Google removed 'number of results' default setting for some users | Hacker News Reader

Google removed 'number of results' default setting for some users

support.google.com

23 pointsnomilk14 comments

For ~10 years I've received 100 results for each Google search (courtesy of some default setting). Today I noticed only 10 results before I had to manually click on (page) '2', '3' etc to get another 10 results each time.

Some others appear to be affected:

https://support.google.com/websearch/thread/291344437/my-res...

Perhaps I'm part of an unlucky A/B test?

Either way this is more inconvenient than it sounds. DDG or Kagi here I come.

UPDATE (6 minutes after original post)

Just signed up to Kagi 'Professional' plan ($11US/month [normally $10, but 10% extra due to Australian sales tax presumably]).

I don't understand why google messes with users but the hostility is not appreciated. I guess a/b testing comes at a cost, and might be the right call.

My plan is to use kagi now. May also make a moronic chrome extension to add &num=100 to the end of every google search url (in case I need google, don't like kagi, or it helps others)

Kagi is actually really good and usable. I'd pay for it just for the "I'm feeling lucky" bang alone. (Add ! to the end of your query.) The AI answer thing when you do ? is also pretty nice. Plus, no more doing weird javascript dumb stuff when you go back out of a page to the result using your back button.

Same, although it happened to me last week. I've been using Google since they were on stanford.edu, and this was the final straw for me. I still could often find what I want within the top few hundred results, but being required to click twenty or thirty times to get there was just too much.

I've also signed up for Kagi, and have been happy with it so far. The search results are somewhere between no worse and slightly better, but the overall experience is much more pleasant. And while there are cheaper ways to block Pinterest from my results, I'm considerably happier using a service that supports this directly.

Someone got a raise for that

Greetings! I pinged you on an old thread, what kind of research are you working on? Saw your old Penrose comment, and organoid research.

I research arrangements of atoms, not bits :) - materials science

Rad! Would love to check out some of your work if you've got any cool papers you can share

Yandex is kinda like what google was.

Google was aggressively apolitical back in the early years, but Yandex is thoroughly tangled up in politics just like the others. There are no search engines that just naively show results today.

No one today realistically sees the internet as being beyond government control. The ones that do get arrested stepping off their jets. That libertarian fantasy is just dead.

Suits ruin everything.

Welcome to the Google great bubble. Internet is full of web pages. There are billions of them, yet Google shows you 10 pages of 10 links each.

Yep, you just described a search engine!

What do you mean? How is showing a tiny fraction of the results a good thing?

> yet Google shows you 10 pages of 10 links each

And five of them are ads/sponsored links!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com