Google Zeitgeist 2013 | Hacker News Reader

Google Zeitgeist 2013

google.com

57 pointsmartinbc61 comments

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What a shitty user experience. What changed at google? They used to have these rather simple, useful, UIs.

Designers and product managers have taken the reigns from the engineers.

Recall that Google at one time never had TV advertisements. Now you can't turn the damn thing on without seeing one.

Exactly. After all, it's pretty much how Apple made its historic unprecedented profits: more designers than engineers.

Really? What Google commercials have you seen recently?

Constant Chrome/cast/book and Nexus tablet ads. I've seen this one far too much:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5LysTmwDan8

Any designer that knows what they are doing makes things easier to use, not more difficult.

I think it would be better to say 'Amateurs have taken the reigns'.

I don't even know what I'm looking at here.

It renders incorrectly, had zero info and just shows me pictures of Hollywood celebrities.

I gave the video about 2 seconds before closing the tab.

I went through it, I always give a chance to content no matter how presented it is ( a habit of mine). However, it didn't tell me anything. It's like a run-of-the-mill motivation video. To make things worse, I couldn't get to the results of zeitgeist on my own to see what was actually going on.

It looks pretty, and I am sure lots of work was put into it and I appreciate that. But it's uninspired and isn't very functional. I expect functionality first from google. Well, I used to.

Wow. I am not the only one that felt like this.

That was such a horribly designed UI. I had no idea what I am looking at and why. Google used to all about simplicity. I remember in prior years these kind of posts always had graphs and considerable text explaining trends. Its like someone there realized they are JS experts.

No, you're not alone. When they offer data, a lot of us think, "Oh, goodie, some interesting data!" We hustle over there to learn something new and learn it quickly.

If instead we are treated to a demonstration of javascript media virtuosity that buries the actual data too deeply to be worth extracting, we get annoyed and complain: "Where's the beef?" (But I don't think there's anybody back there[1].)

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ug75diEyiA0

I hit the button to say exactly that, but you beat me to it. It's unbelievably bad, even by Google's rapidly declining standards....

In Chrome I get an empty dark blue screen unless I tell Ghostery not to block the Google +1 tracker.

You seriously mean to tell me that the most popular search on Google for 2013 is 'Paul Walker' followed by 'iPhone 5s'? What? Surely 'Weather' would be higher. I simply don't know what I'm looking at here.

Fairly sure they've filtered out what might constitute "low importance" searched like terms such as 'weather'. Searches for the weather probably remain relatively stable and don't really tell us anything.

It's actually "Top 100 [Trending] Searches." They could have been more clear about that.

http://www.google.com/trends/topcharts?date=2013

Yes, it's trending searches, not most popular ones. By the way, non-engineers/non-analytical people usually have trouble differentiating the two. I can't recall how many meetings with product/business people that I have to explain the concepts.

I imagine this is a variant of a Latent Dirichlet Allocation[0]. Informally, this will identify words "most associated" with 2013, which is not the same thing as the most searched words in 2013.

Put another way, unless there's a huge spike of interest in the weather in 2013 compared to other years, "weather" won't be included.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latent_dirichlet_allocation

I also wondered why the death of Paul Walker was in the video. Surely Lou Reed was more influential, yet his death wasn't mentioned.

Scrolling is backwards on my Mac. I'm using the default ("natural") scrolling, where swiping up scrolls down, but this page is set to scroll down with a swipe down.

Probably has to do with the fact that they're rendering the images in a canvas element rather than plain old HTML.

It's also broken on iPads. You can't see the bottom nav in portrait and the site is slightly too large for the viewport when viewed in landscape.

I think it might be intentional. I don't use natural scrolling and it's broken for me as well.

I would prefer a .txt file list over this, I can't even tell the order without individual clicks.

http://www.google.com/trends/topcharts#date=2013. Not a text file but, a much better format than the op.

Edit: Apparently this is linked in the bottom left corner of the page... totally missed it. What an effective site design.

And it still fucking breaks scroll.

That would make sense if this were something that was intended to be useful and meaningful. I think this is just supposed to remind you that Google is a thing.

The actual data is so boring (hint: Miley Cyrus) that it's purely an exercise in wasteful over-engineering.

Google Zeitgeist 2013: black box.

The video doesn't load for me on Firefox. It is probably just a bug and will be fixed but it coincidentally prints the correct picture of Google's current stance on browser compatibility. Anyone else thinks that the silent conversion tactics are slowly becoming more obvious?

Consider yourself fortunate you can't watch the video.

It's exactly the kind of maudlin crap we have come to expect from politically correct tech companies.

The video appears to be an mp4 (the network monitor says so) and it should work fine (it does here). Please ensure you have the latest FF version, available from https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/all/ (in case the update fails).

I have Firefox 26.0 installed, it still fails on both Windows 7 and Ubuntu 13.10 (64 bit both).

Can't help you with Windows, but I'm interested to see what happens under Ubuntu. It's on my todo list for tomorrow (by date, not by priority).

It appears to work just fine in FF26 under Ubuntu 3.10 without anything extra installed. Have you tried turning it off and on? Try a new profile (firefox -profileManager) or Restart with Add-ons Disabled (help menu), or perhaps it was just a fluke. Could not reproduce (relevant XKCD: http://xkcd.com/583/ ).

That should've been 13.10, too late to edit :(

Flashblock catches it for me in FF25, the video is actually

https://www.youtube.com/embed/Lv-sY_z8MNs

Perhaps you don't have Flash installed, you lucky thing.

Flash is installed, no blocking add-ons were used. For that matter, I have disabled all other add-ons, that could be interfering and still get the same result.

It could be a flash (64 bit) issue. Also, that's not the video that would show for me, because of localization (Germany). Despite my preference for the English language and google.com over google.de, Google tries to show me this video instead: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8hVwx13k1QM .

what a horrible, horrible browsing experience on desktop. this is a complete new kind of swipeware/pseudo-metro crap...

yeah, it's very non-Google somehow..

Or maybe the new Google. Or the same Google we always had.

You're saying it's a 0 or a 1?

It's definitely a 13 74/9ths

Did I miss something or is 2013 already over?

Also, didn't find any mention of NSA or Snowden. Sadly, I wasn't surprised.

Snowden is #97 for me. I suspect that the results are localized (Germany for me).

Edward Snowden not in top 100.

Goes to show my assumption that he would be says that I'm subject to a large degree of bias.

Is the top 100 actually the top 100? I'm sure it's filtered quite a bit.

Edward Snowden is #97.

While I read almost every HN post I saw about Snowden, I don't think I searched his name at all. In fact, I can't remember searching anything news related this year. I'm sure I have, but its really not necessary anymore. I wonder if others are starting to get into similar patterns.

I'm usually quite impressed by Google's Zeitgeist videos, this one was disappointing however. It's short (a minute shorter than 2012 and 2011), doesn't include many of the important events of the year, and is rather uninspiring. What happened?

Breaks the back button :-(

It's a hideous UI, all I want is a text list of top searches for the year, and to be able to filter by category.

Stealing my touch scroll isn't that nice either. I struggled to read beyond the fold.

This UI reminds me of Encarta 98.

nice. Black dead rectangle in the center of bluish background. No interaction anywhere. Firefox. If it doesn't work in FF, it doesn't work.

Requires login? Why?

I wonder if most people didn't even notice that because they remain logged in to Google services all the time.

I think it's just a default Google thing. Basically, it notices you're logged in but you haven't entered your password for a while, so it prompts you to login again.

Instead, I just clicked 'Log out and log in as a different user', closed the tab, and clicked the link again on HN, and it worked just fine.

So in short, it doesn't require you to be logged in, unless you are, at which point you have to log in again.

Bizarre.

Chrome on Windows 7 bug report: back button doesn't work, mouse wheel doesn't work (scrolls at infinitesimal speed), touch-screen style controls which don't work well with a mouse (click&drag, besides not being intuitive with a mouse, is also broken because it navigates to the selected item on mouse button release)

The first few times i visited this , i was looking for a way to access more content then quit half way round. I tried scrolling down , it didn't work . I had to click a link on the left corner of my screen which wasn't even that visible to me. Affordance = 0.

There must be something wrong with this list when Edward Snowden is at #97 and Paul Walker is #2.

To make this more clear: Snowden was the top Google search for many days, perhaps as long as the incident of Paul Walkers death until now.

That wasn't a patch on the 2012 Zeitgeist that Google put together: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xY_MUB8adEQ

"When you finally get at that's point of acceptance, there is nothing more beautiful"