird. Which is fine.

Alone, I am a person. But clearly I am not the only one here that perceives this, and therefore "people" works.

Uninteresting semantics intended to be clever from both of us aside, you also missed that, although it is a little lie repeated many times, the datapoint still offers no benefit to the user.

Yes, it seems like a lot of people here do want to read whole 2 billion results.

How long would it take to view 2 billion results at 20 per page? I’m thinking somewhere between 100 and 200 years.

> The word "lie" is kinda hysterical, don't you think?

No, it’s 100% accurate. Your response is delusional and a poor attempt at manipulation.

> What do you expect -- the engine collects all 2 billion and puts them in a queue somewhere, just so that the one person in 500,000 who actually tries to see them all can?

If it isn’t possible for users to see those results then you should only display the number of results that can be accessed. That would be “not lying” in this case.

Just tested this, it stops at page 22 with no more next... wow.

They expect you to click an ad and forget all about your query before that page.

Most of the replies under this comment are invalid because of the words "About" in front of those statements. I love the word "about" - it's even more slippery than "many," which implies non-zero.

I am about 10 miles tall.

(This exaggeration is about 1 million times less severe than Google's.)

Very interesting. Just tried it with "covid-19" and its true.

     About 13,460,000,000 results (1.35 seconds) 

     ..

     Page 2 of about 163 results (1.15 seconds) 


     >"If you like, you can repeat the search with the omitted results included."<

     ..

     About 12,620,000,000 results (1.26 seconds)

     ..

     Page 4 of about 361 results (1.75 seconds)

It's like the sticker that says "this amp goes to 11". Google just went further!

Somewhere a product manager is beaming with pride

Yeah, indeed. And not only on controversial topics either.

Check these videos out.

TruthStream's production: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6zyJB45ewvU

Jimmy from BrightInsight: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bWbytHBp0zI

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8O_NvPpbsbw

I work for Google Search. The counts we show for results are estimated. They get more refined when you go deeper into the results. But yes, there are still likely to be millions of results for many things you query -- and most people are not going to be able to go through all millions of those. So we show usually up to around 40 pages / 400 of these. We have a help page about this here: https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/9603785

Thanks for posting here. Some questions: can you confirm that the estimates are unbiased in the statistical sense? Do you have an API for accessing the other ones, the help page for my locale doesn't mention anything? If not, how do you justify showing a very high number of results that users can't access?

it's probably a protection against scraping

and yeah there is probably billions of mentions of any single word out there if you count the computer generated content

So when I google "cows" and it says "Page 2 of about 1,210,000,000 results" you know full well you aren't going to show anywhere near 1,201,000,000 results yet you program it to display that? And in fact it only shows "about 231 results" which is 0.000019234% of 1,210,000,000 results.

That doesn't sound like an estimate to me. To me, that is intentional misleading.

It’s a signal that your search is generic. You can refine down more and get some hint of that.

Compare: “Cows” “Cows New York” “Cows Bronx New York” “Cows Bronx New York major deegan expressway”

This is a dumb example, but the count drops as the search is refined. You can use this to guide a specific search as well… in a tech example, if you search for a specific log entry while troubleshooting you might get 3 results tbat appear random. Remove elements of the search and you’ll get more results and relevance.

> It’s a signal that your search is generic. You can refine down more and get some hint of that.

1. I doubt the common person infers this from the “X results” UI, especially considering this has a literal meaning in most other search interfaces where they encounter this terminology. In fact, you don’t even have to compare it to other services, as apparently on the next page of Google results the meaning changes to the traditional literal interpretation. So on page 1 it is a weird hint, but on page 2 it is a precise count?

2. Even if that’s the purpose of this blurb, I actually still don’t know how generic my query is. I have no idea what the average result count is, so I don’t know if this is a lot or not. It’s certainly not the case that my “successful queries” are ones where there’s exactly one result, or just a few. Ironically enough, it’s the opposite: I only get so few results when I’m searching for something that’s really hard to find and Google is giving me a couple wrong results (in fact Google uses “no good matches” language in this case). Usually when I find something quickly it is merely the top result of many results.

3. If the intent is to tell me my query is pretty generic, then just say that, don’t imply it through language that has a literal meaning in all other interfaces I encounter it.

Note that my gripe with this UI is not about whether it is misleading or not, but merely that if its intended purpose is to give me some hint as to how good my query is, it is not doing a good job of that.

There’s no subjective judgement. No rule exists that says I need to have a narrow query. If they said your query was too broad or arrow, you would be complaining about that.

End of the day, it’s a number with some utility that is ignored or amusing to the majority of people. Apparently it’s very irritating to some slice of people as well.

But the original argument was that it was intended to tell me how generic it was? I'm just saying that I have no idea of that from that number since I don't have appropriate context. It's like a teacher telling me my kid got 10 questions right on a test. OK... out of how many? Out of 10? Or out of 100? And then that teacher being like "hey hey hey, I didn't know this was such a touchy subject. I'm just telling you your kid got 10 questions right. It's a number with some utility. If you don't like it, just ignore it." It's separately weird that the number means something different on page 1 than page 2. It's not like I lose sleep over this, I honestly wasn't even aware that the intended purpose was for it to be a "how generic is this query" marker until you posted that, so I guess I am already ignoring it. I'm just saying that if that is the intended purpose, it fails completely.

How is it misleading? It's an estimate of the total results, it doesn't say it's going to display them

"I'll sell you about 1,201,000,000 paper clips."

"OK."

ships 231 paper clips

"Hey I only got 231 paper clips, not 1,201,000,000."

"That's right. 1,201,000,000 was an estimate."

"You said about. So you estimated 1,201,000,000 paper clips but you actually only had 231?"

"No, I had the full 1,201,000,000. I sold them to you but I didn't say I would ship all of them. What kind of idiot uses more than a few hundred paper clips anyway? Plus, it saves us money on shipping costs."

You're reading into this something I'm not.

Waiter: What will you have this evening?

Guest: Everything looks good

Ok, everything, coming right up.

You're just totally flipping the roles, so of course your version sounds absurd.

You haven't paid Google for search: there is no sale of product or service to you, the user using free services for free.

You haven't signed any agreement with Google for search services. Google hasn't signed any agreement for future performance with you.

Google is not obligated to count every search result of every free search query. You are not entitled to such resource-intensive queries.

How much does COUNT() on a full table scan of billions of rows - with snippets - cost you on BigQuery or a similar pay-for-query-resources service?

>> you, the user using free services for free

Absolutely false, it is not free. I have provided them with my data which they will monetize.

It's the same as Hacker News not being free. I have provided Hacker News with my personal data.

For example, if you look through my post history just in the last day or so, you would know that Rufus Foreman owns a killer cis-gendered cat named Mr. Tiddlesworth, that Rufus Foreman is a Warren Buffett fan boy, and that when thinking of a generic search term to use as an example, the first thing to come to Rufus Foreman's mind is "cows".

Now imagine what sort of dark patterns an unscrupulous corporation like say, Hooli, could implement in order to target me with advertising tailored to my preferences!

If you tell the bartender your life story, they don't owe you free drinks (and they might as well sell a screenplay)

While it's true that they sell the data they collect, you can choose to not share such data and still receive the free services. "Bromite" is a fork of Chromium, for example.

If you spend time in their store and cause loss and order a bunch of free waters, do the Terms of Service even apply to you? What can they even do? What can LinkedIn do about scraping and resale of every public profile page?

Give me some free privacy on my free dsl line. (Note that ISPs can sell the entirety of a customer's internet PCAPs, for example, due to Pai's FCC rescinding a Wheeler FCC privacy rule https://www.theverge.com/2017/3/31/15138526/isp-privacy-bill... "Trump signs repeal of U.S. broadband privacy rules" (2017) https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-internet-trump/trump-... )

Bromite is not a Google service. It's a false precedence that anything open source from a corporation is a free service and makes their anti-privacy stance good. That's like saying a criminal is a good guy because he did 50 hours of charity work after murdering 2 people.

You can use the Chromium source code that Google contributes to, to browse the internet with and without ads and trackers that use obvious domain names: Microsoft Edge, Opera, Vivaldi, Bromite, ungoogled-chromium, Brave, Chrome.

You choose whether to shop at Google.

Google buying the default search engine position in browsers does not prevent users from changing the - possibly OpenSearch - browser search engine to DuckDuckGo or Ecosia.

You can force an address bar entry to a.tld/search=?${query} search w/:

  Ctrl-L
  ?${query}

  ?how to change the default search engine

  ?how to block ads & trackers in {browser name}

  ?how to provide free search queries on a free search engine and have positive revenue after years of debt obligations to fairly build market share

You can choose to take their free s and search elsewhere, eh?

Why would they now get out of paying for Firefox development using a revenue model, too?

(Competitors can and do use e.g. google/bazel the open source clone of google/blaze, which is what Chromium builds were built with before gn. Here's Chromium/BUILD.bazel, for example: https://source.chromium.org/chromium/v8/v8.git/+/master:BUIL... )

Android (and /e/ and LineageOS) do allow you to install browsers other than the Chrome WebView and Chrome. Is it possible to install anything other than Safari (WebKit) on iOS devices? Maybe from another software repository like F-droid? Hopefully current downstream releases with signed manifests and SafetyNet scanning uploaded apps

> You haven't signed any agreement with Google for search services.

Literally on absolutely every google search page: https://policies.google.com/terms

No one read terms and conditions, yes?

Statute of Frauds applies to agreements regarding amounts over $500. Is this a conscionable agreement between which identified parties? Does what satisfy chain of custody requirements for criminal or civil admissability if the data is from not a trustless system but a centralized trustful system?

"Victory! Ruling in hiQ v. Linkedin Protects Scraping of Public Data" (2019) https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/09/victory-ruling-hiq-v-l...

And then the interplay between a "Right to be Forgotten" and the community legal obligation to retain for lawful investigative law enforcement purposes. They don't know what they want: easy investigations, compromisable investigations, privacy

The information can be useful.

Some years back I hit on a notion of how to rate websites, domains, and even TLDs based on the prevalence of specific terms within them, as returned by Google search.

I came up with a list of 100 search terms in the Foreign Policy Top 100 Global Thinkers list. I added a few searches that should at least proxy for English-language texts using frequently-used but not stopwords (the word "this" was one of those). And arbitrarily chose the string "Kim Kardashian" to represent non-salient content.

That gave me a touch over 100 terms, and I identified roughly 100 target sites (sites, domains, TLDs).

The method was to run a Google web search on each of these and scrape the reported number of hits. That meant something north of 10,000 Google web searches, which I automated with a creative application of delays (up to several minutes), running over a week or two. Anti-bot tactics deployed by Google make this all but impossible now, though there's a service which (for a price) offers a directly-queriable web index so far as I'm aware, which might make for some interesting further research.

I summarized and posted the results here: <https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/3hp41w/trackin...>

But contrary to your assertion, estimates of total results even if not directly viewable through Google SERPs are* of potential value.

It's not, though - when you reach the last page, the listed number of results changes to a few hundred. You can't approximate a three digit number, be off by 7 orders of magnitude, and say it's an "estimate" with any credibility.

Ok, what do you think is more realistic for a term like 'cows', that there are only a few hundred references or that there are millions.

I'm not going to say that the UX is designed well end-to-end, but Google doesn't display more than X number of results for a given search string, ever, where X is O(100). It costs way too much money and you are unlikely to find what you are looking for by showing you more than the top X results.

A few hundred, because that is what is being provided by the service.

"I found a billion hits, but I'm only giving you two" is in no way a good defense. It is blaming the user for a completely reasonable interpretation of the language -- weasel words are not appreciated by people.

You think a for-profit company should invest in a feature/edge case that will never be used in an earnest or useful way?

The idea that you would earnestly search through 400 records only to not find what you are looking for --but the 401st record would-- is just not a realistic use-case.

No, I expect them to list the number of results within an order of magnitude of what is available for the user to review, which would be an accurate and reasonable report for what is provided.

And if they want to offer your proposed crazy edge case as a service, folks needing it are willing to pay for organized information that is deep.

I agree this is not a common use use case. But it is absolutely a realistic edge case and I used to do it. It is exactly these edge cases that make software truly useful. Multiple search engines are as good at the common case.

I think actually being able to serve up millions of results would be more realistic.

It's the internet. The internet is huge. I can imagine there being millions of pages that mention cows in some manner. I know google indexes the internet, therefore I would expect that if it tells me millions that there are actually millions _THAT IT CAN SHOW ME_.

When it tells me 10 million and only shows me 8 million, I'll be forgiving. Maybe exasperated, but forgiving. When it tells me 10 million and can only show 400, that exasperation quickly turns into distrust.

>> Ok, what do you think is more realistic for a term like 'cows', that there are only a few hundred references or that there are millions

final short maxReferencesWeAreGoingToDisplay = 400;

final short numDisplayedReferences = Math.min(totalReferencesWeFind, maxReferencesWeAreGoingToDisplay);

I'll send you a bill for my consulting services.

I estimate my consulting charges at about 10 cents an hour. There's a help page somewhere that tells how many orders of magnitude that estimate might be off by.

Sorry, that's a cop out. It says "About X results" and it shows this on a page of results. The inference is clearly that I could see about X number of results if I'm patient enough.

It's misleading, because the pretended estimate is selected in every case as a misleadingly large number that never occurs for any search.

mis·lead·ing | ˌmisˈlēdiNG | adjective giving the wrong idea or impression: your article contains a number of misleading statements.

"Hi, I'm a search service, and I know about a zillion things you just searched for, here are two."

This doesn't sound like a good defense for the product's behavior.

I can't tell if half these comments are from typical developer playing 'I'm technically right / devils advocate' or if google just has a team working on public image.

So you think there's a theoretical possibility that google doesn't have a team working on public image?

They astroturf so hard it's hitting great firewall levels.

I'm so over employees coming out to tour their love for their employer.

Defending indefensible bullshit like 'our estimate was 27k orders of magnitude off, oops!'

Google is the evil bigco they spent years pretending not to be.

People past and presently employed there can keep pretending, but most of us are done with the pretenses now.

S/G/FB/M$/AMZN/APPL. All the same.

> How is it misleading? It's an estimate of the total results, it doesn't say it's going to display them

Ignoring how dumb of a technicality that is, why does that number suddenly shrink to 231 when you hit the last page?

Depending on what you're measuring, it's either "1,210,000,000" or "231". It's not both.

> of about 1,210,000,000 results

I always read this as: "When we were crawling all the internet this phrase you are looking for was found in around 1.2 billion pages"

why can't i then spend the next year of my life paging through them?

And being a search engine that provides links relevant to said phrase, reporting what they found is their anticipated deliverable.

I don't think that's the correct interpretation though, because it states they are the results of your search that are being returned to you, not the content of the wider internet.

And if they just flubbed the language but their intention was that it is an estimate of the internet or their index that they never intended to provide you with, the last page wouldn't change to "Page 23 of about 221 results".

> It’s a signal that your search is generic.

Talk about bad user interface design.

Why are you trying to defend this silly practice?

This is absolutely trash and essentially false advertising. Saying there are 1M+ results but then only having 400 viewable is straight up misrepresenting your product.

> That’s hundreds of results and usually enough for deep research needs. You can enter a related query to refine your search and learn more.

is both patronizing and offensive. 400 result is 4 pages of 100 hits, the way literally anyone who does research on google is going to use it(I haven't used a 10 hit Google page in well over a decade). Not only that, I can browse through 4 pages in like 5 minutes, really really inadequate for "deep research needs", and really anything beyond cursory convenience linking. I've completely dismissed Google Search for in depth topics as a result because of the multiple occasions I tried in vain to find a page I'd visited previously with Google (that I ended up finding again with browser history) that just couldn't be found, even going back and trying to make a search that works.

> and most people are not going to be able to go through all millions of those.

this is totally fair but 400 is just way way too few, if you bumped it up to 4k that would be a step in the right direction. Additionally, by my thinking, Google is missing out on the people who are willing to wade through thousands of search results to find quality content, as it stands now those pages have very little way to break into the top 400, but a complex search term followed by a user wading deep into the results to find a specific page where they go and don't return would seem to show any extremely strong signal that that specific page should probably be ranked somewhat higher.

This is a very bizarre comment. They aren't saying there are 1M+ results that you can access. Who would even want to do that? The number is to give you an idea of how narrow your search was.

This reminds me of when I and a couple of other people watched someone look through 10 whole pages of Google results. Totally insane. But it got even crazier - he actually found the thing he was looking for on the 10th page! Doubly unbelievable.

I regularly look through 10+ pages of results in Google scholar and Google books. (Google web search has gotten much worse so I don't much use it anymore, but I used to look 10+ pages into Google web searches a decade ago.)

I think it maxes out at around 20 pages. You definitely won’t get to page 30

> They aren't saying there are 1M+ results that you can access.Who would even want to do that?

What I've learned about edge cases: I'm not nearly creative enough to think of them all.

Do you think Google Search is a product or a service to searchers?

- If a product: it should advertise precisely what it supports.

- If a service: it should strive for accuracy.

What is is today: a hook for advertising, most of which is noise.

Searching effectively has become difficult, and few search ads have context (I don't look at ad links for purchasing). I'm probably not the median user, either, but perhaps I belong to a useful subpopulation.

Ah ok, so this is why after a certain amount of clicks of the mouse I am at the end of the Internet. I still remember the time when Internet was much bigger than 40 clicks.

Hopefully someone will disrupt you soon and give us back the real Internet.

Although they still massively dominate the market, the competition is out there. While it wasn't that long ago where nobody else's search results were anywhere near as good, my experience lately is the opposite -- it's hard to do worse than Google results.

yep, and here's to hoping that trend continues and google search dies out

If you're saying 2 billion when you know there are 'millions' your estimates are off by a factor of 2000. If you can really only show 400 results then the estimate is off by a factor of several million.

Maybe that's just how Google Search works, but the story points on your JIRA tickets must be a sight to see. :)

It's dishonest to show an estimate that is orders of magnitude off, and not even mention this with something like a +/- standard deviation. I can't imagine how something that has only hundreds of real hits could have an estimate of hundreds of thousands. Why not just drop this estimate altogether?

Do you mind clarifying why they’re off by a bajillion percent? Ie. If this isn’t maliciousness or incompetence, what is it?

I have no idea what's going on in the algorithm but it's not hard to imagine extrapolation of this sort: https://xkcd.com/605/

Not the OP. My speculation is they justify it internally as defense against scrapers.

What can you do? Dunno

Oh that’s a clever thought. I didn’t consider that angle.

> If this isn’t maliciousness or incompetence, what is it?

Expensive to calculate, for something nobody really cares about anymore.

The message is that you cannot verify what you are told, you just get what you're given. And what part you are given is an illusion that there are more results. Just trust Google.... what could go wrong?

Let's not forget, that Eric Schmidt said that more than 1 result is a bug.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XeIIpLqsOe4

This touches on the scope and hubris of Google and other companies that mediate reality for us. They think they have 'the truth', they know it and will give it to us, and if we refuse their truth, they will attempt to train us until we get it, in schools, the workplace, online, etc.

It's also why they will become irrelevant. If there is nothing organic about their results because the algo filters thoughtcrime ideas out, people will continue to move away. Thank god.

I personally use presearch and feel happier that the results are more natural. But nothing is perfect.

How inaccurate does an estimation have to be before it becomes a lie?

What happens when a bank teller asks me during a credit application how many assets I have and I estimate about 10 billion bucks, when it later turns out I own the three dollars in my wallet and a strip of chewing gum? Am I (criminally) liable in that case?

Not so much ballpark estimates as grains of protons in the multiverse then...

Spending 5 minutes performing google searches shows that isn't even close to the truth. The number displayed at the top of the screen is fabricated.

Searching for [google] states about 25 billion results, but it can only show me two pages of search results.

Searching for [meaning of life] states about 10 billion results, but it can only show me 212 results.

Searching for [meaning of life life] states about 7 billions results, but it can only show me 184 results.

It is impossible that these results are correct. They are clearly filtered, and the count of results is inflated for every single search.

Clicking on the text you recommended to expand all search results doesn't do that. It still limits the results, just to 300-400 instead of 200. In no case I tested could I get to more than 20 pages of results.

I feel like you spend a lot of time getting angry at inanimate objects.

You're projecting your beliefs without cause onto a person over the Internet. I do not feel any anger whatsoever and do not care about Google or how they perform searches.

Well,but a consistent estimate of millions of results and then showing 400 is a rather bad estimate. If the search results would be as bad as the estimates, you would have no business.

It seems like the high numbers are displayed to mislead about the speed and efficiency of the search, google knows no human will go through 10 thousands of result pages. And ads are only sold for page 1.

My guess is that this is to prevent bots abusing infinite results pages. Possibly those that would scrape ranked results for a query.

They are also answering questions. Not going to source . But answers are way off. Seen many times where it’s pulling from fan fiction, Etc

You got a lot of responses telling you why Google can't or doesn't want to provide an accurate result count. I guess the logic is:

1. Google has to return a result count.

2. It can't/won't be accurate.

3. Therefore it's fine to provide a count 10 billion times to large.

The jump from 2 to 3 is dodgy and I see people questioning it. But I don't see anybody challenging point 1. Why does google have to give a number at all? If google can't/won't give an accurate result count, then they should give a result count at all. I don't care what technical limitations might complicate giving an accurate result count, that's no excuse for lying when silence is a perfectly valid choice.

Obviously they provide the count for marketing reasons. That's an explanation for the lying, but not an excuse.

> 2. It can't/won't be accurate.

>3. Therefore it's fine to provide a count 10 billion times to (sic) large.

LOL, what? No way!

When I say the leap from 2 to 3 is dodgy, I meant that as a bit of dry understatement. It's insane. But to even get to point 2 you need to first assume point 1, which is that Google is somehow compelled to provide a result count. They aren't. They could simply remove the result count and not say anything about it, then they wouldn't ""need"" to lie about it.

The number of pages in a search index and the number of results found were major selling points for search engines. I'd say that the count got carried forward in the last 20 years.

As I said, it's for marketing. That's the explanation, but it's not an excuse. They should remove it, nobody is forcing them to keep it. They choose to keep it even though they know it's insanely inaccurate.

Yeah I agree it is an explanation. My 'nobody wanted to touch it in the last 2 decades' hypothesis isn't justification for keeping around either.

Interestingly, I just did a search for "Google" and when I got to the page 36, the top changed to "Page 36 of 360 results" from "Page 35 of about 25,270,000,000 results".

> My 'nobody wanted to touch it in the last 2 decades' hypothesis

They must be porting it forward to new versions of their results page, right? The results page has changed a lot over the years. It might be a dusty forgotten decision to have it, but it can't be dusty forgotten code.

Yup. My 'nobody wanted to touch it in the last 2 decades' hypotheses was more referring to how the feature might have made sense in the earlier days when Google respects all the keywords in our search queries. As Google evolved, it became impossible to drill into those results, but there's no upside for any product manager to change/remove it.

If it's an estimate it's not a lie

It's not a good faith estimate. They know their queries never return a million results, let alone hundreds of billions. Asserting that it's an estimate is insulting.

If there is an estimation which underestimates the count of results, then it can be not a lie. Personally, I’ve not seen one in the past 22+ years. Do you have different experience?

They could say "cutting off approximately 10B results after 400 hits.".

Note that if you search [purpose of life], it does not say it has 2 billion results anywhere on the first page. My team removed the blue bar containing that text way back in 2010. You have to hit "Next" or otherwise visit page 2 to get it.

And I'd bet the reason why it's still there (I left Search in 2014) is because < 0.1% of users ever hit the next page. Everybody else just refines their query to a different search. It's a holdover from when search engines were bad (i.e. around 1998) and you had to go through 10 pages of results to get the one you were looking for. As a result, Google expends approximately zero engineering effort on pages 2-20 of the results - I know that in the 4 visual redesigns I worked on, we didn't touch them once. It wouldn't surprise me if the response to flack on this is to just get rid of all pages other than the first one - it avoids the issue entirely and wouldn't affect 99.9% of users.

The technical reason for this behavior, as others have remarked below, is pagination. Ranking across the full result set is a very complex calculation, and it can depend on some factors that are basically random (eg. timeouts and failures in backend servers). It'd make pagination basically useless if the same results you already went through show up on a later page because the ranking is different. This requires that the full result set be cached. You can cache 400-1000 results for each of the queries that the 0.1% of users who actually hit "Next" care about, but you'd have a big issue caching 2 billion results for each of those queries.

> Note that if you search [purpose of life], it does not say it has 2 billion results anywhere on the first page.

This is false for other search terms. Search for "meaning of life". At the top left of the first result page it says "About 10,620,000,000 results (0.56 seconds)".

Screenshot: https://imgur.com/a/SQq7Snl

Logged into Google, Safari 15.6.1.

edit:

Here's a good one:

"starfish buttercup pickle mouse"

Page 1 of 2 says

> About 589,000 results (0.62 seconds)

Page 2 of 2 says

> Page 2 of about 22 results (0.36 seconds)

Oops! Must have been one of those common "multiply by 26,772" errors.

At the bottom of the page, it says "In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 22 already displayed." with an option to show all results.

With all results shown, the total result count goes to 59, so only off by 9,983x! But who's counting? Definitely not Google.

Must've been brought back after I left, I have no idea what the rationale was.

Does that mean you don't use google search? Its been back a long time.

What do you prefer for search if not?

Google employees don't know what's going about top-level policies unlike a few government affiliated managers like Dean or Page (source: google images). It's possible that Google employees don't see the same content as outsiders. Literally CCP vibes, or Plato's Cavern.

What do you mean by "source: google images"?

Every Google engineer can see the code that performs this calculation. Google engineers have demonstrated that we are very vocal when we smell foul play.

The government doesn't have backdoors in Google source codes? or Google engineers are patriotic?

I’ve used Google for decades and I’ve never paid any attention to this. I wouldn’t be able to tell you if it was there or not without looking.

I think a better question is why it was ever there in the first place if the numbers are so extraordinarily inaccurate.

You really think a company would do that? Just go on the internet and tell lies?

Based on the explanation above, it sounds like the big number is the "real number" and then they throw away everything except the first couple results when they're put in the cache. Presumably the number of results is calculated before this caching and nobody cares enough to fix it.

Yeah, so basically you just can't actually get millions of results.

But others have pointed out that those index numbers don't resolve rationally to results.

It seems the index number is a different match than what they choose to show.

Sure, I understand where the number comes from, but I have trouble understanding why someone would program that calculation, see that the number is not actually what a user would experience, and say "okay cool let's put that on the page". It seems hard to imagine any possible motivation other than being purposely misleading, in which case the answer the question "why was it put back?" presumably would have the same answer.

If the number is in the billions you're not going to experience each of those websites anyway - you'd run out of time in your lifetime.

I suspect (it was introduced before I started, and re-introduced after I left) that it's there to remind users of the work that software performs on their behalf, much like how TurboTax says "$X in taxes saved" or Brave says "9 hours saved blocking ads" or your brokerage says "Total profit: $X". Users tend to forget this, and just assume that they're entitled to the world where the product exists.

That presumably depends on when the caching was put in place.

If the number was in the thousands in the late-90s, you could probably get through all of the sites.

If the caching was put in later, say, the early 2000s when google started getting really big, the number might just keep growing until it eventually looks ridiculous.

I've never worked at google, but I've seen a few systems that broke in weirder ways when nobody bothered to maintain them after they had outlived their usefulness.

Well how do you know there aren’t 10 billion results

I shit you not, I searched purpose of life, got no counter. Searched meaning of life, got a counter: https://imgur.com/a/SfzILul

Both typed into the "url bar", and not search box on goolge.com. The only difference as far as I can tell is I copy/pasted purpose of life, and typed out meaning of life... macos & chrome.

Same here, and when I hit page 20 it changed to "Page 20 of about 198 results (1.22 seconds)"

Similar for me.. 8-10 billion results, then on page 21, "Page 21 of about 205 results" and no more pages after 21.

But if I click the link to repeat the query without truncating the results do continue beyond page 21.

I don't doubt that's what you see.

What I get for: "starfish buttercup pickle mouse"

is exactly one result [About 1 results (0.32 seconds)], which is your YC post.

Removing the quotes gives me [About 34 results (0.63 seconds)].

The difference is that I have setup Google to show 100 results per page by default. I believe that this allows the (very approximate) results estimation algorithm to be more accurate. When I switch to 10 results, I get [About 591,000 results (0.53 seconds)]. Feel free to verify that this is the case for you as well.

There is no foul play here. I work at search serving, I've seen that algorithm. My personal opinion is that nobody cared to improve it because almost nobody (modulo YC crowd) cares.

> There is no foul play here. I work at search serving, I've seen that algorithm. My personal opinion is that nobody cared to improve it because almost nobody (modulo YC crowd) cares.

In other words, the product is shitty because no-one at the company really cares about it - because of course, that “product” is just a vehicle for a big ad company. On top of that, there’s no meaningful competition. Hopefully we’ll get some DoJ action on this at some point.

By all means, feel free to use any other search engine that you feel is better than Google. Or better yet, wow us with the better engine that you can build.

It’s almost as if you didn’t even make it to the second sentence of my comment. Maybe take another stab at it? You’re really going to enjoy the third sentence.

FWIW my default browser is Brave, and Brave's default search engine is Brave Search. I almost switched back to Safari because the Brave Search results were so much worse than Google. Eventually found that you can set the default search engine in Brave - there's Brave, Google, DDG, Qwant, Bing, StartPage, and Ecosia available.

I'd highly recommend this exercise for everyone who complains that there's no competition for Google, because a.) you're actually trying the competition and b.) you might realize how much Google does for you, and how far ahead they are against the competition. Who knows, you might even find a better search engine, and then next time you can come make recommendations for other HNers.

A lesser man wouldn’t snark so hard while pointing people to an obviously absurd claim (no competition for Google search). Clearly we are in the presence of greatness!

Google used to be much better. If I could use the old Google, I would. I really do want content beyond the top 500 websites, and sometimes it was on page two. Now it’s not there at all.

Most daily usage now I use Bing for the rewards points, and it’s approximately as good as current Google. Never have I failed to find something with Bing I then found with Google, despite it being a regular occurrence.

Wow, I had strong suspicions Google was dicks (because of too much anti-user BS in their products) but here is proof!

> Feel free to verify this is the case for you.

Yes, if only one page is shown, it’s accurate. I picked that (unquoted, sorry) phrase because it resulted in two results pages for me, showing a worse case scenario. With your settings, it would require a term with > 100 results to see the fiction.

I actually do assume it’s intentional, because

1. It’s predominant, at the top left of the page

2. I assume your UI team is competent and cares about every pixel shown on the screen, especially predominantly placed ones

3. it’s great marketing

4. It’s absurdly incorrect. 10x could be ubderstandable. It’s off by nearly 27,000x error here.

It was a good query, I'd have done something similar to replicate.

I can guarantee you that it's not intentional. It was definitely easier to estimate in the past, when a single query was fired on a single corpus for a given user input, but modern web search is vastly more complicated than this.

Oh boy do I feel special right now, since I hit 2nd page (or even 3rd etc) quite often since main search became quite a spam-infested over-seod crapfest few years ago for some types of search. Some first results are outright dodgy, often outranking ie official sites and I strongly suspect only malware awaits there.

Such a shame for basically one-trick pony who doesnt understand that staying relevant long term means that trick must be and remain a damn good proposition.

Its true I eventually give up and do ie duckduckgo and if that fails I try to refine searches even more (but this rarely works since I already start with it as default)

I switched to duckduckgo few years back, and most of my searches work. I still have to use g! once in a while. Web search is such an important function, I wish there was a community funded, Wikipedia like entity for search.

we're seeing a small rennaisance of search engines which is promising to me; brave with it's discussions and goggles, kagi, marginalia, million short, and i am sure others it makes me happy to see

I still remember, around a decade or two ago, going through page after page of results to look for the exact page I wanted, and somewhat often getting that result. Now, if I'm very lucky, I'll find that result; otherwise, I'll probably get a CAPTCHA-hellban instead.

It's very ironic that a search engine, which is supposed to be helpful precisely for the things that are hard to find, seems to actively sabotage your efforts at such deep searching.

What does the search org look like internally? Is it connected with the ads or Chrome orgs at any interface? Do the rank and file ICs, EMs, and PMs have issues with how these products interact?

I have so many complaints about your product, it drives me wild.

How many people even look at organic results versus the paid-for ads that display at top?

It should be illegal for anyone to be able to purchase ads for another company's trademark. Apple, Google, and Amazon are all extorting companies by forcing them to buy ads to protect their own brand. (My own brand is being attacked by a competitor in this way, and it's ridiculous!)

The only reason anyone uses these systems at scale is that third parties were available in aggregate early on to provide content. You built your product off of our backs. And now that the power dynamic has shifted, we're cattle to soak for as much revenue as possible.

It also seems like the only reason Google is dominant is bad behavior. Paying for default search engine status. Being the default in all of their other unrelated platforms. Achieving browser monopoly.

I've recently started seeing Chrome ads and billboards everywhere. Google purchased a huge percentage of my city's billboard ad inventory for their "better on Chrome" campaign. It's as if Google knows this is the reason for everything. Where except for Apple devices is Chrome not dominant?

This whole cartel needs a muzzle.

Device companies should not be ad companies.

Ad companies should not be service companies.

Service companies should not be content and production companies, since they can favor their own and price pressure the rest.

We have a world where the top tech conglomerates are all of these and then some. They've cast a wide net and turned the whole world of consumer interaction into a supermarket, where we now have to pay for "shelf space" to interact with customers, pay to protect our brands from unfair sniping, pay to grow, obey asinine rules to build a product that fits their desired shape, integrate with their payments and login stack (so we're even less in a relationship with our customers).

It's a far cry from the open web of the 90's. Really bad for small companies, new startups, and even consumers. We can barely afford to build our products with all the margin that goes to Google, Apple, and the rest.

I wish the rank and file could feel this. :(

I have no idea, I left Search 8 years ago. I would bet on people responding to incentives, though, because that seems like a universal constant of human behavior.

That's a bullshit cop-out if I've ever heard one.

'Don't mind us destroying society, we are just following incentives!'

Swear I've heard that somewhere before though...

I closed my small shop due to not being able to afford appearing on ads anymore, so I feel your pain. You are being downvoted because most people here benefit from the $$$ big tech makes from ordinary hard working people. And they think complaining about the unfairness of their practices is petty. Talk about lack of empathy

Thanks for this comment. I have personal experience with all of these frustrations and agree very strongly. I can see someone writing off this comment as just another rant but it really isn’t - you’re hitting the nail right on the head over and over.

The way Apple and Google have wedged themselves in as an interface and then gatekeeper to our customers is deeply pernicious. I respect what they have achieved but it’s deeply saddening to wonder if the freedom we had decades ago online was anomalous and not intrinsic to the medium.

> It's a holdover from when search engines were bad (i.e. around 1998) and you had to go through 10 pages of results to get the one you were looking for.

Unlike today, right? Where actual search results... represent less than 10% of the page and the rest is irrelevant information and ads in Google search https://grumpy.website/post/0XCmMC-2O

In your example (link) one of the engines returned way better results: guessed and returned stuff that the query author probably meant.

In my opinion a search engine that can guess and understand my question from a single word is superior to encyclopaedic-bureaucratic return. (After all, in whole lot of times I am searching for something that I don't even understand what am I really looking for.)

You can also scroll down to comparison between 2000, 2013 and 2020 here: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/10/19/google-...

> The technical reason for this behavior, as others have remarked below, is pagination.

> It'd make pagination basically useless if the same results you already went through show up on a later page because the ranking is different.

A bit off topic: I have always wondered why search result is the only feed on the web (apart from HN) that has not adopted infinite scrolling. This is a good explanation.

Infinite scroll is a terrible UI experience despite being popular; that’s why not everyone has adopted it.

For sure, infinite scroll isn't designed for the benefit of the user.

> It wouldn't surprise me if the response to flack on this is to just get rid of all pages other than the first one - it avoids the issue entirely and wouldn't affect 99.9% of users.

You are confusing users with queries. A lot more than 0.1% of users use the other result pages - double digit percent certainly. But if Google is doing a good job they don’t do it very often.

I am sorry but it doesn't change the fact that it is super disenginous to say (I just tried it myself): and then you only display a maximum of 149 results.

"Page 14 of about 184,000,000 results (0.83 seconds)" "Page 15 of about 149 results (0.76 seconds)"

"In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 149 already displayed."

Maybe it's time Google spent a bit more time on their search engine, including pages 2-20.

Searching "purpose of life" while logged in shows about 245 results, searching "purpose of life" while logged out shows "Page 10 of about 10.740.000.000 results"...

Extreme profiling Google? :-)

> It's a holdover from when search engines were bad (i.e. around 1998) and you had to go through 10 pages of results to get the one you were looking for.

Search engines are still bad.

Having to go through 10 pages of results to find something that matches what I was looking for is one of the reasons I stopped using Google. What I want is almost never on the first few pages of search results.

In this thread are dozens of people complaining about something they would never use, ie going through a billion results. It’s really weird how hateful HN can be for no real reason.

I don't care that Google doesn't give me billions of results. I do care that Google is lying about giving me billions of results. Either give me a reasonably accurate result count, or no result count at all. The lie is an insult.

You are insulted very easily over extremely small things.

Do you get insulted over the fact that food producers have been decreasing the size of their food servings while keeping the same price? For example, a “pint” of ice cream is no longer a pint, it’s 14 oz. And the size of OJ had been decreasing Constantly but the price stays the same.

Here you are actually suffering a loss. You are being deceived into believing you are getting the same but you’re not. Are you upset and insulted about this?

With Google all you’re not getting are the results you wouldn’t have used anyway. You don’t actually suffer a loss. And yet, this is what you’re insulted over?

Sometimes I really want to see more than 10 results. I used to be able to set a flag that told Google "show me 100 results on the first page." But as of a couple of years ago, whenever I set that flag Google accuses me of being a bot and makes me solve a captcha. Thanks Google. I really enjoy solving puzzles just to get beyond your ad-sponsored search results.

Just one of many reasons why my default search engine is DDG now. DDG kind of sucks but these days it sucks less than Google.

Both Bing and DDG seem to have stop indexing porn since about 6 months ago.

Search for "couple having sex" then set the filter to "past month". Zero results on bing and ddg. It started around late January, early February. Other things that would lead to porn also fail like "woman f*cking dildo", "shemale", that's all I tried. They'll show result, but if you filter for 24hrs, past week, past month, they're blank

Unfortunately, I have similarly bad captcha results elsewhere. Millionshort normally rejects my queries from my Linux desktop, and often it will go 5+ rounds, which exceeds my patience.

Everyone knows that "purpose of life" has 42 results ...

Wow. True. It shows about 1.1 billion results. But on page 22, the results are 218 and is the last page.

Never noticed this !

> Google does this yet lies about their searches to maintain an illusion of competence.

I've seen this around a lot, but I have yet to see proof that it's a "lie" in any way. Perhaps provide some evidence if you have it?

More likely, there ARE 2 million results, but they're not going to show them all to you, because you are not economically able to pay them enough to do so. Now, if you want to pay Google a billion dollars, you can probably get all 2 million search results. They'll probably deliver them on gold-plated floppy disks if you want.

Anyway it ALSO it serves as an important hint that there are LOTS of results, and you should NARROW down your search. Wouldn't it be weirder if you searched for "meaning of life" and it said "200 results"?

> The revenue-sharing deals that Google offers to browsers are essential to companies like Mozilla Corp., he said, because they offer their products to users for free.

> “The reason they partner with Google isn’t because they had to; it’s because they want to,” Schmidtlein said.

Mozilla would disappear overnight if Google stopped paying them.

Good riddance IMO (even though I love FF and it's the only browser I use). They haven't been able to build a sustainable business despite receiving hundreds of millions of dollars per year from Google. A flower shop on a street corner can get a better ROI. Mozilla's management is incompetent and shady.

Isn’t receiving hundreds of millions a year a sustainable business?

I did not realize currency trade was constrained to your sensibilities; my bad. Private property, free markets! Until two parties enter into an arrangement then you demand they open themselves to business with others?

> Isn’t receiving hundreds of millions a year a sustainable business?

Right, but the argument goes that the only reason Google pays Mozilla so much is to prop up the competition. Google may have calculated that it would be preferable to pay the hundreds of millions, rather than have Firefox die just leaving Chrome/Safari.

Thus, it's not really a sustainable business, but rather being the lucky benefactor of some scheme. Their value is only in being 'the other guy', not in actually creating a valuable product for consumers. I wouldn't call that a sustainable business.

> Their value is only in being 'the other guy', not in actually creating a valuable product for consumers

Mozilla's value to Google might be only being "the other guy", but Mozilla is valuable to me (a consumer) because they are producing a Firefox, which is a product I consider valuable.

Obviously I would prefer that Mozilla can find a self-sustainable business model to support Firefox development. But if I had to choose between "Mozilla doesn't exist" and "Mozilla exists only because it gets money from Google", then I choose the latter.

But the fact that Mozilla continue to require Google's money to survive means that not enough people would make the same choice.

Perhaps, but also consider that they are only in this position because Google uses their search monopoly to fund development of a free alternative... much like Microsoft used their desktop OS monopoly to do the same in the 90s.

While I don't think user payments would be enough to fund development, I don't think "they need Google's money" is evidence for it. It's not like paying for Firefox is currently an option.

Firefox is developed by the Mozilla Corporation. The closest thing to paying for Firefox is probably donating to the Mozilla Foundation, but that money is used for education and advocacy.

> It's not like paying for Firefox is currently an option.

That's a choice made by the Mozilla Corporation, not a technical impossibility.

How are you supposed to build a "sustainable business" if you're expected to offer your product for free because your competitors are pouring money from other businesses in to it to offer it for free?

Google Chrome is not a "sustainable business" either; it just gets funded by Google's other business activities (mainly Google ads). Arguably, Safari is the only one that people (indirectly) pay for when they purchase an Apple device.

> Their value is only in being 'the other guy', not in actually creating a valuable product for consumers.

I use Firefox purely because I feel it works better than Chrome.

The majority of the software industry is just lucky benefactors who “got there first”.

Google isn’t a sustainable business without paying enormous sums to remain in business, without a whole lot of political concessions that have been made to hype USian markets.

What is and isn’t a sustainable business is relative to how frequently you have been told what is and isn’t sustainable business.

> The majority of the software industry is just lucky benefactors who “got there first”.

This is not true. There are so many examples of 2nd mover who became the dominant force, such as Zoom, Photoshop, MS Office, IntelliJ.

To attribute a success product purely to luck is also intellectually lazy. There are often so many factors, in many cases conflicting, that change of course of a product. It is impossible to say luck is the main factor, although it is usually a factor.

Imagine you pissoff Jeff Bezos, sould it be cool if he pays your employer to fire you, your landlord to get rid of you, hires a private detective to dig up dirt on you and offers every future employer money just to ruin your carreer?

Thats what free market allows.

Oh I wasn’t advocating for free markets. I think it’s a ridiculous “phrase of power” spoken tradition gibberish.

I’m highlighting social hypocrisy.

Google isn’t sustainable without policy concessions; the market value gibberish is added onto something that is propped up by government looking the other way to sell the idea to people who don’t understand finance is an ephemeral con game. IMO “big software products and services” are only big business because it’s also profitable to politicians insider trading schemes. Open source and for hire software workers and ridding ourselves of big corp protectionism provisions in law and policy would be great. Very little of this distributed ledger and accounting nonsense has value to the average worker; their day to day is being a worker. Make the minority of “successes” compete on an open labor market instead of giving Bezos a pass. Having 25 people willing to chuck $50k each at my dreams.

Make him a gig worker too.

Wouldn't most businesses disappear if their partnerships dried up? This is just a weird criticism.

Eh if a car company could only stay in business because they had giant Coke ads emblazoned on the sides of their cars I wouldn’t chalk it up as a win for the company.

What if a car company could only stay in business because of the interest it collects on financing?

Then I'd hardly call it a car company.

That's a perfect analogy for Google. They only stay in business because they're able to plaster Coke (and other companies ads) all over their websites.

No? Most businesses sell products or services, their primary source of revenue isn't bribes from a single company. That's pretty rare actually.

You've been downvoted because simply selling a product to make money is considered absurd in this industry. What a horrible state of affairs.

The current Mozilla might disappear but if it brings back the old Mozilla it can only be a good news

Yeah it seems like the right kind of attrition. I would definitely pay patreon-wise for Firefox.

Unfortunately you would be in the vast minority. I’m not sure there’d be enough individuals willing to do it to keep up with chrome

A big part of the reason browsers are so expensive to build and maintain is because Google keeps expanding the set of features browsers are expected to implement (and Mozilla offers no meaningful resistance to this.) Google creates a problem so large that only Google has the funds to solve it.

Right kind of attrition? Execs would fire every dev rather than themselves take a pay cut. The fact that this would actually kill the project is beyond them because they'd stay in office a little longer.

Sadly, old Mozilla won't come back even if we get rid of the current one. Building web infrastructures is now a completely different story than 20 years ago. You're not going to build a new functional web browser from scratch without hundreds of millions of bucks every year.

> You're not going to build a new functional web browser

Then thank god that Firefox is FOSS, so whoever picks it up won't have to. The abolition of Mozilla would mean that more thoughtful forks won't have to compete with upstream for either cash or attention. Although I'd bet $1000 that if Mozilla died, they'd give Firefox and its trademarks to the Apache Foundation Openoffice-style to protect Chrome even after the company's last breath.

I remember a comment from their CEO complaining that a 3 million USD comp was a "sacrifice" she was making because she believes on the mission. Totally insane.

Well, if she can be getting paid $10M somewhere else, then it is a sacrifice.

If that's a real opportunity she has, I wish she'd leave Mozilla and take it. But given the abysmal performance of Mozilla, is she actually worth as much as she claims? Why should we believe her?

That's what happens when you cheap out on a CEO and pay them $3M instead of $10M :-)

This is a "let them eat cake" style of statement. Yeah the poor could sustain themselves on cake, but read the room. Especially as Firefox has made lots of layoffs recently.

I can't parse this comment. Who's the princess, what's the bread, and what's the cake? And what are they supposed to read in the room? As far as I can tell, "read the room" is something that people have been saying a lot on twitter over the past few months in order to silence people when they are correct, therefore difficult to argue with.

> Yeah the poor could sustain themselves on cake,

This is the opposite of what the anecdote is meant to say, right? The joke is that the poor can't sustain themselves on cake because lacking bread also means lacking cake. Is $3 million the bread? Is the CEO the poor? Am I having a stroke?

I'm not parent and I agree that it was not a carefully thought-out comment, but I'll give it a shot.

comment 1: How dare she say 3 million is a sacrifice? That's more money than many of us will see in an entire decade, if not more! None of us can get imagine getting 3 million!

comment 2: Well she could make 10 million, so 3 million to her is chump change.

My guess is as follows: The "us" in comment 1 is the poor, the failure to "read the room" is comment 2 mentioning the 10 million when the vast majority of people identify with comment 1 and thus think mentioning 10 million when even 3 million is unattainable is tone deaf.

Thus, loosely speaking, 10 million is cake, 3 million is bread.

But I agree with you that the analogy is not perfect.

"Let them eat cake" is a famous example of "not reading the room" because it was said while French peasants were starving and the royals feasted. Its an incredibly crass thing to say, like bragging about your wealth while your next door neighbor is being evicted.

By comparison here is a CEO announcing a noble "sacrifice" at 3 million/yr salary while people and projects were being axed at Mozilla - and in my view Mozilla continues to falter relative to what its trajectory could have been given the extreme amounts of capitol and talent they've had access to.

A real sacrifice would've been to take $0 (presumably this individual is already enormously wealthy).

The people getting axed...how much money did they make per year? Are they now in the poor house?

Is it not standard for lower paid product and sales roles to be axed first in these circumstances?

You do realize in these organizations not everyone is making 150k+.

that is less a problem with mozilla and more a problem with CEO class that get massive pay yet often its difficult to distinguish who is a real proffeshional and who is full of hot air

When did we decide the only people who could be CEOs had to be blessed with magic CEO-dust or whatever, and must be showered with cash because there aren't enough people so-dusted and they're apparently impossible to train unless they've had just the right pedigree from birth? Is there really no-one at the company who could do the job and would be happy to take a promotion and a "mere" $1M salary? It's not fucking brain surgery, normal people can figure it out, and they used to. It's just a job.

In Mozilla's case especially, such a gamble ("gamble"—I really don't think it's that out-there) seems eminently worth it, since they've been treading water at best for over a decade. What's the worst that can happen? They fail? Already happening.

I suspect this entire trend (across the economy, not just at Mozilla) is due to some combo of our modern intense aversion for taking responsibility for anything whatsoever, and pervasive self-dealing in the management class. Board won't replace the "right" kind of person with the "wrong" kind because it's Simply Not Done—why, if anyone in the top half of the intelligence bell curve and an OK work ethic could do their jobs with just a little experience and training, they might no longer command such insane salaries! Can't have that.

But, I'm open to the possibility that it did in fact become unworkable, for some reason I don't know about, to just train people into these positions as-needed, and in fact we do have to pay stupid amounts of money to a tiny, incestuous c-suite class who are the only possible candidates for these roles, or else everything will fall apart.

Again with this sentiment, you're not paying the CEO. "We" didn't decide that, the people with the 3M decided that person's services was worth that amount and it is their money to spend or waste as they see fit.

You get that I'm using that a touch poetically, which is a common usage of "we" in this kind of context, right? I.e. "what changed such that this is now how society operates, even though it seems kinda worse than how it operated before?" I (obviously?) don't mean that we all got together and decided this, and that only a small set of probably-biased-by-their-own-interests people are the ones making the decisions is exactly one of the possible reasons for it that I highlighted, making it (surely?) even clearer what my post was about.

Cool story bro. You should just start your own company and get a CEO and pay her $40k.

> "Is there really no-one at the company who could do the job and would be happy to take a promotion and a "mere" $1M salary?"

I want to reserve my response until you clarify who 'we' refers to. I just do not want to assume.

You don't have to hand wave a CEO as just magic dust. At least on paper the CEO is there for their ability to network at the highest of levels whether that is to recruit other executives, raise capital, predict global strategy, whatever.

Its all still horse shit, but if you want to tear down the American CEO institution you have to understand their first and primary argument is that they can still do things others can't, because they're (reportedly) in those smoke filled room where "big deals get done".

> Its all still horse shit, but if you want to tear down the American CEO institution you have to understand their first and primary argument is that they can still do things others can't, because they're (reportedly) in those smoke filled room where "big deals get done".

Sure—and I'm serious that I'm open to the possibility that something actually did change about the business landscape for non-shitty (i.e. not corruption or principal-agent-problem) reasons such that it's in fact true that there's a big advantage to hiring from the small pool of acceptable CEO candidates that justifies giving them entire train cars full of cash, but it does seem to me like we didn't used to operate that way and things were... basically fine. Not that there weren't huge advantages to being in the "right" set, or whatever, as there has been in any time and place, but that it seems like for the specific case of CEOs it used to be more acceptable to train up existing employees, who didn't start their employment with the company somewhere in the top-exec echelon, into those kinds of roles, which behavior seems like it would act as a pretty effective relief valve on CEO comp getting out of control.

What's going on now sure looks like what would happen if the people in charge of hiring for these roles had a strong interest in keeping the compensation extremely high. But it's still possible there's something else going on, and there are good, non-corrupt motivations at work.

> it does seem to me like we didn't used to operate that way

I think that's nostalgia glasses. The level of corruption in SV seems no different to me to Wall Street in the 90s. People in power grasping community resources as their own is nothing new to humankind.

Its still worth being passionate about and rebelling against. While the general theme of the corruption may be similar its still eventful that it is occurring in new areas and in new ways (i.e. SPACs, ICOs).

Admittedly, the "used to" is rather longer ago than the 90s :-) More like through the 70s.

> I think that's nostalgia glasses. The level of corruption in SV seems no different to me to Wall Street in the 90s. People in power grasping community resources as their own is nothing new to humankind.

The 90s might be the wrong point to measure from. Isn't it pretty well documented that CEOs are getting paid greater "multiples" of average pay than they had in the past (e.g. they used to be paid 100x, now they're paid 1000x)?

Many of the things used to balance the scales in the past are no longer possible, historically if you owned a business, the workers (who lived in the same area, spoke the same language, and drank at the same pub) could unionize, or decide that they were going to compete with the original business. Now you have a generic international labor force, who dont trust each other, and have large legal infrastructures preventing them from directly forming competing businesses.

> I'm open to the possibility that something actually did change about the business landscape ... such that it's in fact true that there's a big advantage to hiring from the small pool of acceptable CEO candidates that justifies giving them entire train cars full of cash...

Even if there was a big advantage to hire from the same small pool of acceptable candidates, that's no justification for paying them "entire train cars full of cash." There's all kinds of scarce and valuable skills that are just as rare but compensation doesn't shoot off to infinity.

Why is that insane? A CEO is just a job and how much you get paid depends on how much the industry is willing to pay you. So turning down 10mil to earn 3mil is indeed a sacrifice. Unless you have something against people making a lot of money or think once you hit some number you should not say anything bad about the pay. People don't get salaries because they earned or deserved them, they get them because that's what others are willing to pay for their work.

> So turning down 10mil to earn 3mil is indeed a sacrifice.

Agree whole-heartedly.

I'm all for reducing exec pay and wage disparity, but still... let's give ppl props when they do pro-social things. That's the moral equivalent of a talented software eng opting to take a 70% pay cut to work in non-profit or government sector instead of private sector. The majority of ppl reading and judging are doing no such thing

Taking money from an organization that intends to do good and riding it into the ground is sabotage, not charity. At least Marissa Mayer fixed Yahoo up long enough to pull off a sale. Firefox alternates between stagnation and self-injury.

First, I would still say yahoo was operated worse. Second, job performance has nothing to do with how much pay she accepted before even performing the job. If she is that bad they can fire her. Again, "their" money. Mozilla is not a corporation that wants to do good, it is a corporation that needs to make a profit. Which Mozilla service are you paying for? The few that coulr potentially be paid were implemented recently much to the horrir of the small number of fanboys.

Because there are plenty of people who are willing to take on the role, who love Mozilla products and actually believe in the mission. 3 mil. is more than enough for the CEO of a non-profit or a company like Mozilla. If she were to really be worth 10 millions as CEO she would be at FAANG, or a unicorn, etc... In that comment which at the time people called out, she was just doing more of the virtue signaling we are used to, and just revealed the type of leadership Mozilla have.

> despite receiving hundreds of millions of dollars per year from Google

> despite

"In spite of paying my 30 year old live-at-home son a $100,000 per year allowance, he has been unable to find and hold a full-time job"

Yeah, the Red Cross can screw right off. And libraries. Things should not exist in this world if they can't pay their own way...

Sorry, my words above feel gross. I don't normally write sarcastic comments, and I don't like to, but I was a little put off by the "good riddance" comment.

I just mean... aren't some entities cost centres that pay dividends later, sometimes non-monetarily. Kinda like children. Not everything needs to compete is the market and be judged a failure if it doesn't succeed through the single metric markets care about, right?

Anyhow, respect (despite my sarcastic start :) )

If the Red Cross were run by a lawyer, who gutted the budget for doctors and nurses and focused the organization on PR initiatives, yeah, fuck the Red Cross.

That's where Mozilla is.

Here's the regular reminder for people to carefully pay attention to the distinction between the Mozilla Foundation and the Mozilla Corporation.

The Corporation makes the browser (and presumably gets the Google money), the Foundation collects the donations and does PR/social justice/bettering-the-world initiatives.

The Foundation also gets paid by the Corporation for the right to use the Firefox brand.

You can't donate to the Corporation to fund Firefox development, and even if you could, any 'excess' profits the Corporation made would get siphoned out to the Foundation anyway.

Cool story but Mozilla Corporation is a wholly owned subsidiary of Mozilla Foundation. Mitchell Baker is Chair of both. For-profit Mozilla Corporation exists to wash revenue that can't go directly to the non-profit Foundation. c.f. Hollywood accounting.

The distinction matters, it's not just a 'cool story'. Money donated to the Mozilla Foundation legally cannot go to the Mozilla Corporation, and therefore cannot fund Firefox development.

Is that really true? I thought the foundation bought things from the corporation, like the right to use the Mozilla brand, and did so using donation dollars.

It's the other way around; Mozilla Foundation owns the trademark and Mozilla Corporation pays the Foundation to use it. From their 2020 financial statement (https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2020/mozilla-fdn-202...):

> The Corporation and MZLA pay license fees per trademark license agreements with the Foundation. In January 2020, the trademark license agreement was amended between the Corporation and the Foundation, whereby, the Corporation will pay the Foundation a royalty payment based on the Corporation’s annual revenue. The amount of royalties owed are calculated using a tiered rate structure, but at no time will the royalty payment go below the lesser of $11.0 million or six (6)% of search revenue. The Corporation incurred $16.3 million and $15.9 million in license fees to the Foundation in 2020 and 2019, respectively.

> The trademark license agreement between MZLA and the Foundation stipulates that MZLA will pay the Foundation a royalty payment based upon the revenue generated from certain products. MZLA paid $63,787 and $0 in license fees to the Foundation in 2020 and 2019, respectively.

>Mozilla's management is incompetent and shady.

Yes, and plenty of guys have been saying that since day 0 of the new management taking over, only to get ignored and hushed away. Yet, here we are 8(!) years later :).

New unpopular opinion: Mozilla needs to disappear. The faster it does the better, as it is already dead.

Maybe the billions are the reason why they are not innovating

I'm curious how much other major brands pay to stay in their places

Coke arguably pays megabucks to have giant displays in prime locations. Those locations have limited space so Coke taking up one is

Similarly, IIUC, companies pay to have their products put in conspicuous places in stores like Walmart, Target, etc. Only rich companies can afford to always get the spots that stick out the most.

I don't know if those are compariable. Google pays Apple to be the default search engine seems no different than Coke paying to be the first soda on the aisle or to be featured on the edge of the aisle. People are still free to pick a different search engine or go into the soda aisle.

Of course in retail another tactic is to make a bunch of products that appear to be different but are all basically the same. I think Crest or Colgate and 15 kinds of mouthwash all of which have the same "active ingredient" at the same concentration. The goal is to fill up the shelves with your products so there is no room left for the competition's products since shelf space is limited.

Coke gives Disney unlimited free beverages as long as they only sell coke products in their parks

Sounds like bullshit and at least one site agrees with my intuition:

> Legend: Because of the advertising value of having its products featured at Disney theme parks, Coca Cola provides Disneyland with all of its beverage products free of charge.

>Behind the Legend: This is true, but highly misleading. For years, Coke has had an advantage over rival Pepsi because it provides its products free of charge to all of its customers. The company makes up the loss by requiring that beverages only be sold in official cups or containers -- and charging an enormous amount for those contains. The container charge is based on a sliding scale depending on the customer. Individual consumers, purchasing beverages at a grocery or convenience store, pay only a few cents for the can or bottle in which their beverage comes. At the other end of the scale, movie theaters and theme parks like Disneyland pay as much as $2.00 for a single drink cup, making the exorbitant prices charged for drinks at those locations completely understandable.

I wonder if this is why stores are assholes when you want a glass of water, and they give you the dinkiest cup.

That site is effectively continuing the urban legend, but shifting it to be that Disney pays for cups.

In reality, Coca-Cola and Disney's partnership is quite complex, and didn't become exclusive until 1990 (https://www.upi.com/Archives/1990/01/24/Disney-Coke-sign-15-...).

They've never publicly disclosed the terms, but I'm sure they aren't as simple as "we give you free syrup", given the depth of the co-marketing (e.g. giant coca-cola store at WDW, the Star Wars cokes they sell at the park, more examples here - https://disneyparks.disney.go.com/blog/2021/09/celebrating-c...).

It would be like if Pepsi paid Coke billions to not make soda. Or if Coke paid Walmart billions to not sell or make their own soda.

They are paying them to not compete. Isn't that the definition of antitrust?

It's standard practice to offload truckloads of cash on marteking while you dominate the market. The purpose always is to stay on top. I personally think it should be illegal to spend $1 on marketing for companies above a certain size

The problem with this is that it's basically unenforceable. What counts as marketing? E.g. is sponsoring a charity event marketing?

If they plaster that charity event with their logo and name, then certainly yes. If it were really about charity and not advertising, they could do it as anonymously as a public corporation can, and not have the event plaster posters for the company everywhere.

It's possible that the charities would get less money, probably a lot less money. That doesn't sound like a good trade off to me.

There would always be companies donating to charities and advertising - just only the ones below the threshold. And the variety and number would be a lot more vibrant

Word-of-mouth would actually be what the mega corps would aim for in this hypothetical system. They would be forced to treat customers super nice and actually lose money. Consumers would win and competition would improve. I propose the increased number of competitors would actually increase the donations made to charities. It just wouldn't all come from Coca Cola Corp and instead from hundreds of others

> There would always be companies donating to charities and advertising - just only the ones below the threshold

Below the threshold of what?

How does a company get word of mouth regarding its charitable donations if their contributions are anonymous?

> Google pays Apple to be the default search engine seems no different than Coke paying to be the first soda on the aisle or to be featured on the edge of the aisle. People are still free to pick a different search engine or go into the soda aisle.

It feels a little different to me because changing the default search engine requires more steps than simply walking down the aisle and it's obvious that the drink aisle has more drinks. Finding the search engine settings is rather difficult for the average user if they even know that there's settings for Safari, especially now that some of the settings are in Safari itself and others are tucked away in the Settings app.

In my mind, it seems it would be more comparable if iOS had you choose the default search engine at setup and listed Google first or every shopping cart in a grocery store already had Coke in it, depending on which direction you wanted to make them comparable.

From an economic perspective they are quite comparable.

However, the complaint isn't asserting that such marketing practices are inherently illegal or harmful to a competitive marketplace.

The accusation is that google abused its market dominance to render any competition virtually impossible, or at least fiscally unfeasible. If the market for search engines that also control the end-to-end ad/marketing space like Google does were genuinely competitive, this practice wouldn't be illegal according to the DOJ. Even if a company as unethical, obtrusive, innovative, and effective as Google existed and wanted to compete in this field, thered be almost no way of breaking into the market. That also explains why the charges are happening now instead of when they began this practice in the early 2000's, to answer the defense's question asked regarding why this happening now after all this time.

IMO, the most telling and head-scratching detail is Google's claim that they face competition in the search engine marketplace with the likes of Amazon, GitHub, tik tok, meta and even Expedia? All because people don't have to use Google to access those products.

It's ridiculous to claim just because you have information and a search function, it's somehow a competitor to Google. Feels insulting they claim all of those entirely different products, which don't seek to index the web and provide general search capabilities, qualify as competitors.

Defense by comparison to tiktok and meta?

"no the users aren't our customers, they're the product, and the market for their attention is very competitive srsly!"

To be fair, meta basically wants to be the web and in practice, for many people i know, it basically is.

The comparisons are misleading. Google is gatekeeping search. Cocacola is not forcing you to drink to enter a stadium.

Honestly ... Sometimes it feels like it. If you are out and are looking for a non-alcoholic beverage you are often limited to Coca Cola products. If you you then would prefer to have a non-sugary drink you are often left with water.

(Background: German bar and clubbing scene; exceptions apply; this has somewhat changed with 0.0% beverages)

innovating is hard and haphazard, paying to defend your position is expensive but easy and incredibly predictable

i'd be very surprised if any large company with a commanding market share isn't spending a significant chunk of change on lobbying and other ways of locking newcomers out of their market

Wouldn’t it be really good for google if the DOJ banned paying for default placement? I mean it seems like an untenable result to say that anyone but google can pay for default placement. So if paying for default is not okay, then that just saves google a lot of money (since google knows most people will pick them if presented a slate of options).

If they knew most people would pick them, then why are they paying?

To prevent their competitors for making deals to be the default.

Bingo. Google is less paying for default placement and more paying so that they aren’t locked out by default.

Most people would pick Google if there was no default option.

Most people don’t change the default option though. If Google didn’t (or couldn’t by law) pay such large sums, someone else (e.g. Bing) would pay a bit less and become the default. Even though most people prefer Google over Bing, there is still a significant incumbent advantage for being the default option.

And because little old Microsoft couldn’t afford to pay Apple to be the default search engine?

Well, no. They did pay to become the default and I guess it was a big enough hit to Google that Google opened the pocketbook.

https://appleinsider.com/articles/17/09/25/apple-switches-fr...

Because Apple is extorting them.

What would a fair default option be?

Either letting the user choose, or the developers setting a default (ideally with the interests of their users in mind). Of course, the latter is subject to interpretation, and a privacy-focused application might make a different choice than standard consumer products.

Any choice made that doesn't involve a kickback.

There's a difference in exclusive dealing by a market leader and by a new entrant.

Of course, if and as a new entrant garners increased share, rules should change to reflect that.

The problem is that market dominance tends to be a positive feedback loop, for reasons not associated with actual product superiority. Ultimately it quashes choice, competition, new innovation, and the like.

Current US antitrust legal theory mostly ignores this based on the Bork / Posner / Director (all Chicago School) tradition. See Cory Doctorow's new book Chokepoint Capitalism for a revised take: <https://doctorow.medium.com/what-is-chokepoint-capitalism-b8...>

Chrome showed us that people will change the default when something is clearly a better experience for the user, even when the entrenched giant was Microsoft.

Just like with what happened with IE, as Google Search becomes worse and worse quality with advertising cruft, SEO spam etc. filling the first pages of results there will come a point where they’ve lowered the bar enough for a competitor to come in.

That said, I’d still prefer to be asked on first use “which search engine would you like to use?”.

Chrome leveraged Google Web Search, itself already an established monopoly in search, to facilitate that spread.

The entrenched giant was Mozilla with Firefox. Chrome was distributed as malware included in various installers including Flash updates. And as scareware when using Google services.

I default to Bing on desktop, and DDG on mobile. For a specific search, I often give-up, and begrudgingly revert.

It's obvious that Google search has become the better product, but quality has wavered in the past 5 years, it's been on an uptrend. That on occasion the search task reports a 1.4s delay is actually reassuring.

Functioning operator search, Scholar, and Books seem to be the distinct advantage Google has for many of my use cases.

My biggest issue with all of the big players is the gaslighting and erosion. They need to dogfood everything. When my keyboard ime is suddenly under attack, and it gets stuck that way for months, it's time to look at how you're doing things.

What is your reason for using bing instead of DDG on the desktop? DDG uses results from bing, so in theory the quality should be the same?

Bing's results tend to be a lot more crowded and visually distracting, I'd really just rather have search results on my tiny phone screen.

But why would you want the distraction on desktop?

Apple for sure would have already built or acquired a search engine if it was not for Google giving them billions to stay on the iPhone.

I’m not so sure about this. Apple doesn’t (seem to) mind killing off sources of revenue by doing something new.

Apple did build a search engine, but it doesn’t look like Google on the front end, it looks like a set of features in Siri, Maps, iOS, MacOS, etc.

Google’s deal with Apple is specifically for iPhone’s built in web browser. Apple was working on a web search engine, but killed it off after Google renewed their deal the first time.

> Apple was working on a web search engine, but killed it off after Google renewed their deal the first time.

They might've said they killed it off (I haven't seen reports of that), but the Applebot crawler has been increasingly indexing the web for at least 8 years, ostensibly for services like Siri and Spotlight: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204683

Also, we know Apple hates to be beholden to other companies, triply so for core platform capabilities. Search is surely that, especially as its importance extends beyond the web into meatspace — streets, stores, things, etc.

Apple will introduce web search based on their search engine when it's clear that it beats Google in notable ways. If that takes another 5 years, I'd guess they're fine with that.

That's the interesting thing about this. It's an open question of which monopolist is abusing their power here. Apple threatening to use their iPhone monopoly to bully their way into search or Google paying off Apple to forestall competition.

It's interesting that they haven't considering their stance on privacy and user data. Maybe Facebook can cough up some dough to become a default social media app.

Apple slaps down Facebook but allows Google to pay to be the default surveillance capitalist search provider?

An apple search engine oh man I wonder what that would be like

"To list your site on Apple please submit your DUNS number and pay the $100 annual fee?"

An Apple search engine would require that people who want to be listed submit to the Web Search Guidelines which would require things like "respecting DNT", "allowing users to log in with Apple if they offer social login", "supporting Apple Pay", "no spamming", "no rehosting scraped content", and collect a 30% commission on purchases made with their special "products" results. It would be privacy first, collect no information about a user's searches but generate a ranking on a generic index based on an on-device/in-browser ML model. Apple would spend comparably little effort making sense of the messy content on random websites and instead make websites provide a curated, easily digestible format to them. And sites would bend the knee to access iPhone users.

Never before would you see so many people on Reddit/HN pissed off at how successful it is.

I can’t find it for the life of me now. But someone did create a web interface to Apple’s “search engine”. It’s used in different parts of the interface.

https://cmitsolutions.com/hartford/apples-web-crawler-appleb...

On the other hand, Apple has been operating a podcast indexer for over 15 years that anyone can submit podcast RSS feeds and has had a fully documented API for searching its index the entire time. Any third party client can use it.

No, Apple never stores the audio on its servers unlike Spotify.

Or building a search engine as good as Google is hard.

Maybe. Apple passed on buying Yahoo Search when it was up for sale though.

Yahoo has used Microsoft's Bing search engine to power results since 2009.

It has been either Bing or Google since 2009, but when Marissa came on board, she revived the old search engine team. The effort was shut down just before the sale to Verizon.

My personal moment when I realized Google isn't as smart as I thought, came from searching phone numbers.

A number calls me.

I type in the number with spaces to Google to try and find it. No results. Nothing.

I add dashes. Results come up.

I put the area code in parentheses, different results come up.

If google can't figure out how to search 9 digit numbers against phone numbers correctly, I'm not sure I can trust them for anything.

Wow, you're smarter than I am, or at least more persistent. I ran into the same thing and I figured it was some sort of privacy issue or something and just switched to looking the numbers up on Bing. Pretty sure it used to work to google numbers without the dashes.

Identifying something as a phone number is very difficult. https://github.com/google/libphonenumber/blob/master/FALSEHO...

Those things are all true, but if I search Google for: 510 555 1212 It shouldn't take massive AI and 25 phds to find a result for a company that lists 510-555-1212 as their phone number.

Ok maybe it does. But it's not like Google is a startup and they haven't had time to get around to it.

And add in the fact that if I do search 510 555-1212 I really wish they could atleast bring up (510) 555-1212.

I guess for now I'll give them a pass on 510.555.1212

I was under the impression spam callers in particular actively randomize and spoof their numbers.

They definitely do. But I'm usually searching the number of real people I talked to that put in a lead. Eventually I can find something usually, I just have to try various forms of formatting usually.

My only source for this claim is my memory but google was better for phone number reverse lookup in the past.

I wonder whether google has nerfed their own search results for phone numbers and email addresses.

i believe they have, as it probably opened the door for too much nefarious use back when it worked well

> Google faces competition from dozens of other companies, he said, including ByteDance Ltd.’s TikTok, Meta Platforms Inc., Amazon.com Inc., Grubhub Inc.

Google faces competition from Grubhub like General Motors faces competition from Schwinn.

https://archive.ph/pfQWv

I remember when Firefox's motto was "your web the way you like it."

Now users have to install an extension to set a home page, which- and I'm sure this is pure coincidence- might interfere with users interaction with the search bar, known in bygone days as the URL bar. By the way, Firefox's default search engine is google.

Mozilla also wants to deplatform/ban anyone they disagree with politically, which is the entire opposite of "your web the way you like it".

You're being down voted, but I must say this is one of the things that has been most slowly driving me away from Mozilla. They are not only developing a browser, but they also have an economical and political agenda. That's okay if you agree with them, but it just feels so wrong that when I'm using their browser or donate to the Mozilla foundation I'm in some ways supporting this.

If you're reading this and you're not aware what we're talking about check out their blog post from last year [0].

Generally free software is already pretty political, just take a look at the FSF, but Mozilla takes this to the next level, and makes it even worse by having this confusing corporation/foundation setup where you are kind of deceived of donating for the foundation to help develop Firefox (their only important product) when that money can never (legally) be used for that purpose.

It just doesn't feel genuine. I am back to using Firefox though because Blink being the only browser engine is a monopolistic nightmare waiting to happen (in fact it already is, any web spec is just a suggestion, the true spec is what Google decides to do with their browser).

PS: I should also put a disclaimer that I'm not American, do not live in the USA, and do not care much about what happens there, and that's kind of what bothers me so much, not so much the political-alignment of Mozilla itself. Although I do think that de-platforming is enough, and I'm not really a fan of "factual voices", being someone that lives in a third world country which has already taken this path, where both extreme right and left claim to be the holders of the absolute truth.

[0]: https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/leadership/we-need-more-...

You can set your home page to any url without any extension, you need an extension to set your new tab page to something other than the default or blank. The most popular extensions to configure new tabs was to make them blank so they added that feature.

Having the new tab page be a remote page doesn't make much sense if it ever goes down or you're not on the internet. Would pressing + open a new tab to yahoo.com or would it load yahoo.com but display an empty url bar?

What else do you want from them?

Google search results have become quite terrible over the past few years.

Have important people on the search team moved on?

One thing I find amazing is that "single box" search engines are still the standard.

The biggest pain point of using Google is when it incorrectly guesses what you are trying to search. But the user is only allowed to type in one little box, so it's hard for the user to even express what they want.

If the user had multiple inputs, such as the ability to drill down, define general topics, etc., it would be way easier for them to express what they actually want.

A Google competitor that did this well could win.

Isn't this the classic HN misconception, that complex, customisable interfaces ought to be popular?

Yes. Classic approach here is that exposing more behavior is better and that there should be rich formal languages for interacting with systems. Good for HN, more questionable for the rest of users.

They are though. The most profitable paid search engines have incredibly sophisticated operators and interfaces. Westlaw has a super sophisticated topic sorting system that goes back about a century. Lexis has something similar it generates by software.

Free search isn’t the only way. When your users all charge hundreds or thousands of dollars an hour and really need good information, they will pay a lot.

What’s ultimately limited is general user free search. Normal person time just isn’t very valuable and they mostly just want stimulation. Google is mostly a stimulation engine pretending to be a knowledge engine. It started off as more of a knowledge engine and over time optimized itself for providing a buzz.

Firstly, those are apparently geared towards legal research; I was replying to a comment about "a Google competitor". Secondly, B2B software (which I'm guessing those programs might be) has much less incentive for good, simplified UI/UX, even when it's obviously feasible and useful. The focus is almost always on customisations or new configurations that will draw in more leads.

Yes, this site skews heavily not just in favor of engineers, but the more old-school, "give me the box of tools and leave me alone" style engineer. 99% of humans who use a computer just want a single button that implicitly means "give me content" and they're satisfied.

https://www.google.com/advanced_search

This?

Yes, and very few people use that because most users can't tell an app from a website, spell URL correctly or tell you what "" does in google.

When I need those features I use the operators directly in the search field anyway.

The single omniscient search field is an amazing interface, it's incredible at what it does, which is understanding what our idiodic human brain is attempting to express with sausage fingers a monday morning.

> spell URL correctly

That's impossiboe by design. There are different cuaracters that look identical, foreign alphabets and special characters. Then there are GUids and queries in url

Oof. That's really complicated and still doesn't do the trick.

Concrete example -- when searching Reddit, I can check a box to confine the search to the current subreddit I'm on. That does a wonderful job of restricting results, and... it's one checkbox.

You don't need to make search feel like filing your taxes to make it better.

> Oof. That's really complicated and still doesn't do the trick.

> Concrete example -- when searching Reddit, I can check a box to confine the search to the current subreddit I'm on. That does a wonderful job of restricting results, and... it's one checkbox.

> You don't need to make search feel like filing your taxes to make it better.

I'm surprised at the Reddit example since Reddit's search capabilities are in-fact so awful that people have actually quit the platform for it or have at the very least resorted to using Google to search for specific Reddit threads (doable via Google's advanced search or simply adding the keyword "site:reddit.com").

In fact, the capability you described is present on the Advanced Search form. Look for the row "site or domain" and you can constrain your search to just specific sites.

I think the thing people miss is that Google effectively creates the function you're describing not just by having a multi-field search box (advanced search) but by allowing that to be achieved through just one text box (e.g "site:", "inurl:", "filetype:", and other key words), and for more tailored searches, Google provides entirely distinct UIs such as News, Shopping, Scholar (my favorite), etc.

I suppose I'm just lost as to what the main complaint is. I can't bring myself to work at Google because of how heavily they rely on adtech for revenue, but I can't hate their search.

That just creates the search with boolean operators for you... which Google then ignores. Attempts to search for an “exact string” are merely a suggestion to Google. They’d rather return 10 pages of definitely not what I wanted (i.e., wrong!) results than only return one or two hits even if those one or two hits are exactly what I’m searching for!

Nah, you can still force it. It treats exact-strings as suggestions at first, but you can still power through.

e.g https://www.google.com/search?q="search+enqine"

click the link that says "Search instead for 'search enqine'"

So Google understood my search query perfectly fine, but still chose to ignore what I asked for, and then makes me jump through additional hoops to get my initial question answered?

> So Google understood my search query perfectly fine, but still chose to ignore what I asked for, and then makes me jump through additional hoops to get my initial question answered?

Google's catering to the common audience, so yes basically. The hoops are for people who know what they're doing, which is annoying but understandable.

is there any proof that this has improved search for most people? Everyone i kniw says the opposite

improving search is not the main goal, rather it's keeping an interface that can still plausibly be described as "search" while allowing for the most ad impressions and clicks

Yes. Many years ago Google search leaders concluded it made more sense to optimize for what most people do: make bad queries. Ignoring quotes produces results that people click on more than respecting quotes (averaged over billions of users). This is also why the number one signal for ranking is user clicks, not something like page rank.

What percentage of searches require something this complex? I’ve been using Google for 20 years now and I’d be hard-pressed to remember a single time when I pined for a more complex interface.

The vast majority of my searches are simple, so I just do my first search and then (in order of frequency) find what I was looking for, do a second search that is either more or less complex than the first, or forget why I was searching in the first place.

Since the results from my first search are often enough, why would I want the interface to do that search to be more complex when the complexity is rarely needed?

When the subject is a generic or overloaded name, it's very common. For example, I've often done searches related to Smalltalk or Lisp (the programming languages) combined with names of various popular but generic libraries and get lots of results for small talk[1] and lisps[2]. There are various techniques you can use to cajole Google into giving you something closer to what you want but you end up losing a lot of the results that are the most useful due to terms you need to add to your search that aren't on most pages.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_talk [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisp

People don’t enjoy more complex search inputs. This can be readily seen at libraries where users strongly desire Google-style catalog search and don’t like being shown separate fields for author, title, keyword, etc. Worldcat hid that traditional search view years ago and, like Google, keeps it around for those who prefer it.

Increasing max query length seems more promising since it keeps the simple interface. Search expectations are changing as we Google more verbose errors and eventually expect to shape our search queries as we do our GPT prompts with extra moods, language styles, countries of origin, etc.

> Worldcat hid that traditional search view years ago and, like Google, keeps it around for those who prefer it.

In fact, it's so true that in order to find Advanced Search on Google and it doesn't occur to you to go into the settings menu in the top right (the gear - because why would anyone bury Advanced Search there anyway?), you have to actually google Advanced Search.

For Google to have buried it like this, Advanced Search must've been confusing the vast majority of people who tried to use it.

> For Google to have buried it like this, Advanced Search must've been confusing the vast majority of people who tried to use it.

Apple, the industry leading expert of UX, didn't have copy/paste in iOS for years. Compelling evidence that copy/paste is too complicated for people, right? Then one day they added copy/paste, I guess the nature of people changed over night and Apple merely responded to this new tolerance for complexity. They're the experts, after all.

Or maybe, [tech company] not implementing [feature] isn't good evidence for that feature being undesirable to the public.

> Apple, the industry leading expert of UX, didn't have copy/paste in iOS for years. Compelling evidence that copy/paste is too complicated for people, right? Then one day they added copy/paste, I guess the nature of people changed over night and Apple merely responded to this new tolerance for complexity. They're the experts, after all.

> Or maybe, [tech company] not implementing [feature] isn't good evidence for that feature being undesirable to the public.

Not sure Google burying advanced search is a good analogy here since Google once used to make advanced search easily accessible from the main page.

In fact, they still do depending on your user agent. Case in point: Wayback Machine's view from today. https://web.archive.org/web/20220909000247/https://www.googl...

The fact that its appearance is variable would seem to suggest it's a very deliberate decision to determine whether to surface it, unlike Apple just trying to force its own worldview.

My point is that these companies are not ruthlessly scientific user experience optimization machines. Google burying advanced search should not be taken as evidence that users didn't like advanced search.

Apple added copy paste two years after the iPhone was introduced

https://www.engadget.com/2009-03-17-iphone-finally-gets-copy...

> For Google to have buried it like this, Advanced Search must've been confusing the vast majority of people who tried to use it.

Or, pushing people towards the simplified "let us figure out what you want" showed slightly better ad conversion rates.

How about instead of doing really dumb complex forms we put our thinking heads on and try to optimize the process.

If you type 'Tolkin' the UI could suggest 'Author' and if you click on it adds it as a constraint. There are all kinds of things you could do by having a simple switch to complex search and have interesting options with a good UI.

I think something like that can work, but at Google scale, the suggestions would have to not hinder users who accidentally click them or think they did something just by appearing. Google has largely succeeded by trying to guess when the searcher means the author Tolkien without any UI prompt/change.

Again, I don't want to replace the initial model, but have a 'Complex Search' page that does this.

The issue is that sometimes you know you want to the 'Rust' programming language, not the 'Rust' video game. And in a complex search you could express these things and you could get much better results.

Sorry, I missed that you were proposing this for a separate search page and not the main search.

pay for kagi.com; it has “lenses” that define a corpus for your search

I'm trying it out for free and so far it's turning up great results. Thanks for the recommendation.

There's also Brave Search which has "Goggles" that perform the same function. https://search.brave.com/goggles

99% of searches are good enough with just a single text phrase. 1% needs more refinement. The current approach is personalization but I think having more dialogue like UX which can better capture the contextual information might be more suitable. But the blocker here is that our so-called AI technology is not there yet and those 1% searches are usually not very valuable in terms of revenue.

Back in the day, one of my first developer jobs was to build a "meta-search" system that issued queries and scraped results from something like a dozen different search engines - it supported pagination, direct links, annotations etc. all written in Perl.

The 30 or 40 folks I supported found it insanely useful, and it ran on a spare decrepit laptop in a corner of my office with literal dozens of MB of RAM. This was maybe...2002?

I sort of miss the days when there were different engines with different strengths and weaknesses and an endless set of matches for very literal queries.

Users knew exactly why they got the responses they got from Altavista or whatever other engine and understood it was mostly a matter of what they indexed instead of a black-box of "optimizations" that give semi-random results most of which are spam sites.

I miss the old days.

i'm pretty sure the timing is right to jump back in the game, people are paying kagi, the marginalia threads on here are getting lots of comments and good discussion. people are tired of google and the fact they've let google search rot and even made it intentionally worse and worse for users who aren't ad cows.

so here's to hoping some of the optimism and beauty of the niche search solution you ran can return and is not just relegated to the past

Just for a point of reference: Unless Google has someone increased their profit dramatically with respect to Android over the past 5 years and I don’t see how since Android’s market share hasn’t changed that much since 2016, Apple makes far more from Google in mobile than Google makes from Android.

https://www.engadget.com/2016-01-21-android-22-billion-in-pr...

The article did not mention specific numbers, but Google is estimated to pay Apple about $20B this year to stay integrated into their systems. That amount surely buys a lot of favors.

it's true~ish but laughable because google sucks compared to ten years ago, bing and yandex aren't useless either

i only use it to find things on specific websites like SO or reddit

if I want to find a newer website I try newer search engines

Isn't this the kind of argument that bites the government in the foot?

On the one hand, plenty of antitrust people argue that Google is a natural monopoly and needs to be broken up because the regular rules of competition aren't working.

On the other hand, here's the DOJ seemingly arguing the opposite -- that Google needs to fight so hard to maintain competitive dominance that it's forced to pay billions of dollars just to keep its market position.

You can't have it both ways. And companies strike exclusivity deals all the time, that's normal capitalism. Really this is just ammunition for why Google isn't abusing anything, it's just competing normally.

Sure you can. The ability to establish a noncompetitive monopoly via paying billions of dollars to maintain a market position that allows them to make those payments and still make billions of dollars of profit is perfectly compatible with and even evidence for a monopoly. DDG isn't going to be able to write those checks.

Though perhaps simply banning these types of exclusivity deals would be sufficient to return to a competitive market. It seems lighter touch than breaking up Google.

> Google needs to fight so hard to maintain competitive dominance

These are words you're putting in their mouths.

> pay billions of dollars just to keep its market position.

This is what they're doing. It's not a desperate fight, it's a bribe of what is a trivial amount for Google. It's a network of patronage run by a monopolist, not desperate street-fighting bribes, or whatever it is that the DOJ can't have both ways.

Imagine a similar scenario where a local businessman is paying off local politicians and judges. Would you actually make the argument that the fact that the businessman is paying everyone off shows that his position is so precarious that he can't possibly be running the town? Monopolistic behavior as evidence against monopoly?

This argument falls down because if all it took was a few billion in capital to buy a bunch of ads and the right partnerships and then extract 100x the value from your newfound monopoly it would be the easiest business opportunity in all of existence.

You can't compare this to government bribes because the bidding process isn't open. If politicians sold their votes publicly to the highest bidder the market dynamics would be different and maintaining power would be ludicrously expensive. If Google really is paying "trivial" amounts of money then those partnerships must not really be as market swaying as argued.

Google paying tiny amounts is evidence of a monopoly. Google paying large amounts is evidence of a competitive market.

If they didn’t pay so much then Bing or Yahoo would pay a slightly smaller amount to be the default and not Google. Would that be fair?

Its not the money so much as the methods. Though the money does keep it out of reach.

I thought Yahoo shows Bing search results.

Correct. Yahoo! Search is powered by Bing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo!_Search

If we're going for fair how about outlawing search engine defaults since they've proven to lead to unreasonable competitive advantage.

What's the alternative?

During setup you have to choose amongst hundreds of options, e.g. does "you.com" make the list?

Maybe those engines could all bid on an annual basis to be positioned higher in the rankings? /s :)

Well it could be a small list chosen by Firefox as a result of an honest selection of the best options their users would most likely want, rather than just defaulting to the megacorp that bribed them with the most money.

But I'm really solutionising here, and I'm sure some of the worlds brightest engineers can come up with a solution thats better for users than "we default to whoever pays us the most money".

Let's create an extension that merely prompts for the URL of your desired search engine. On confirm, it makes all the technical browser settings to set as default.

good idea, where to start? do you have a good extension skeleton repo to start from? i've only worked on a firefox only extension but it probably should be chrome and ff compatible especially now with brave

I noticed that Ecosia, Startpage, and Brave search all have extensions that will set those as the default. I am not sure if their code is open, but I imagine the Brave extension is probably best place to start.

Browsers don't have to have default search engines built-in at all. They didn't used to.

Huh, I wonder what the effect would be if integrating search into the browser was outlawed. Short term I don't think much would change but long term? Dunno...

Not sure what you're getting at; ideally they're subject to the same anti-trust legislation as Google. The fact that others might also try to break the law doesn't make it pointless to uphold the law.

We're in a weird world where we're asking if it's okay for the public to be harmed because a company with lots of money (that they earned from the public) is paying another company lots of money.

Changing a default search engine is extremely easy and cheap. I struggle to define it as “harm”.

Should a person not be expected to be able to do that much?

In theory it is and yet the extremely high price Google is willing to pay to keep it default suggests that it's harder than it looks.

Plenty of non techies are deathly afraid of changing any settings. Google is paying a high price to erect an artificial barrier to entry against less well capitalized competitors looking to target them.

Google paying a high price suggests people will not change the default. It does not suggest changing the default is hard.

People may not change the default because they

1. find it too difficult

2. they do not believe they are negatively effected by not changing the default

3. they do not even know it is a choice

4. or they prefer Google.

Going into 2022, I would rather governments focus on educating people how to use computing devices than nannying them by barring two businesses from engaging in business. #1 thru #3 can be changed via public education, or even requiring more transparency from search engines to make comparing them easier.

The physical actions of changing the default are not hard.

>Going into 2022, I would rather governments focus on educating people

Yes, thats what most corporations engaged in abusive or anticompetitive business practices say. Credit card companies rake in the dough from abusive interest rates and then feign an interest in helping "educate" the consumers out of being exploited by them to keep regulators off their back and the senators they purchase do the same.

Rinse and repeat, feigning concern for "financial literacy" for 30 years with nothing changing because nothing was supposed to. The system was "working".

I say put the regulators on their backs. If a business transaction is bad for the public then f*king prohibit it. End of story. "Educating users" out of avoiding abusive practices isnt meant to work.

>If a business transaction is bad for the public then f*king prohibit it.

If only life were that easy. Is it bad for the public that Costco and Walmart deliver lower prices to customers via efficiencies if scale? Or is it better to have more inefficient local stores?

>Is it bad for the public that Costco and Walmart deliver lower prices to customers via efficiencies if scale?

Obviously not. Whereas if they could pay local governments money to keep the other one out so they could jack up prices that would be bad.

It is not obvious to me. Maybe it is better for a society to have redundancies in supply chains and business operations. Or having businesses spread out through a region as opposed to conglomerated in a few spots with big box stores.

Or maybe it is worth the lower prices. Or maybe it is not in society’s best interest if Walmart is so big they can force suppliers to cut quality to meet their prices.

> Going into 2022, I would rather governments focus on educating people how to use computing devices than nannying them by barring two businesses from engaging in business. #1 thru #3 can be changed via public education, or even requiring more transparency from search engines to make comparing them easier.

Google/Microsoft/etc will donate tons of hardware and software to public schools to ensure teaching kids to use their products become the lesson plan. They're already doing this; they pay schools to be the default just like they pay Mozilla to be the default.

So you still have to solve the same sort of problem, except "company donates computers to school" sounds like a sort of charity and that makes it relatively politically unassailable.

The issue is on competition. Nobody can really change consumer behavior, but we can regulate businesses to ensure the free market remains fair and competitive.

Changing the default search engine is incredibly difficult and sometimes even impossible.

It's in fact so difficult that you'll have an easier time getting people to use your search engine if you ask them to install your extension or even your own browser.

If you want somewhat fair competition that's 'easy and cheap' then it should be possible to prompt for user permission to change the default search engine on any browser. It should be possible to avoid abuse by restricting the search engine change to the domain requesting the change.

I disagree with the premise, but if you really think changing the default is so hard, that seems like FF's fault, not Google's.

It's just as hard on Chrome and every other browser. So far I've yet to meet a single non-developer capable of changing their default search engine to my website without my help.

Try changing the default search engine on iOS Safari to some search engine that Apple hasn't hardcoded into their settings (e.g. https://ask.moe, https://search.brave.com, etc).

This seems to be by design and influenced by the funding. Many search providers created an extension as the easiest path for end users. Most users don't seem to even understand the difference between a browser and search engine.

There should be government regulation around - according to which criteria internet browsers are offering their users default search engines. So for example if I make new internet search engine how do I get Apple and Google to offer it in their browsers as default search engine. Because it seems like Apple and Google are doing it on voluntary basis of good will not because government or anybody else told them to do so.

Firefox making it easy to change the default (or worse, prompting the user on first-run with some choices) would devalue the default. That default is how Mozilla makes money, so I don't expect them to address this any time soon.

If its so easy, then why is google paying so much for it? You think they are stupid and they aren't getting their money's worth?

You can't have it both ways - simultaneously argue that market is efficient and we should let it do it's own thing, and that market is stupid to pay for defaults because changing them is so easy.

Google is responsible for almost all of FF's income, so this is a distinction without a difference.

My comment was worded in generality because Google and default search engines is only one instance of the phenomenon. For instance: Microsoft or Sony paying game companies not to release games on competitors platforms.

But to your specific point, this isn't (directly) about harm to users who don't know enough to care what search engine they use. It's about the number of users Google has allowing them to influence policy (privacy, tracking), technology decisions (internet standards), and the market (delisting or downlisting companies, promoting competitor pages, disabling adword accounts which can cascade to android developer accounts, etc).

So it's okay for me to rob you, because if I dont do it, the next criminal will?

Yes, and here's hoping that trend continues and Google searches become extinct.

Where can I find the actual information from the DOJ about this?

Also:

> a lawsuit from 2014 revealed that Google paid Apple $1 billion to be the main search engine on iPhone

Why does it take a lawsuit to discover these cashflows? Google can pay Apple billions and nobody knows until there is a lawsuit?

Everyone knew that Google was paying Apple, they just didn't know exactly how much.

I know I should hate google for some reason, but despite the SEO spam, they are still better than bing and duck duck go.

I think my cocktail of degoogled Google products + adblock solutions + being that person who doesn't care about privacy has made Google 'fine'.

I avoid using Google products unless they are FOSS. I'm not going to get screwed by "play music" or similar again.

Out of FAAMG, I think I like Google the best. But that doesn't say much.

I've long since switched to DDG nearly exclusively and I've rarely felt like I am unable to find what I'm looking for. When I can't, I switch to Google (easily using DDG's !g bang) and almost always can't find it there either.

Ddg works for me for technical searches, google is better for digging up stuff though. I default to ddg but use google as needed.

>FAAMG

Is that with Netflix swapped with Microsoft? If that's the case, we might as well change the entire acronym to GAMMA to account for the Facebook -> Meta rename.

F*** the MMAAAN: