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Comment by JonSkeptic | Hacker News Reader

I think this is interesting because it matches my user experience with Google products in a very inverted way. Google search has gotten worse and worse lately, forcing me on to other search engines with worse UIs just so that I can get useful results. Youtube UI gets worse every time they update it. They cancelled the RSS reader. The email UI keeps getting worse and featuring more ads.

But the stock value hit $1000. I guess they're doing something right, it's just not something that affects me in any positive way.

[EDIT]:'affects', not 'effects'

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This is because Google has started optimizing for the 99% use case, which most HN'ers usually don't fall under. They originally optimized for what most Googlers like (who are generally the 1%) and have since learned that you can't run a business just pleasing the elite and whiny ones.

> They originally optimized for what most Googlers like (who are generally the 1%) and have since learned that you can't run a business just pleasing the elite and whiny ones.

Well you can - you just can't offer the service for free.

Quarter after quarter Google needs to monetize more. In their earnings announcements, they love to mention it's only a fraction of what Google can achieve. But their heavy monetization of web assets makes me think, they are at the beginning of the second half of their post IPO life. Of course the Glass, the Car, the Hardware may change everything. That final argument is valid for any company, even for startups and even more for YC startups.

I think you can even do that. What you can't do is build a $300 billion company that way.

I'm a bit confused about that. Doesn't their algorithm take the user's profile into account?

>Youtube UI gets worse every time they update it. They cancelled the RSS reader. The email UI keeps getting worse and featuring more ads.

Those concerns are completely unrelated to their algorithm. I doubt they want to maintain many Youtube UIs.

Some of their algorithms, yes. But that doesn't mean that users who fall into the "elite and whiny" bunch get the privilege of using the service ad-free and in a format that doesn't work as well for their business.

I'm not in any way affiliated with Google but a Google employee has strongly and empathetically suggested to me that the ad people (and algorithms) have absolutely no access to user account data.

That is the reason why AdWords location targeting is kinda broken currently (at least on non-mobile devices it relies on IP geolocation). If one day AdWords start serving geographically correct ads for everyone, that's the day when the ad people got access to account data.

Data shows differently.

Google AD CLICKS increased by 22% and PPC went down 4%-8% so Googe made it up on volume. If showing more ads and/or making ads better than organic search is "optimizing for the 99% use case" then you aright.

But as shown on a few comments below Google in many cases shows only ads on the first browser screen. Terrible for users and terrible for Google long term. They should enjoy the steroid boost while it lasts.

Surely it can't be the case that Google was serving the 1% till recently. Their products - Gmail, YouTube, Android, Search, Maps etc. - are all leaders in their categories. So the 1%-to-99% argument doesn't quite hold.

I personally think Google held itself back from OTT monetization strategies all these years as it waited for (a) its individual products to become undisputed market leaders, and (b) a unified privacy/social glue across all its products.

Now that the majority of users are locked in to Google - to specific products and across their entire suite of products - they are lifting their self-imposed restraints on privacy/aesthetics/advertising.

That's the wrong way to look at it. They served the whole 100%, and now they are starting to optimize for the 99% at the expense of the 1% of power users. (My guess would be more like 95% / 5%, but I may have a biased view myself)

That's the only explanation to the whole set of stupid decisions they've been taking lately (reader, yt UI, gmail compose, ...): they make more cash by doing so.

Personally, I have noticed a multi-year trend towards serving that 95% at the expense of the 5%.

I'm usually flamed or attacked for suggesting it in most forums, so it's very nice to see people experiencing the same thing with Google

Hangouts is the perfect example. Instead of an easily sortable, easily curatable list of contacts with an easy way to see if they're available or not... now the whole product is shiny, with flashy animations, very little user control of any part of the software, and a whole bunch of Google's "we know best" design ideas like a "special mix" of "recent*" contacts that you cannot alter in any way without actually removing a contact from Google entirely.

And in my experience Google products have gotten significantly better and more polished in the last few years. Goes to show that their products aren't getting worse, just shifting in focus and priority.

Which products specifically have gotten better?

It's all subjective but I love the new Gmail interfaces, Hangouts is much better than Talk and keeps getting better. Google+ photos is so much better than Picasa, I love how I can search for 'blue cars' in my photos and it returns them even though I've never tagged any of them.

Android has seen enormous improvements, I love stock 4.3 and Google Now.

Chrome's new 'native' apps wrapper-like thing is neat.

Even Youtube has improved a little bit, they've got a nice nifty ajax loader bar up top instead of refreshing the entire page when you go to another video.

But I guess with a different perspective, someone could argue how they don't like any of those changes. But for me, I love them.

The Hangouts experience on Android is an abomination. Its why I disabled (yes, fully disabled) Hangouts and switched to Whatsapp. Its that bad.

I double that. It's slow, clunky and unnecessarily heavy. That's why most of my contacts have already switched to other platforms. Talk for Android 4, that added support for multiple accounts, was just good enough.

At least you have hangouts. </wp>

Yes, agreed </BB10>

I'm using a poor internet connection (because of geography) and my experience is that the usability of Youtube has gone down dramatically.

They made a change a while back where the video will only buffer a few seconds beyond where you've paused it. Previously, you could go a few seconds into the video, pause it, and let it buffer 100% in whatever quality you needed, now I find myself having to constantly pause the video to let it load. One workaround I was forced to use is TaperMonkey Chrome addon with a script that adds a download link underneath the Youtube video in Chrome. I download the video and watch it offline in perfect quality.

Ah, I was wondering why I kept leaving videos in tabs to buffer nowadays and they just never did it any more. Very sad day. ;/ Sucks for someone on a mobile connection 99% of the time like me.

They've announced offline viewing for android recently which should help

YouTube Center [1] allows you to disable Dash [2]. I had the same problem and worse, before I could autoplay 720p video but with Dash that didn't work.

[1] https://github.com/YePpHa/YouTubeCenter/wiki

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_Adaptive_Streaming_over...

The continuing problems with buffering on youtube have caused me to resort to youtube-dl/mplayer.

Your comment about maps is dead, fyi. No idea why. I agree.

Huuuh, curious. Maybe comments that include the string 'goo[dot]gl' are auto-killed?

The URL updates in the new version. It's always the permalink. Much easier than having to go through a bunch of clicks to get it.

Ah, good to know; thanks.

Unfortunately this is because ISPs throttle youtube traffic.

Android and the play store. The DFP API (their only API I'm using)

Oh man, quite some room for disagreement. In my opinion Android's UI is a complete joke. Maybe they're doing their research after all.

> Oh man, quite some room for disagreement.

Yeah, even the rather homogeneous group of HN readers seems to have very different opinions of what got better and what got worse :)

But with Android I was talking features. The UI is not bad but (without ever having used Win mobile) MS seems to have the better UI. And Apple the worst (again, without having used them).

Google places API makes my customers happy!

Search. Seriously.

For many queries Google search is now better than Wikipedia. For example, Google 'Tom Cruise' and the right-hand side of the results page has an almost perfect summary of the actor: A great selection of photos, a concise biography, a clickable list of his popular movies and other actors related to him. This is the sort of thing that makes Google search far better than the competition for most people.

Some products have improved, and some have gotten worse (losing Exchange on Gmail, Reader, Google Talk, Google Checkout) and some haven't changed in years (Google Finance).

I use a lot of Google services, and it's frustrating when they keep removing features, or killing off products that I use daily. It's gotten to the point where I'd rather pay for a service now and be the customer rather than signing up for another Google product.

Google should just shut the google finance android app down. Its so bad its embarassing. Adding arbitrary securities (some foreign adrs in the cases I have found) will prevent any portfolios from being displayed at all. When you open the app and hit update it will update the portfolios and show a notification that portfolios updated but the portfolios themselves will never appear anywhere in the UI.

God. I have two different google accounts linked to my android devices -- my work address and my personal one. And Google Finance just Can Not Cope with that. Every time I open it, it prompts me (again) to choose (again) the only account I've ever used for Finance. And then, having chosen my account, it promptly makes all of my stocks disappear. THANKS FINANCE. So then I background and foreground and refresh a few time and it says, "Oh, okay, maybe I'll list your stocks for you."

As its postscript, if you click on your stock, you get a list of articles about that stock! Helpful! Those articles are webpages. So if you click on the article that's actually a link to the webpage, in a Google app, it will open the webpage in the other Google app that's designed for opening webpages, ie Chrome, right? WRONG. What you wanted was a crippled web browser inside the Finance app, right?

Google finance is one of those apps that seems to just work, but if you try to actually use it you keep hitting bugs. My latest bug is that it thinks UUU should redirect to UUU.TO I keep end up going and using yahoo finance for quick things, what about you guys?

For me Google does indeed return Uranium One, Inc.(TSE:UUU). WolframAlpha on the other hand interprets the query correctly and provides sensible alternatives:

Assuming "UUU" is a financial entity | Use as an airport instead

Assuming AMEX:UUU | Use ZA:UUU instead

For me, Google also returned Uranium One, trading on the Toronto Exchange.

However, Yahoo Finance showed Universal Security Instruments trading in New York, Uranium One in Toronto, and some wireless company trading on six different exchanges. The only symbol without a dot qualifier was the one for Universal Security Instruments.

Their new Google Apps control panel is impossible to use. It has icons that doesn't correspond to the function and no labels. It's like walking around in a nuclear control panel with no lights on.

While I'm moving my e-mail away from Google, the last thing I still use is the search, which still feels light weight and easy to use.

> .. the last thing I still use is the search, which still feels light weight and easy to use.

If you haven't, you should really give DuckDuckGo [1] a shot. I used Google's search for the longest time, and finally just forced myself to switch to DDG this summer. It was rough for a while, but either I've gotten used to their search algorithm / results, or the results have gotten better. I hardly ever have to use Google's search to find anything anymore.

[1] https://duckduckgo.com/?q=duckduckgo

For me DDG is sometimes okay. Most of the time though, I want to be in the bubble google places me in. DDG gives me results for someone searching for X. Google gives me the X I want.

One thing that kills me is how terrible DDG is at parsing an address. If the street is misspelled at all you get nothing but real estate listings but if it's correct it shows a ghetto gif map from MapQuest :(

If you just want a map, "!map <address>" will send you to google maps with that address.

DDG's search results are terrible for me most of the time.

Though DDG as a frontend is quite nice. I use the bang shortcuts all the time. It's actually a better frontend to google's search than google's search itself: I can easily switch between google France results (which emphasize french speaking pages) and normal google results, something that I haven't been able to do in years since google.com/ncr (no country redirect) no longer works when you're logged in with a user account.

Overall I love the idea of DDG's bangs. I've found many of them useful and you can infer those you don't know easily (if !a is amazon.com, then !afr is amazon.fr; !hn is very useful as well!)

I switched to DDG a year ago; it was painless. I think I have gone back to Google for a search maybe twice.

I still use Google Image Search, though that's kind of a different beast.

Yeah I switched my domain to Google Apps this year and somewhat regret it. It is pretty clear that Google Apps might work, but clearly it is made for the guy that is being paid to deal with its interface and can spend hours if not days just getting basic things working as he tries to figure out the docs (most all public discussions of course talk about the old control panel and link are busted etc) when he runs into a problem. And as a bonus anyone else notice how the POP interface fails to implement a core "feature" of pop. When using POP with google apps and you try to delete an email it doesn't actually get deleted. tricky tricky

I hate the new UI for gmail, (mobile and web) is the worst aberration in the history of google UIs. For example for web, now they hide the "from", "cc", "cco" fields, also they moved the reply, reply to all and forward to a drop down menu. The attach, and format buttons now are tiny and moved to the bottom. In the mobile they removed the check-boxes so when you want to select multiple mails you have to keep pressed a mail until it becomes blue and to select the other mails you have to tap where it used to be a check-box and if you mistakenly tap the title of the mail then your selection is lost and it opens that mail in a new view. They also hided the "from", "cc", "cco" fields in the mobile version. I seriously considering to use other clients.

>In the mobile they removed the check-boxes so when you want to select multiple mails you have to keep pressed a mail until it becomes blue and to select the other mails you have to tap FYI, you can just tap on the email's avatar to select them. Maybe not the simplest interface, but it works well once you get used to it.

If you have any example bad queries, I'd love to see them to debug. If you have your search history on, you can find them here: https://history.google.com/history/

If you have any example bad queries

Hey Moultano, how come Google's ad clicks increased by 22% this quarter when Adsense was largely flat? Oh, I see. You decided that Google's properties are more "relevant" especially the ads.

Nice scam you got going.

That doesn't look like an example bad query to me.

This is the exact reply you offered me a few weeks ago when we were complaining about w3schools ranking at the top of Google's results. Ultimately, your "debugging" amounted to explaining that you rank lower-quality results higher because they are more "popular", and therefore, somehow, more useful.

I still don't understand the strategy of promoting less reliable, poorer quality information as a way to help the user. But it's easy to understand as a (short term) way to help Google, as these low-quality sites invariably carry Adsense, and the better sites often do not.

You didn't really give me a query to debug. I also don't think that's an accurate characterization. (Here's a link to the discussion for those curious. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6426892) People like w3schools probably because it has code samples front and center on every page. People find that very useful, even though as a reference MDN might be better in an abstract sense.

"You didn't really give me a query to debug."

It's right there in quotes, at the top of the very discussion page you link to. I'd like to think you are really interested in these issues and not mounting a disingenuous public relations campaign, but you don't make it easy.

I am very honestly interested in these issues, and in the past HN has been a great source of queries that fail in interesting ways, which is why I keep posting this request.

On "html title tag" what do you want to know about it that the w3schools result at 1 doesn't give you? I know you may not like the site in general, but is there more to a title tag than that?

Don't be evil, bro. Eric Schmidt smells everything you do.

It includes no link to normative documentation, for one, but this isn't one of the most egregious examples of w3schools sitting at the top of search results when it provides absolutely terrible (either wrong, or completely useless) information.

A better example is: "html iframe element". Go ahead and look. What's more interesting here is that if you modify this query to "html iframe element scripting" the top 3 results are now w3schools, one related to the <script> tag, while the relevant section header in MDN on scripting isn't even highlighted in the matching result from MDN. The word "scripting" does not even appear in the rendered DOM of the w3schools page for <iframe>.

At this point, it's pretty safe to say that there's a reason, distinct from content quality, why w3schools is always promoted over better sources of information. Popularity doesn't seem likely either (http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/mozilla.org vs http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/w3schools.com). The site is:

1. Covered in questionable and low quality ads.

2. Intentionally misleading in general but especially in name (w3schools is not affiliated with the W3C or any standards body).

3. Abusing its position (in both search rank and in its misleading name) to sell useless "certifications" that not one company in existence would take seriously.

Why doesn't Google consider this a scam and factor that into its search ranking?

Thanks for following up with this. There's a real bug here that I'm passing along. Unfortunately, I can't share any of the details, so this will be a bit unsatisfying, but your hunch was correct, there is something wrong going on there.

> Google search has gotten worse and worse lately, forcing me on to other search engines with worse UIs just so that I can get useful results

Can you give a few example queries?

These days I find Google is good for finding things you already know but don't remember. e.g. Number to my favorite Thai restaurant. But has become worse for finding things you don't know. I encounter this a lot when Im trying to find information related to my work but am not knowledgeable enough to narrow my keywords. Mainly programming or server related info....

Could you give an example query, and the non-Google search engine that gives better results?

Right now I cannot. This is more of a generalization I've found over the past year or so (+/- ~6mos). Typically when it deals with work Im more interested in just finding an answer and move on to the next best resource. I guess this is true when Im at home and the results end up being more spam/ad based, e.g. finding a plumber with a good reputation.

Probably not the definitive results driven answer you wanted but this is my experience and what I share with others when asked.

Agreed. They are removing features that were quite valuable for me, especially in apps like Google Maps, and I absolutely hate the new ads that look like email rows in GMail and don't let me delete them. I can move off their web email client, but Maps is tough to replace. Will have to move to Apple or Nokia or something.

It's a good indication of market power (and therefore business value) when products get worse but users still buy.

Shutting down reader will give them stock value. Google plus is now the aggregation of your niche content. Reader was obsoleted by Google plus. This makes it easier to track an individual as well as create more intelligence on ads for that individual's likes.

More ads in the email app gives more revenue. Youtube is integrated into Google plus which helps them target ads even more.

It makes a lot of sense to me.

Maybe shittier search results cause more clicks on the ads made to look like search results?

for the record, it's the 90 per cent use case.

In my opinion, the increase in Google share price really has to do with the Motorola purchase. There is a potential that Motorola phones could some day be just as popular as Samsung or Apple - this a huge add to the share price and Google's revenue and profits. Just take 10% the market cap of Apple and Samsung and add it to Google, you'll see the picture.

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