Google.com tests a news-filled homepage, just like Bing and Yahoo | Hacker News Reader

Google.com tests a news-filled homepage, just like Bing and Yahoo

arstechnica.com

36 pointsmfiguiere60 comments

Wasn’t the clean homepage one if the most iconic differences between Google and other search engines that helped Google become dominant?

That, and the quality of the results.

They've had to give up the latter, so might as well dump the former too.

they also forgot about non-me-too innovation it seems

That is certainly the "legend" of how they succeeded. I honestly think it was less about having a clean homepage than it was a single text input for searches. That said, hard to view any story on how they "won" as much more than a "just so" story. :(

Clean home page was definitely a huge part of it:

- Google predates widespread U.S. broadband, and even early DSL was not too fast. So cutting bytes made a real difference.

-Search was not baked into the browser (search bar etc) so homepage speed really mattered

-It was memorable branding, it clearly marked Google as more focused on quality search vs Yahoo et al who were trying to be "portals" with news and listings and so forth -- no one else understood how important search was, that it could be exponentially better and a differentiator

I would want that to be true, but I just don't buy it. I remember search in the early days, and I honestly don't remember having a huge speed difference for most search sites. The homepage of all of them was relatively fast to load.

Now, Yahoo and a few others were quick to jump into "portals" of news and such. That slowed down. But altavista and other base search pages were fast enough. (If a bit hard to remember the names of.) (I do find it funny that I remember so few of the options now.)

probably something difficult to know for a fact, as most people may not pick their tools as consciously. I however remember vividly the clean design winning me over instantly, compared to the alternatives, which were overloaded with ads or other content I was not interested in. same could and still can be said for gmail compared to other freemailers like gmx. but I'm sure google will not stop enshittifying all their services till they are ready for their graveyard.

It was definitely an important reason for early adoption (just remember how chaotic altavista and yahoo looked). That and good results. When they were funded there was some chatter that the things that made them good would go away.

> I honestly think it was less about having a clean homepage than it was a single text input for searches.

All of the other search engines just had a single text input for searches, too, e.g. https://www.webdesignmuseum.org/gallery/altavista-2000

By far the biggest reason was that the results were soooo much better. All of the other search engines basically used some variation of keyword matching in the document itself, which is why you'd see so many pages back in that time that were loaded with superfluous keywords. It was Google's original PageRank incarnation that made all the difference early on.

I'm sure I'm remembering the "advanced search" that other sites had. I feel that those were more common back then. Granted, most of my searches back then were probably in libraries and such?

The "advanced" search UI was amusing. You would click there thinking that you could give a better search, but you often got worse results by trying to use all of the fields. Google not really having an advanced search at least let you cycle more rapidly on raw searches.

At least among nerds who were early adopters, this was an oft cited reason for their personal enthusiasm about Google versus incumbent search engines. Of course quality of results was paramount, but the spartan homepage definitely drove that segment of early success. The theory that tech adoption promoted more mainstream adoption may be more “just so”, I think that’s harder to validate (but given the adoption of computers and internet at the time, it’s probably at least partially true).

Yes whenever I use Bing (by accident) I'm instantly reminded of those "search engines" that came with crappy toolbars bundled in shady freeware installers. Same goes for any "crowded" search engine.

I guess Bing is also a complete mess too because it has no coherence in its UI. Maybe google will be better in that regard, because Bing is hard to beat, but yeah...

On screen-sharing I see my clients open new browser tabs to an eye-gouging mess of homepage widgets. News, weather, things a pop singer said today... they see this 50 times a day?

I don't know how they live like this.

It's important to conduct experiments. I don't really have a problem with this.

However, I also don't use Google Search. I use (and pay for) Kagi. So I'm not the intended audience for this.

I'd love to use Kagi, but honestly the price point is just too high. at $120 a year vs Google for free sadly I'm still going to choose Google. I would be willing to pay something in the region of $3-5 a month

I don't know if the price is too high, but the limits are too low. I can't deal with niggling thought that I might exceed the query limit -- every time I'd be thinking about whether I'm going to have to do another query because I made a typo or didn't pick the right search terms.

they recently made some changes to their pricing plans. $10 plan now includes unlimited searches, and they introduced a $5 tier too.

if they're going to involve quantities in pricing, they should just charge per search

That just means we have different ideas of price.

I use the $5/month tier ($60 per year) of Kagi.

Google doesn't cost you money... but there is a cost associated with using it, and I'm not willing to pay that cost.

Plus, Google Search's quality has dramatically dropped in the last ten years.

>we have different ideas of price

doesn't everyone?

for clarity, the $5 tier gives you 300 searches a month. with 300 I just know that some months I'd go well over, and some months I wouldn't come close. it's just the perfect number where there's uncertainty. 200 I'd always hit. 450-500 I'd probably never

they should just tell marketing/sales to fuck off and charge per search. they'd gain me as a user

>Google's search quality has dropped

yeah it has, but its still better than any of its free competitors. around a year ago I tried a few of the free alternatives (DDG, Bing, Ecosia, Brave Search). what I found is that Google is still by far the best at understanding what you're searching for, where it struggles is prioritising results

the problem is that every other search engine I tried has the exact same issue, but doesn't know what the fuck you're searching for half the time

Brave is slightly different in that it is better for avoiding SEO dreck but it isn't fantastic at understanding you and it misses certain search operands

Maybe search patterns are relevant here.

Without getting too specific, maybe 10% of my searches are programming-related, 25% current events, 25% sites or information that was current 20+ years ago, and 40% "other."

Basically... Kagi is better at returning results I'm interested in. I use DDG for searching on my work laptop, because separation of concerns. Google, though? It doesn't work for me.

If it works for you, great. Keep using it.

As for Brave... well, I don't abide cryptocurrency in any form, so that's an ideological "nope" for me.

my search patterns are probably not wildly dissimilar to that

>As for Brave... well, I don't abide cryptocurrency in any form, so that's an ideological "nope" for me.

I understand distrusting crypto, but this seems like really childish reasoning. I think it's fair to generally distrust strangers at first. does that mean that you should never interact with them?

Brave has an optional crypto feature that I turned off once and never saw again. reddit also has in-built crypto features, do you refuse to use reddit too?

Yeah, I also refuse to use Reddit.

sure you do

We already did this experiment in the 90s, it sucked. The only reason the outcome would be different this time is because there's no viable Google competitor that can swoop in and rescue users from this garbage.

I don't see it as a law of nature that "Google" has to have a plain search field forever. The world around it changes.

Back in the 90s Google proved you could make "all" available better via search than the Yahoo catalog a d thus became the landing page.

Nowadays the pure search bar is integrated into the browsers addressbar and Google as starting page has been replaced with Twitter/X, Reddit, news sites, .. and Google has to find something to become the start page again.

I think it needs to be combined with some judgement what you want to become also. If you just go by numbers, you can end up with something that makes more money for some time, but that people stops caring for. And then it will go downhill. Google's uncluttered start page was part of their brand, their legacy and origin. If they sell that out, we know there is no soul left.

Edit: When Google IPO'd, the offer was for $2,718,281,828 worth of stock. That was a signal about who was in charge and it colored the company's identity.

This is the opposite.

I love how "experiments" are now "how things used to be in the bad old days and people hated it and we won the search engine market partly because we didn't do that but uh maybe it's time to try again"

Things have changed a LOT . The vast majority of Google users never even see the home page since it's integrated into the address bar of all mainstream browsers. So I guess they might as well use it for something other than pure search.

The _last_ thing I want more of is news. I quit news in 2020 and I'm been happier.

I really wish there was an app to keep up with news that will actually have an impact on me like extreme weather, changes to the tax code, and significant changes to the economy.

Such a service could only work as advertised if it were run by a benevolent dictator with a zealous aversion towards anyone changing the product to include stories that tell you "that's a good thing" or "X group most affected" or "top 10 reasons men love hairy women" or "the science is settled". Otherwise, I can picture such a service declining rapidly.

We need self-hosted AI assistants that filter out the noise for us. Only the most impactful news stories, podcast episodes, etc. All under our full, personal control to train.

News are free. You’re not the customer. People pay journalists to make people aware of some information. Entire countries own news agencies. This is what power is.

Looks like the work of a product manager changing shit up in order to justify their salary.

Justify their salary? They fired 12000 employees last year! There are portions of the company that are in panic.

And if blind is to be believed, the next round is already being decided on.

Exactly.

I like Blind, but let’s be real - if Blind was to be believed, then the next round has already been in the process of being decided on since at least April.

Kinda similar to how we had “the next recession is about to happen any second” since at least 2015.

When you can initiate a search directly from the address bar, what should the role of a "homepage" be? It's reasonable that there should be some "zero click" attempt and content that would be useful.

If this is instead used like the typical chumbox content, that would be a real disappointment. Google would also be shooting itself in the foot if it added a bunch of distractions to the page just as they were poised to realize a intelligent assistant capability (which would benefit from having as clean and interface as they had when they launched web search).

Crunch crunch crunch.

Everybody’s monetizing everything they can as the free money faucet gets turned off.

Google is forgetting their roots. Maybe it's a good thing - competitors will have easier job to take search market.

Another fucking trash fire.

Google attribute its success to its search quality. But as a user, I've never done any A/B testing to quantify "search quality". For me, the reason for me abandoning Yahoo for google was because the page was simple and loaded faster.

They have lost it

Not yet. First they have to buy Skype.

Buying Skype wasn't such a bad idea. It was what they did or did not do to it later.

Maybe some new search engine will emerge with a clean homepage.

One that has just one text box, a “search” button, and why not a “i’m feeling lucky” button?

ai feeling lucky

Time to bring back iGoogle

These attention stealing portal aol-style homepages are a pox upon the 21st century.

Also I think worse for long term business outcomes.

I have not visited the main google.com in years. I'd imagine the target audience is for people who have this page set as their homepage

For power users this is true.

For other people it varies, I've seen people use the url bar to search google and then do a google search.

Basically iGoogle but this time directly on front page of google.com. It will outlast the discontinued iGoogle (2005 - 2013) this time?

Time to look for another search engine.

I originally switched to Google because of the barebones homepage, not search quality.

This is a thinly disguised vehicle to deliver ads in sneaky places.

Honestly can't remember the last time I used Google's home page. I get to it via omnibar, new tab page search, or voice search.

I bet that google has less than 5 years left as a company.

Sorry but this is delusional. They can literally do nothing but drop the ball for the next 10 years straight and still be one of the largest tech companies. Look at IBM or Oracle.

The enshittification continues. Can't wait for Google to be eaten by a competitor.

The arc of advertising is long, but it bends toward enshittification.

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