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Comment by pron | Hacker News Reader

+googol. I just have to repeat this. Google, YOU WILL GUESS WRONG!

And my hunch is, you'll guess wrong about, oh, 8 times out of ten. Google search is the last place I go to look for something that's already one of my interests. For that I have twitter, my feed reader etc. I only google things that I have no, or little, familiarity with. Google search is supposed to tell me WHAT I DON'T ALREADY KNOW. In fact, now when I think about it, you could use my information to make search better by LOWERING rather than increasing the rank of any result that I'm likely to already know.

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Use the toggle to turn off the social stuff then.

A UX lesson I learned long ago: If you have to have an option for it then it's a poor design

A UX lesson I just know: It is better to have options than unchangeable defaults.

Another UX lesson: do one thing and do it well. Apparently Google forgot that. I still think it is a great one. And yes, I know it pertains to the function software plays and web empires are a different beast, but I find the poetic irony of the down the rabbit hole fiasco being related to a *nix quib delicious.

I think as a professional it's incredibly useful to have little rules like this that provide a structure out of which to make quick judgements and decisions.

But don't become complacent and let these transform into actual beliefs. There is no quicker way to kill your creativity.

I still think it's very poor design that the toggle is:

1 - Completely unlabeled, nor is the icon indicative/clear.

2 - Not sticky. It will turn itself back on, even though this is neither implied nor stated in the UI.

3 - The only way to actually turn it off is to dig into your search settings - what percentage of your users actually know that exists, much less think about looking there?

On stickiness: search settings - turn off personalized results.

I'd argue that a user looking to configure the settings of their search, are likely to think about looking in the search settings.

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